Tag Archives: valve

Half-Life 2 Episode 1: One Paragraph Review

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Half-Life 2 Episode 2

I was going to write a review, but instead I’m going to quote from an email Miles sent me, because he puts it better than I ever could:

“It cracks me up how schizophrenic it is between apocalyptic horror and tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment. On the one hand: Alien slavers colonize the earth! They’re sterilizing humanity, draining the ocean for minerals, and infesting our ecosystem with hostile alien species. On the other hand: everyone of any significance to the story is a Physics PhD! SUPEREMPOWERED NERDS DUKE IT OUT FOR THE FATE OF HUMANITY! You spend the entire game running around with a 22-year-old babe who’s a self-taught physicist, roboticist, electrical engineer, sniper, and alien-technology hacker; she’s a crack shot with rifle, pistol, and shotgun alike; she climbs walls like a parkour master, and high-kicks zombies so hard that their heads come off!”

And a bonus paragraph from a letter that Miles is “mentally composing to Gabe Newell about ep2,” complaining about the death of CENSORED.

“I mean, I know that you’re Valve and hl2 is a Dark Catalogue of Human Nightmares like war, zombies, Orwellian fascism, environmental collapse, and extinction, but get real: The player has spent nearly the entire game tear-assing around the Bavarian forest in a chopped muscle-car with his electrical-engineer / commando / babe sidekick crawling across the hood to ride shotgun, with a literal keg of whup-ass hooked to the back bumper, earning the raucous cheers of the men when he uses said keg to dispatch looming alien tanks (with great dispatch, even.) It’s the height of insensitivity to cap this all off with, ‘and then two monsters came out of nowhere and killed CENSORED.’”

Portal: One Paragraph Review

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Portal

Portal is absolutely good. The only criticism I have is that it’s really short. That said, in the commentary track, the developers mention that they’re just starting to explore this type of game, so it seems likely that we’ll see more in the future. The gameplay is nice and simple. You wake up in a research facility and are put through a series of test chambers, which gradually introduce you to tougher puzzles involving the portal gun, which fires a hole in space-time that lets you instantly step from Point A to Point B. At first your puzzles involve things like dropping boxes on switches, but by the higher levels you are routinely challenged with timing and jumping puzzles. It’s difficult, but not frustratingly so, and beating the game feels like a real accomplishment. Of course, the real draw is the sense of style that Valve brings to all their games. The AI who guides you through the facility is a genius parody of corporate legalese, and she gets more twisted as the game progresses until you find yourself attempting odd things just to hear what her reaction will be. The conclusion is great, and ends with a hilarious song played over the credits by Jonathan Coulton which will be running through your head for days. This game would be worth buying on its own, and coming bundled with four other games in the Orange Box makes it practically a crime not to pick it up.