Spoiler- 3D graphics do not age gracefully.
- Audio engines do age. The ambient sounds coming from out of nowhere and hearing monsters through walls is so odd.
- Music and art ages gracefully, but most of this stuff isn’t really my bag.
- FPS is not my bag.
- Horror-like anything is definitely not my bag. I don’t even turn into some blubbering idiot, I usually just go save and quit, straight into the catatonic shutdown phase. Outside observers have often mistaken mistaken this for stoicism.
- So yeah, I played this in short bursts. That can’t have been terribly entertaining for anyone who saw the Steam notifications....
- The music, by the way, doesn’t feel like it’s placed well, no matter how awesome it is. It just transitions into existence and nonexistence, over before you know it. I don’t think this style of game has done it very well since, either. Since you’re sprinting in and out of places, you can be in a completely different place long before music gets a chance to really get pumping. Dynamically mixed music fares a little bit better, but not necessarily that much, plus a lot of games just don’t do it. Maybe one day we can find a way around these issues.
- Even the easy difficulty is hard and I am not even afraid to admit that I godmoded most of it rather than turn it into the authentic quicksave-fest of the 90s (and of course there will surely be someone who reads this and immediately moves to deny its difficulty/scariness and to you Internet badasses I award a pat on the head, ruffled hair, and a giant lollipop, though on this forum I guess you might need to register first). Most of the difficulty, no matter how good your FPS skills, lies in the first-person platforming.
- The number and locations of those Seriously, what. I seriously look forward to seeing how Freeman’s Mind is going to handle that. Like, maybe complain that he knows five mutually exclusive explanations for this that can each be summed up in the title of a movie.
- Speaking of Freeman’s Mind, you should watch it! It’s hilarious to see someone look a little too closely at the world and pick it apart, including the brain of the main character himself.
- Other than the I don’t see why all sorts of people who get that far think it’s so different from the rest of the game. It seems paced pretty well when you godmode and noclip and impulse 101 everywhere
- This game has certainly left its mark on later games. The scripted set pieces, atmospheric NPC actions, almost-seamless transitions between levels (they were less almost-seamless in the 90s, I’m afraid), and memorable story elements delivered in-engine is what so many games now try to be, particularly in the first-person genre. Sadly, not that many live up to its quality, much less surpass it.
- It’s convinced me to get to HL2 sooner rather than later (I’ve had almost every single-player Valve game spoiled heavily albeit piecemeal in real life; not sure why, I guess people just feel comfortable playing these games in public, especially in the circles I’ve run in? Especially when the guy over whose shoulder I saw the ending of HL2 does these sorts of things for the whole Internet to see?). People have argued back and forth about which is better, but I’m a lot more comfortable thinking of these things as parts of the same story, willing to overlook the incongruities in gameplay and graphics. Seeing the escalation in scope and scale from HL to HL2 makes me appreciate why Valve might be reticent to top it for now. Nothing short of Lord of the Freaking Rings scale war will match that bump.
- All the crates being around really doesn’t make sense. The crowbar does, given all the crates. Then again, I never saw a crate for real until I started my current job working with lab equipment.
- I actually got stuck in geometry a few times. An unwelcome blast from the past!

SpoilerGordon Freeman left for another dimension, and what the Marines must have thought about that stinker of a mission, though it seems to gloss over their overt cruelty on display in the first game.

SpoilerNeither one was built up to well, though I guess the Gene Worm was slightly less disappointing since you could see a little bit about the Race X invasion that needs to be stopped. Still, it came out of nowhere; you only get notified of its existence right before you go fight it.