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Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2021 3:30 am
by Blastinus
I hope you folks are ready for some ball-busting action, because it's time for a chapter that's just plain nuts.



In all seriousness, the Gonarch's design was 100% intentional because the folks at Valve had and still have, to some extent, the maturity of college frat guys. According to Valve's co-founder Gabe Newell, people in design meetings could just shout out any ideas that came into their heads, and they would be seriously considered as part of the game. This kind of open forum-based approach where basically anyone could have a say in the design process means that Valve was able to take a lot of risks that a more committee-driven game would have dismissed because they were too bizarre or open to scrutiny. The Gonarch in particular was a design that certain team members were worried about, wondering if it was too risque, but since Gabe was into it, they kept it in the game. Good thing too, because if there's one thing that a lot of people remember about Xen, it's that time that you fight a giant testicle.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Wed Jan 06, 2021 4:23 am
by Kibayasu
When I was playing it Gonarch's Lair annoyed me more than I'd hoped. Half Life never really did the "run away from the oncoming death" setpiece before, or at least a version of it that lasted more than a few seconds, and considering the player had already fought off Gonarch once before it took me a few deaths until I caught on that I needed to run away. Some of those leaps in the crystal cave didn't seem marked very well either so the whole thing was constantly teetering on and off the edge of frustrating for me. Some of the visuals are really nice, chasing the fire to the final arena is great for example, but I don't think running away as much as you do was the right path to go.

Great final fight though.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2021 2:59 am
by Blastinus


Interloper is another example of taking a concept that already existed and expanding it out into over an hour of content. The series starting with Half-Life 2 is going to reveal that Vortigaunts are actually a benevolent force in the universe, so with that foreknowledge, the chapter has been reframed as a Vortigaunt sympathy tour, with them being beaten, mistreated, forced to operate the devices that produce Alien Grunts, and it's heavily implied by the game that they are actually the fuel for the process. The enslavement has always been a part of the series, but as far as them being linked directly to Alien Grunts, that's more of a fan theory that Black Mesa decided to run with, based on the fact that Grunts have the third arm in their midsection, despite being grown in vats. It's interesting to note as well that Alien Controllers also have the third arm, so wherever they came from, this treatment has been going on for quite some time.

Around this time, we're also being given some interesting implications concerning the leader of Xen and, depending on how you interpret the syntax, maybe Gordon Freeman himself. The line "We are their slaves" could be referring to any number of people and it would still be applicable. After all, we do know that there is a mysterious man tracking our movements, and we've been railroaded down a specific path all game long, so how do we know for certain whether where we're going is our own will or just someone else's larger plan for us? The series likes to leave some questions up in the air for people to draw their own conclusions.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2021 6:41 am
by Kibayasu
Is there any hint that green juice is vortigaunt juice? I just figured it was nameless alien slime.

And man, I tried my hardest to not kill any vorti's in Xen but I must have clipped a few here and there. You mentioned that it is shown somewhat in the original that the Vortigaunts are slaves but against the rest of Xen its a pretty small moment and I do like that Black Mesa closes the semi-plot hole of the status Freeman has with the Vortigaunt's in 2 - besides some unnamed prophecy or something. It may be somewhat incidental but you/he really does wreck a lot of stuff between them and their slavers.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2021 1:05 pm
by Blastinus
I don't know if there's strict evidence for it, if I'm going to be honest. My reading on Black Mesa indicated this was supposed to be the case, so I ran with it, but I didn't see any explicit demonstrations of the Vortigaunt -> Grunt process. Maybe I just wasn't seeing the right tube or the right tank. Still, it does sort of feel to me like I'm making unsubstantiated remarks based solely on fan theories.

As for the original game, all you see are egg-like containers with Grunts inside being rolled along on conveyer belts, which we'll be seeing in the next update.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2021 11:11 pm
by Blastinus


You know those green crystals we saw near the end of the last update? They're the focal point of the rest of Interloper, presenting us with situations where we can just go crazy with the Tau Cannon and Gluon Gun (but mostly the Gluon Gun) and not have to worry about ammo consumption. There's a section of Half-Life 2 where we're also suddenly gifted with a ridiculously-powered weapon and asked to just go hog-wild with it, so I assume that this is a direct homage to that.

This also presents us with the last obstacle of the game: the Ascension, with a song appropriately titled by the same name. The artist who did the soundtrack for all of Black Mesa is Joel Nielsen, and while he leans closer to shredding guitars over the original's more electronic sound, his stuff can vibe just about as well as the original, even if the mood is completely different. If you can hear anything over the lasers, the explosions, and the shrieking, this is one of my favorite songs in the game.

My apologies, by the way, but this part of the game is really unkind to the framerate. Black Mesa was designed on the Source engine which is great for a number of things, but processing a lot of physics objects all at once isn't one of them.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2021 6:56 am
by Kibayasu
I don't particularly doubt the Vortigaunt to Grunt pipeline, just the pulped Vortigaunt juice part.

