Belated first-impressions of Half-Life 2

So, if you know me then you’re aware that I am stubbornly anti-hype. Be it music, movies, video games– if people are raving about it I usually try to hold off on passing judgement on it until the chatter has died so that I can judge the work in question with an opinion that isn’t clouded by others’ biases. I still haven’t played Bioshock. I still haven’t played Lost Planet. God, I still haven’t seen 1 second of any of the Godfather films. Music is a little different because its format allows for easy perusal (and dismissal) so I’m pretty up-to-date on most new releases, no matter how blog-hyped they are. There are some exceptions (I just got around to listening to the Fever Ray album) but the point is that I’m trying to build up a certain respect for these works; when you ask for my opinion on Half Life 2, which I just played through this weekend, you know that my opinion likely won’t be clouded by critics but will be somewhat more clear thanks to time.

As someone who never did and never will play a first-person game on a PC, Half-Life 2 felt strange when I first started playing it on the Xbox 360. It felt like the first time I booted up Left 4 Dead. After years of next-gen games like Gears for War and the Call of Duty series, my senses are spoiled by the clumsy, half-awkward realism of those games’ bulky movement. In Valve games you don’t really walk, you just glide. This isn’t anything knew to those who grew up playing PC shooters like Quake and Doom and Unreal Tourney (which I played as well, but my memory of them has slipped a bit more) but it does feel a bit old-school, if I may say so.

I kind of hated Half-Life 2 for the first couple of hours. The game was slow and I was slow at picking up the details of the story. The one thing that really popped out at me, though, were the facial expressions. Even today, I haven’t seen a game that has implemented such authentic looking facial reactions in their sprites. From the sly little smiles that Alyx gives Gordon over her shoulder to the numerous troubled characters you meet along your journey, the expressions are beautifully and realistically rendered. I understand what Valve was going for with it’s silent protagonist, but it really would help the player identify with Gordon if they pulled the camera back during lengthy convos for a sort of Mass Effect styled view of the speakers’ facial expressions.

But like I said I kind of hated this game for the first couple of hours. I hated the boat and most of the missions around it. I only started getting into it once I hit Ravenholm, a zombie infested town. It was dark and creepy, just what I want in most of my games and reminded me a bit of Condemned or Left 4 Dead in its layout and overall atmosphere. From there the game picks up fast and I was hooked. Like a good novel the pacing is really extraordinary, where you can sense your closeness to the end. The scenes in and around the Citadel are really a prime example of how to build up tension and make the character feel small, battling against insurmountable odds.

In the end,  I had my trepidations but Valve really quashed them. In full disclosure, this was my first non-Left 4 Dead Valve game and I can really see now why the company has such steadfast and loyal fans. They’ve built a great in-game world with the Half Life series, on par with two of my favorite games of all time, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. I can’t wait now to jump into Episode 1 & 2.

GTA4 revisited

I started playing Grand Theft Auto IV again the other day and it really is still a great game. After visiting New York this year the game is seen in a new light. The fictional “Liberty City” in the game is obviously based on New York and it’s great to see the little details the designers put it to make it look almost exactly like a video game representation of the Big Apple, from the different neighborhoods that resemble Manhattan and Times Square to Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. It really did deserve the accolates it got, not only for it’s visuals but also for having a really great story that is a lot deeper and asks a lot of pretty important questions about American culture and the world than most people give it credit for.

Contra for 11 year olds

It’s always interesting to see what a young gamer nowadays would think of the old school NES and Super NES games. Would they like them or be bored with the non-3D landscapes andside-scrolling action? Here’s a great article and video via Kotaku where they have an 11-year-old play Contra for the first time.

DMC4 (pt. 2)

So I finished Devil May Cry 4. This was the first game I’ve played in the DMC series and I had a blast. It’s really fast paced, the cut scenes are ridiculously over the top, to the point where they are laughable (in a good way) and the ending bosses just kept coming and were fun to fight. I’ll definitely have to check out the other titles now and I’ll definitely be picking up Devil May Cry 5 if they ever release another sequel.

