The Orange Box: Valve are laughing
A little known company called Valve released "The Orange Box" to the world a little while ago, and while it unarguably is a good value buy given the average game these days, I've been a little under whelmed by the actual content. This will probably be a series of posts broken up into each game.
Half-Life 2
Half-Life (1, the original, the first) was hailed as a break through in the First Person Shooter for it having a story line, a unique concept back in those days. For those who haven't played it (I didn't play it myself until the weeks before its sequel), the story can be found easily enough by searching for it, but I'll summarise it for the lazy
You're a physicist, Gordron Freeman, incapable of speech, hygiene (you never leave that suit), or actually doing physics, set to save the world after the Black Mesa research complex goes ape after a failed portal based research experiment. Since you've looked at guns before, you instantly know how to use them with better-than-military grade precision, and you have to save the world/your own ass by escaping Black Mesa.
But wait, there is more, once you do beat the impossible odds of battling Security Guards, Military Personal and random aliens, you'll teleport yourself to their planet, and beat the shit out of them, be 'liberated' by the "G-Man", and the games over. Congratulations.
In 1998/9, sure, story telling was weak in games because the budgets weren't there to hire non-geeks (ie, those who can write coherent sentences), and don't get me wrong, the game is fairly solid in gameplay and overall presentation - I just don't get why its hailed as the best thing to come out in the history of History.
Like all quality sequels, you start off where you were in the last game, except throw that into the HL universe and you start off in the nothingness which the G-Man left us in. Oh, and it's ten to twenty years in the future - you don't find out and official sources aren't sure. Once a company finds a good formula for making games/books/movies, they tend to stick to it, and Half-Life 2 is no different. You play Gordon Freeman, you wear a special suit, you don't talk, and you have to save the world.
There are some mind boggling changes to the game though. No longer do the evil aliens hail from the terrifying floating rocks called Xen, in fact some of them are even our new allies, for our new enemy is the Combine, who were behind the original invasion as-if-you-didn't-already-guess-that; Physics can now be handled by even the lowliest of physicists thanks to the Gravity Gun; and finally, Head Crab Zombies come in many different flavours.
Don't get me wrong, HL2 had some solid gameplay to it; AI was decent, weapons varied and interesting, and it was especially beautiful when it came out. However just like it's predecessor, it was hailed for having an incredibly rich story. The game was fairly short, the stories had plot holes that you could drive a small truck through, and the ending was incredibly lame; but that was overlooked by most because you had the gravity gun where you could cut zombies up with circular saw blades.
Half-Life 2: Episode One was meant to be the first in a rapid succession of episodic content for the Half Life saga which would give shorter game play but be more regularly produced, and at a reduced cost. Given it took six years for the sequel of Half-Life, slightly more regularly produced isn't setting their standards particularly high, and with Ep1, they certainly did give the shorter game play and more regular - only totaling about two-to-four hours of gameplay, and released a year after HL2.
Half-Life 2 and Doom3 were released close together, and HL2 was hailed as being much better because it actually had environments (plural) rather than just one-super-long-dark-corridor-with-a-poor-flashlight. The majority of Ep1 is made up of areas where you have little-to-no ammo, in the dark, shooting zombies. Sounds original and awesome right?
I suppose it would be wrong of me if I failed to mention just how cinematic Ep1 was. For a large slab of the game, it was like a movie, I forgot I was simply playing a game. I'm sure many industry analysts are wondering how you can achieve such immersion. Valves answer to that question is as simple as it is elegant…give the player no ammo in a First Person Shooter, but give them a "cute" female NPC that follows them around who has unlimited ammo but simply won't share. It wasn't that I was immersed, it was that I had to watch Alyx have all the fun.
I'm not far enough in to Half-Life 2: Episode Two to critisise it to the inevitable pointless rant I'll undoubtedly have in my head, but it certainly isn't promising much. It starts off with a train crash, and all of your weapons have been vapourised, yet Alex retains hers. You've also inexplicitly developed a separate battery pack so that the flashlight and running are no longer connected.
In all fairness, the Half Life games aren't bad. That is to say, they're not terrible, but they're not awesome. They fall somewhere in between, kind of what Yahtzee said about Halo 3. The Source engine is certainly good looking, and scales well, and etcetera and so forth about their technical capabilities, but at the end of the day, we've got a overly-hyped-underdelivered-game which for some reason, gets 95% or higher in "real" reviews.
You forgot to mention Ep1's lack of story line ;)
Ep2 is OK.
I do admire the larger environments that it has, and they do look impressive. However, I found the first couple of chapters rather tedious - shooting antlion after antlion to get this extract so my NPC companion could be healed only to be pretty much useless to me in the next chapter. And I expected a better twist with the G-Man than what they gave too. Disappointed about that.