Anyways I think Interloper gets a little long in the tooth between quality control, as you put it, and the final elevator ascent but hardly game breaking-ly so. And that elevator does make up for it. It is rough on hard but that good kind of rough.

And in the immortal words of Ross Scott: https://youtu.be/DCwu9G0epYk?t=747

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2021 11:51 pm
by Talisriel
The "Ascension" song is very recognizably the song they use in the Steam release's first trailer*. It's such a good song that it's been teasing me when some of the highlights of the song started drifting in to the Xen soundtrack. It's not a clean take, but it is better balanced than an actual game in progress.

* If this is your first exposure to the Half-Life series, don't actually look for it until Blastinus posts the proper final episode-that trailer spoils the whole game including stuff the LP hasn't shown yet.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Sat Jan 16, 2021 5:03 pm
by Blastinus


So...the Nihilanth. Brainy voice guy's looking a little not-so-healthy there, and in fact, general impressions were that he was kind of weird and even a bit pathetic. Then again, FPS final bosses are sort of hit or miss in general, even today. It's hard to create a challenge for a player that isn't just "shoot it a lot more than the average enemy". I think that the decision of the Black Mesa team to turn it from a gimmick fight to a straight-up brawl was probably the right call in the end, since platforming, while improved for this version, is still not the game's strongest suit.

Story-wise, the resolution to the Nihilanth fight provides a number of questions and not a lot of answers. Who is the G-Man and how does he have seemingly supernatural powers? Who are his employers and what is their stake in the conflict that occurs throughout the series? How did the Nihilanth know enough about him to realize that he would deceive us? Did the G-Man extend the same kind of "offer" to him that we got, where he was effectively forced into doing the employers' dirty work? Valve tended to put a lot of ambiguity into their storytelling, which is perfectly on-brand for the kind of stuff that was airing at the time. Much like the X-Files, you can get a lot more engagement if you don't tell people everything, or much of anything at all, because their imagination will tend to fill in the blanks for you.

I'll be taking a short break to start recording Blue Shift. In the meantime, I'll be doing a short feature on Half-Life Uplink, a cut level released as a free demo for the original Half-Life 1. Thanks to everyone who's stuck around so far.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2021 12:02 am
by Kibayasu
One last problem I had with Black Mesa? Don't tell me you're sending me into a battle I have no chance of winning and then not even giving me the chance. Give me back me weapons and let me reenact the end to Halo Reach :colbert:

Ok sure there's cheats and people would use them and probably break the ending somehow but still.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 1:29 am
by Talisriel
In counterpoint, playing out the refuse ending (and having a hope of survival, even if by running away for a while) would turn Gordon into Doomguy, and he's got his own series.

Thanks for the Black Mesa run, and I'll be looking forward to Blue Shift!

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2021 5:07 am
by Scaramouche
Some thoughts on Xen: I think they redeemed it from being the utter shit show it was on original release. I remember playing this through originally, basically pre-internet (so no spoilers or guides) and basically gutting through it and hating the entire thing. The resource constraints. The constant low health scenarios. Terrible visual indicators on what you're actually supposed to do (it was also dark as hell but that might have been my 3dfx card). All this I recognized without an internet group think saying Xen was bad since this predated me really being on the internet.

And the new one, it's not perfect obviously, but it still looks dang good. It's clear, understandable, improved in nearly every respect. I will agree that the Gonarch is a stumble, both thematically and in implementation. The same urgency doesn't seem to be there.

The Nihilanth fight, fuck that original fight. I thought landing in the head and crowbarring him to death was the only way to beat it, because you had no ammo left for anything else.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Sun Jan 24, 2021 2:19 am
by Blastinus
Image



The original Half-Life was released on November 19, 1998, and results were overwhelmingly positive. Currently the title holds a 96% rating on Metacritic among game reviewers and has sold millions of copies, way above the modest 180,000 that they had projected. Valve and Half-Life had become essentially a household name for PC gamers, and naturally folks were already clamoring for a sequel.

So why in the world did they need to release a game demo four months later on February 12, 1999? Generally what you'd expect is for a company to release a demo in order to get people interested in a game that hasn't been released in order to entice them to buy, but people already were buying Half-Life 1. By the droves. What's more, Uplink is all cut content with little to no relevance to the overall story other than a vague allusion to the idea that the satellite we're linking to is the one that we launched earlier in the game.

Best I can tell is that this is an early form of DLC, something extra for fans who were already interested in the game to begin with. Uplink is actually unavailable these days in its original version, and attempts have been made to redo it in the Black Mesa style, but none have come to completion just yet. In their place, I'm running a game mod for Half-Life 1. If you're interested in a little piece of gaming history, you can get it here. Just a heads-up, you'll need to play through Lambda Core to access it.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Sun Jan 24, 2021 8:22 pm
by Scaramouche
I wonder if the 'cloning' of the welder/commander were just the game replacing the scripted entities that were posed for the door opening with the real entities who can run around and fight. The posed ones would have probably been invulnerable, so the gibs might have come from the guys in the ceiling you were expecting. I never got much into Hammer so I'm not sure if that's how it did things.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2021 4:51 am
by Kibayasu
I'm one of the ones that the Uplink demo got to buy the full game, quite a while after release too because I played Uplink for far longer than one would reasonably expect one to play a demo.

