Slashdot Mirror
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, Antlion Troopers
Ant writes "Antlion Troopers is a series of Half-Life 2 modifications where it puts you on the squad of a combine expeditionary force to fight off the antlion population. Just think of Starship Troopers movies. The sequel, Deuce, lets you interact with the squad members, set up sentry guns, etc."Additionally, Gamespot has a first look at the Lost Coast add-on for the main campaign. From the article: " You fight your way up a sheer cliff face, trading fire with those pesky Combine soldiers every step of the way. You'll occasionally have to deal with some of the more vicious sorts of headcrabs, and at the end you'll have to bring down a Combine gunship with Gordon Freeman's trusty rocket launcher. You'll have to solve a couple of light physics puzzles as well, which we won't detail for the sake of preserving at least a little of the surprise."
The torrent from there site is here
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Otherwise, HL2 is little more than Yet Another Generic Shooter. It's completely linear, almost as bad as those early rail shooters. "Go this way, now this way. Oh look, a scripted event trigger."
The story is fine, but gameplay-wise it's just boring. For godsakes, it has ubiquitous exploding barrels and crates with ammo! It's a dull, cliche shooter.
I have no idea what the hell is going on. But Half-Life 2 gives me major motion sickness. Never had that before playing these games.
I can play CS:S with no problems. Been playing Battlefield 2 everyday. Red Orchestra through UT2004 quite a bit. So just 3 nights ago, I thought I'd fire up HL:2 and go a little further and WHAM about 2 minutes in I begin to get queasy again. Breaking out in a cold sweat and very nauseous.
No idea...
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
are you sure it was people you know? are you sure it wasent nothing?
Did anyone actually finish HL2?
Yes. (Including the Citadel sequence which some didn't like but I thought was an excellently done "falling action" epilogue after the proper climax of the battle with multiple striders). You mind saying what you didn't like about the game? Personally, I consider it to be the best single-player FPS ever made. The only way I can see for someone to really hate it is if they don't like, y'know, shooting things. Which is generally considered something of a given when you buy a First Person Shooter.
hl2? i run a cyber cafe. I have had a few people ask about hl2/cs. I explain what they want to charge me per month($10 per pc per month) and they say wtf?. I woulnd't pay that! I then have them try out bf2 or some other game that isn't limited to a map the size of your local shopping mall and never hear any further complaints. hl2 and doom3 are wonderful game engines but the game play isn't there. People have moved on past that. They try a game in the bf* series and forget about playing a game based in a hallway someplace. I feel bad for valve but the simle matter is that people want a larger play experience. Playing cs over and over isn't much different than playing tank on the atari 2600. You get your paterns down and thats that.
I thought it started off brilliantly and was immediately very immersive, but it really failed to sustain that interest and the story seemed to fall by the wayside, turning it into a mediocre by-the-numbers shoot em up (albeit one with a great 3rd party physics engine). I found it pretty repetative and formulaic with very linear level design with few 'milestone' points (unlike the origional). I'm fine with 'repetative' in the sense of 'shooting things' over and over (ala Doom 1/2, Unreal 2, etc), but when the environment repeats itself for large sections (as with Doom 3) it gets very tedious. 'Ravenholm' was certainly a nice departure, but they failed to really take enough advantage of it, and they had some dodgy elements to the level design in that section.
Dispite being heavily critisized by some of the gaming press, I loved Unreal 2 because of the varied gameplay. It had many different weapons, multiple types of deployable equipment, several completely different types of enemy and unique envrionments. It also had a consistant story to move things along (between every 'level', there was an additional 'level' set aboard your ship, where you could wander amoung your shipmates and interact with them to play out the story). This was actually a lot more 'interactive' than HL2 (and area in which HL2 is very much overrated IMO), in which it was almost entirely scripted and you just happened to be able to move around - though it was possible to 'trigger' a small number of additional scripted routines by looking or clicking on various things, it was noticeably quite limited.
With regard to HL2 feeling 'linear' IMO, I felt quite artificially constricted in by the outside environment. After playing titles like Ghost Recon, PlanetSide, Soldner, Joint Operations, BattleField (etc), when I'm outdoors I want to have freedom to explore and find my own way from A to B, over a reasonably large map (all of these support maps up to several kilometers in size). I hate getting to the top of a hill or mound - or worse, facing an invisible barrier - and discovering I've reached "the end of the world" just because I've gone a few feet off the beaten track. Far Cry did much better in this respect, and gave the player genuine flexibility and what felt like inteligent AI. There are even open source tools which can seemlessly stick together large outdoor maps into one envrionment (e.g. in whatever map format the Ureal engine uses). HL2 did particularly poorly in this regard, one of my most enduring memories of it is the frequent loading screens.
At the exteme end: You can drive for miles in Solder, for example, and the world just keeps being drawn - without repating the map over and over (forests, lakes, hills, mountains, grassland), because it seems a tool has been used to auto generate a huge amount of terrain and they have simply placed special interest points (i.e. basis, buildings) on top. As a bonus, the terrain in Soldner is dynamically deformable too (as well as buildings, you can fell trees and forests, even create new rivers, or destroy a whole mountain). The descruction models for buldings were a bit linear (several 'impact points' which could be struck and blown up/off/open), but at least they were there. The origional PlanetSide team used real world map data and adapted it to build the continents of Auxaris. I imagine something like an adapted version of the terrain builder from Sim City 4K would be ideal for this sort of work. Certainly after playing larger 16-46 multiplayer games and MMO's (and even the likes of GTA3/VC) I have no desire to back to out door maps that feel like they have been rendered according to the limitations of something like the Q3 engine.
In summary, I think I just felt that HL2 lacked imagination and vision - it did not really bring anything new to the table nor did it alternatively execute it all that well (with regard to the comments above, but also to the much maligned AI of the supposedly more intelligent opponents). For that reason I felt it wasn't as good as some other rec
I love it!
I've enjoyed both similar situations in the game (in the prison, and when teleporting with Alyx), and this is way more fun.
I don't know if it's just the simple pleasure of hearing the bugs die or what, but I can play this all day. (which is actually what I did today).
Thanks RomeoGuy! I'm sure you and your team will be rewarded for your endeavor.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I finished the game, and honestly, it wasn't all that great. I mean, it was fun and all, but it didn't live up to the hype.
The gameplay was fun and enjoyable, but the storyline was horribly lacking. As an FPS, it doesn't really have to have a gripping storyline, but even so, basic questions should have been answered.
As Freeman, you're dropped into this bleak future, and nothing gets explained about how the world ended up that way or anything along those lines. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, because I could have missed it, unless the explanation was simply "crap hit the fan after Black Mesa"
Bit of a late reply - been on hols, but if you finish the airboat bit and get to Black Mesa East then Dr Vance will explain a bit about the 7 hour war and the installation of Dr Breen as administrator. This though is only activated if you zoom-look at the noticeboard with news clippings on it. In fact several 'plot' elements are revealed this way.
I use 'plot' in quotes as I think that you are in some measure correct, that HL2 could have been much more enjoyable had they actually made it more interpersonally interactive and less 'shoot things, get to next waypoint, shoot more things, next waypoint'. Just because it sits in the FPS genre, doesn't mean it has to be only shooting and slogging.