Metalocalypse game

Good news for those of you who are fans of the Cartoon Network/Adult Swim program Metalocalypse– Konami, one of the biggest and most reliable gaming developers around is planning on announcing a game based on the show later this week at the annual Comic-Con conference. If you haven’t seen the show, it is basically Spinal Tap to the metal extreme, with the five members of the super-metal band Dethklok getting into various metal-situations. No idea if the game is going to be Rock Band/Guitar Hero style or something else entirely, but I am excited about it.

Shadow Complex

Described as the love-child of Metroid and Contra, Shadow Complex is said to be looselybased on the Orson Scott Card Novel, Empire. Literary inspiration, check. Side-scrolling early gaming nostalgia? Check.  Xbox Live is slowly becoming one of the best ideas in gaming. Not only can you purchase old games from other systems like SNES and Genesis but some of the excluslive Xbox Live content, like Braid, is just as good, if not better than any standard Xbox 360 game that you would normally pay $60 for.

Tim on DQIX

Over at Kotaku there is an excellent piece written by one of the most loved/hated game reviewers working today. The first piece I read by Tim Rogers was about Earthbound, and it was less of a review than a highly emotional personal argument for the game’s importance in his life (he said he became a vegetarian because of Earthbound). Tim’s piece summed up all the feelings I have for the game, how it effected my childhood and how it continues to have an effect on my life today. Today Tim posted another great article about one of his other favorite games, the Dragonquest series. You can read the piece here. Be warned that Tim tends to ramble; it’s kind of his style. If nothing else, check out the great videos he took at random shops selling Dragonquest.

WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009

The last console wrestling game I played was probably WWF: No Mercy for the Nintendo 64. I logged many hours on that game with my friends. Along with Goldeneye it was probably the most popular Nintendo 64 game among my friends and I. What made No Mercy so great was the pinpoint accuracy of the moves. Unlike a lot of wrestling games that try to make the player’s movements as realistic as possible, No Mercy understood that when you make the movements super realistic it slows down the game and makes it feel like you are less in control of the character. WWE SmackDown 2009 for the Xbox 360 is a bit like this, where the graphics and movements are so realistic and coordinated that it feels like you are just hitting a couple buttons then you watch the effects for a while. I haven’t played the game w/ any friends yet to see how it feels in co-op. I’ve been out of the loop on pro wrestling for awhile so it’s odd to see all these new WWE faces that I have no idea what their finishing moves are. So far it’s pretty fun, though, definitely worth a rental on a lazy, rainy afternoon when you can’t go outside.

Walk It Out

Konami’s new game, Walk It Out is surely going another punchline videogame where critics use it as an example of how video games are antisocial and dangerous to the development of children. The premise of the game is very,. very simple: using the Wii’s balance board you will walk around a virtual world in rhythm to the game’s over 100-song soundtrack. That’s it. My suggestion, hook up an iPod and take those extra steps out your door. I do think it could make for a good adventure game if they ditched the whole idea of the game as a workout simulator. But I guess that game has been made and it’s called Fallout 3. Although I do think the Wii could benefit from having a giant, open world game like this where you walk on the balance board and fill the world with people to talk to, missions or just random things you can do. But it is on the Wii…so we’ll see how it turns out.

Devil May Cry 4

Gamestop’s unending used game sales suckered me into another purchase I probably wouldn’t have made otherwise in the form of Devil May Cry 4 for the Xbox360. I totally picked this game up on a whim (kinda like when I bought that air hockey table) without knowing much about it, something I very rarely do. I knew it had a 83% aggregate score on metacritic and that it is a hack-and-slash game about devils or demons or something made by Capcom, that’s it. It was either between Devil May Cry 4 or Bully: Scholarship Edition, and I went with Devil May Cry 4 because I have been playing too many long ass, open world games lately and I need a break. I was on vacation for a week so I haven’t even put it in yet but I’ll definitely give my impressions on it in the near future.