My internet connection mysteriously went down on Friday afternoon, so I was stuck for the weekend with no network access. Without the safety net of the internet time-sink, I was forced to re-evaluate my priorities, and find something to do that didn’t require a feed to the Intertron. After a few hours of soul-searching, I decided to get back to work on Half-Life 2 for the Xbox 360. What follows are my thoughts from picking up this game after a long hiatus.
Half-Life 2 is such a good game, but I figured out why I have such long stretches between play sessions: This game scares the hell out of me. Sure, it’s not Resident Evil, with zombie dogs jumping in through the window. That’s not to say there aren’t zombies though; they do show up every now and then, usually after noticing a large smear of blood across a wall and floor, leading to an ominous closed door. And when the inevitable beast shambles forward, and the headcrab leaps towards me, I fear (if only for a moment) that it might actually jump out of the screen and devour me.
So once I get past the burning fear, and the confusion that comes from continuing a story-based game after a break of several months (“Where am I going again? Wait, do I need to go across that bridge, or is that where I just came from? Why is that guy shooting at me?”), I am back in the world of City 17, guns blazing. It is immersive and disturbing, but also immensely satisfying. Playing it is amazingly intense, but I find myself days later, thinking back on how cool those events were. So here, in no particular order, are the things that really impress me about Half-Life 2:
1. Interactive “cutscenes”: I put “cutscenes” in quotes because, unlike the cutscenes in most games, Half-Life 2 does not actually cut away during the story progression. You are still in complete control while events unfold, free to walk around the room, view a conversation from any angle, or just stand in awe as a giant robot throws an oncoming van into a crowd of snipers. You see the events happen in real time, and it draws you in to the story. You observe the action not as a person watching a television screen, but as a character in the middle of the scene. The importance of this perspective can not be overstated.
2. Immersive environments: Half-Life 2 is not populated by boogeymen in closets, waiting for you to stumble by so they can pop out and say “Boo!” Your attackers are creatures and soldiers and yes, sometimes even zombies. Sometimes you will stumble on a battle in progress, and you have to ready yourself to face the victor; sometimes you come upon a desk littered with soda cans and papers, and then notice reinforcements arriving on the security monitor; sometimes you see the remains of a headcrab attack, and are left to face the unfortunate soul who was killed. Either way, you happen upon realistic enemies who inhabit realistic locations, not wax mannequins waiting for a tripwire before they spring to life.
3. Interactive environments: Remember those games where you need to get the gold key to open the gold door? Or you need to blue keycard, which happens to glow brightly as it sits by itself on the desk? Half-Life 2 has none of these. What it does have are realistic environments with real-world solutions. So when you are faced with an electrical fence, you can actually follow the wires to the control panel that you need to disable. Or maybe you have a fan that needs to be disconnected. In that case, you can see the air vents that travel the room, and follow them from room to room until you reach the generator. But these are not painted red or under a bright glowing arrow; they are just normal, ordinary air ducts, like you might see in any other building. The environments are put together logically, and everything pretty much works, so you can solve a problem using common sense, instead of trying to figure out what arcane series of steps the creators wanted you to follow. You begin to see the environment as a real thing, not just painted bitmaps on featureless walls.
4. Realistic physics: In the same vein, you have real objects that you can pick up and interact with. Maybe you can jump from one rock to the next to avoid the toxic sewage…or instead you can grab that board for a makeshift bridge. If that ramp tilts as you walk across it, you begin looking for something heavy to weight down the other end. And maybe that barrel will float long enough for you to jump on it and bound across to the other side of the lake. But again, you can see and use real objects to solve real problems.
5. Gameplay variety: You face military forces that require direct combat. You encounter overwhelming forces that require stealth. You are sent into a zombie-infested town, and forced to battle as you run for your life through a never-ending onslaught. You have to drive across the countryside, avoiding or shooting the huge attacking insects. Then later, you have to avoid those same insects by only jumping from rock to rock, because touching the sand will bring forth a swarm that will most likely destroy you. And later still, you gain a gland from one of these creatures, and throwing it at your foes causes a swarm to emerge from the earth and attack the enemy. From mission to mission, the gameplay changes and evolves, making sure you never get bored.
6. The sound: Oh sweet merciful fate, the sound! The machine guns generate a room-shaking amount of sound, and yet you can still hear the “clink clink” of individual shells hitting the ground. You can pinpoint an attacking zombie simply by the direction of the approaching shriek, and you sometimes hear large mechanical beasts doing battle behind the walls nearby. If you can afford to play this with the sound cranked beyond tolerable levels, I heartily recommend it.
