Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.

Werner Spahl wrote:

You could ask John McLane.
Even John McLane meets a lot of living people and has help sometimes.

He didn't meet a lot of living people in "Die Hard", because most of
them tried to kill him. And the three people he talked to through a
telephone. Guess why the sequels with the more open areas are worse
than the first one. Less tension.

Oh dear. I guess you don't need to play another FPS anymore then,
because you've already played a FPS.
Of course not, but it was claimed that an isolated player was something
special which it clearly isn't.

It is, if it's done well. NPCs tend to give you background on who and
where you are. Which is kind of annoying if you try to make the player
find that out on his or her own.

I'll never understand why a boring and repetitive hackjob like Halo is
constantly being mentioned together with good games.
Because Halo did fighting NPCs alongside the player very well. And
because it's one of the very few console shooters available ;).

That doesn't make it a good game.

Honestly, are you intentionally acting ignorant? I'm sure you are
able to differentiate between a concept and its realization.
As I already said I never played SS1 but found the concept as well as
the realization in SS2 not that great which is said to be similar to
SS1.

Who said that the realization is the same? For all the complaints about
the controls in SS1 I found those to not be hard at all. Leaning was
much better implemented in SS1, which also had mines and grenades that
were inexplicably removed from SS2. SS1 also didn't have degrading
weapons. It did have a cunning and devious opponent right from the
start, unlike SS2 which brought in Shodan only after about half of the
game and even then she wasn't really that much of an opponent. In SS1
the constant back and forth over who tricks whom was simply brilliant.
Compared to that, SS2 was just a watered-down rehash. Still very well
presented, but ultimately not as satisfying of an experience as the
first one. Kind of like Deus Ex and Deus Ex 2. Although compared to
that, SS2 was a much better sequel.

First of all, SS2 was the worse game, compared to the storyline of SS1.
Maybe that is my problem. If SS2 is much worse, SS1 might be great
:)!

It *is* great. It's a classic.

Could you possible summarize and compare the storylines of SS1 and
SS2 so I could get a better impression of the differences?

And spoil the experience? You must be kidding. Go and play it (the CD
version)!

It offered a full-blown cinematic experience, complete with facial
expressions.
Full blown cinematic experiences were first with HL and done very well in
NOLF and other games.

Not really. NOLF used Cutscenes and while HL did offer something like a
seamless cinematic experience it had a rather cartoonish style.

Anyway, the throroughness of HL2's presentation is definitely unique.

And Bloodlines beats HL2 on facial expressions and would have been
released much earlier without Valves "HL2 first" clause.

I don't quite remember what it looked like, but I didn't have the
impression that it looked better or at least as well.

--
"Es wäre wenig sinnvoll, die Strafen für Bigamie zu verschärfen. Ein
Bigamist hat zwei Schwiegermütter."
-- Winston Churchill
.

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