Not impressed with Half-life episode 1
The opinions expressed below are those of one individual gamer and are protected under free speech laws.
With this fever clouding the thoughts in my head I've been unable to do anything intelligent, so I left my computer running to download Half-life 2. It turned out to be more than 2 gigabytes in total - a good thing I've temporarily upgraded my download quota from my service provider.
To start with I am most indignant about the fact that in order to play this game you need to download such a whopping load off the internet when you've already paid for the disc. That shouldn't be allowed.
More importantly, I would state that after my experience with the game it just wasn't worth the expense. The plot turned out to be nothing but an obstacle course from start to finish, and highly tedious. I think it was written by the same person(s) who wrote Half-Life Opposing Force, which is in the same pattern.
There were only two objectives in the game. The first quarter was to stabilise the enemy (nuclear?) reactor to delay a meltdown. That wasn't too bad, although I'm always uncomfortable with game settings that have lots of fatal falls if you slip off the edge of a path. With my fever they made me all the more dizy.
The rest of the game was just getting to the railway station on foot. No cute little vehicles like in previous games (even in Opposing Force there was the Black Mesa railway cart). This went on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Fighting past zombies, headcrabs and combine forces, over, and over, and over, and over again. Through one wrecked building after another, and another, and another, and another.
I'm trying to be fair in that sequels often have the difficult task of improving upon the original, but this game really lacked any kind of substance. Even the storyline seemed insubstantial to me. To give a movie parallel, the production crew of Back to the Future admitted that if they'd known there would be a Back to the Future II they'd NOT have put the character Jennifer in the time machine at the end of the first movie because they then had to take the story in a different direction. Similarly in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 there's a plot hole in that Gordon is apparently freed from the Gman by the vortigaunts, and Alex is rescued from certain death yet there's no explanation, and both suddenly appear at the base of the citadel.
Not impressed at all.
With this fever clouding the thoughts in my head I've been unable to do anything intelligent, so I left my computer running to download Half-life 2. It turned out to be more than 2 gigabytes in total - a good thing I've temporarily upgraded my download quota from my service provider.
To start with I am most indignant about the fact that in order to play this game you need to download such a whopping load off the internet when you've already paid for the disc. That shouldn't be allowed.
More importantly, I would state that after my experience with the game it just wasn't worth the expense. The plot turned out to be nothing but an obstacle course from start to finish, and highly tedious. I think it was written by the same person(s) who wrote Half-Life Opposing Force, which is in the same pattern.
There were only two objectives in the game. The first quarter was to stabilise the enemy (nuclear?) reactor to delay a meltdown. That wasn't too bad, although I'm always uncomfortable with game settings that have lots of fatal falls if you slip off the edge of a path. With my fever they made me all the more dizy.
The rest of the game was just getting to the railway station on foot. No cute little vehicles like in previous games (even in Opposing Force there was the Black Mesa railway cart). This went on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Fighting past zombies, headcrabs and combine forces, over, and over, and over, and over again. Through one wrecked building after another, and another, and another, and another.
I'm trying to be fair in that sequels often have the difficult task of improving upon the original, but this game really lacked any kind of substance. Even the storyline seemed insubstantial to me. To give a movie parallel, the production crew of Back to the Future admitted that if they'd known there would be a Back to the Future II they'd NOT have put the character Jennifer in the time machine at the end of the first movie because they then had to take the story in a different direction. Similarly in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 there's a plot hole in that Gordon is apparently freed from the Gman by the vortigaunts, and Alex is rescued from certain death yet there's no explanation, and both suddenly appear at the base of the citadel.
Not impressed at all.