That said I remembered very little about it besides the end with the gargantuan. Were the pistol and SMG (well, not an SMG in this) different in the original?

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2021 2:26 am
by Blastinus
Kibayasu wrote:
Mon Jan 25, 2021 4:51 am
I'm one of the ones that the Uplink demo got to buy the full game, quite a while after release too because I played Uplink for far longer than one would reasonably expect one to play a demo.

That said I remembered very little about it besides the end with the gargantuan. Were the pistol and SMG (well, not an SMG in this) different in the original?
They probably just used the SD models for this demo. The HD models were released with Half-Life: Blue Shift. And speaking of which...

Following the release of Half-Life 1, Valve took a break of about six months before development began on Half-Life 2. This development cycle would last all the way until 2004, which would have been a long time to go without a Half-Life game, especially when people were foaming at the mouth for a sequel. Imagine letting people wait for years without any news about the series. They would never do something like that.

Enter Gearbox Software, formerly known as Rebel Boat Rocker. The company was formed in February of 1999, consisting of ex-employees from 3D Realms, the guys behind the Duke Nukem games. Securing the license from Valve, Gearbox would create an immediate expansion (which we'll get to later) and also take charge on porting Half-Life to the Sega Dreamcast and the Sony Playstation 2. These home console versions were planned to have add-on campaigns as an extra incentive for people to buy them, which brings us to our game today.

Image



Blue Shift was the intended add-on for the Dreamcast port, developed in June 2001. However, because of external factors (like, you know, Sega dying in the console market), the Dreamcast port was canceled, and Blue Shift was instead spun off into a standalone PC expansion. The game stars Barney Calhoun, a seemingly generic security guard working a regular shift in the Black Mesa Research Facility. However, when some random schlub named Gordon Freeman ends up causing an alien invasion, Barney has to find a way to survive and, perhaps, to escape.

Aside from a so-called high-definition graphical upgrade to all of Valve's assets, Blue Shift has very little that's new to talk about, so I'm bringing Tanz (they/them) onboard to help keep things interesting. This is my first foray into co-commentary, so things might not entirely work from a technical perspective. I hope that it's mostly okay.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2021 5:03 am
by Kibayasu
So am I the only one who likes Blue Shift more than Opposing Force? Feels like I am.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2021 3:32 am
by Blastinus


Well hey, if it isn't Jon St. John. That's 2 for 2 on me not recognizing his voice, since I also thought they got someone new for Duke Nukem Forever back when there was an LP of that. Not my brightest hour. This time around, he's playing the part of Dr. Rosenberg, who is...slightly different from Duke Nukem. But first, we have to find him, which means a long series of shootouts with the HECU. When you consider the brevity of Barney's journey, he actually does manage to rack up the impressive body count. If all security officers were allowed to use automatic weaponry and grenades, this whole mess would have been sorted out in no time at all.

The little easter egg at the start of the video reminds me of another point. I honestly really like how the handgun's model behaves in the HD model pack, especially with how the slide stays retracted once you've expended all the ammo in the magazine. It's really cool stuff, and it's going to be weird to go back to standard models when I do Opposing Force. But that's what I get for doing the games in this order.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2021 3:12 am
by Kibayasu
Even though I like Blue Shift more than Opposing Force the arena design in these earlier levels do leave something to be desired. They're very open in a lot of the area and when combined with hitscan enemies they tends to make players just hide in a corner or behind a door, as shown.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2021 2:38 am
by Blastinus


When it comes to Barney's jaunt through Xen, there's a lot less obnoxious platforming and it's overall a more straightforward journey than HL1. Still, there's nothing here that we haven't seen before, aside from hearing Dr. Rosenberg explain things that are probably going right over Barney's head. We'll never get a real idea of what Barney's thinking, due to the whole silent protagonist thing, but I'll wager from the little we know about him, he's basically just going wherever he's pointed and hoping there's a convenient button to press.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:05 am
by Blastinus


And here we are! Barney's short tale of passing the buck to someone else has come to an end. I pointed it out in the video, but yeah, ol Mister Calhoun here does actually succeed in saving some folks. Like, he isn't a failure as a hero. It's just that when you compare to what the other protagonists do, his story ends up feeling a bit flat. But I tell you what, sometimes being an underwhelming individual is helpful when there's a mysterious blue-suited man giving folks offers that they can't refuse. He managed to save himself by being unexceptional, and that's praiseworthy in itself.

As I said in the video, Barney will return. He and Gordon Freeman have business in the future. But for the time being, let's set them aside. We've got more folks involved in the Black Mesa Incident to deal with. Stay tuned for that.

Re: The Right Men in All the Wrong Places: Let's Play the Half-Life Anthology

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 4:46 am
by Kibayasu
I think I must have included stuff from Opposing Force in with Blue Shift because that is way shorter than I remembered.