Half-Life 2 - Still an A+ game 19 years later.

After 19 years I finally played Half Life 2.  Even by today's standards, this is an A+ game.  I've been hearing about it forever, of course, but what not enough people raved about was the level design.  It is brilliant in the way it breaks up racing sections with having to get out of your car and fight to a control room to open a door.  Or a semi-maze like city area that keeps bringing you back around to the weapon caches you filled up on before.

Everyone talked about the gravity gun so I was ready for it, but it was still more fun than I expected. Especially in the last parts of the game where you have a very upgraded version. The physics engine seemed better than games made as much as 7 or 8 years later.  And I also need to compliment the story a bit too. Or perhaps not the story, but the way it feels cinematic and giving you a reason to get from one area to the next.

I was a bit surprised that I only found half the ammo caches (according to the achievement, 23 of 45) but never was low on ammunition even once.  And sometimes my squad would block my path at the worst times.  But I can't really complain about that when the game is such a great example of how to make games fun.  The rapid constant autosaving that encourages you to jump right back in when killed. The variety of weapons. The sense of discovery over and over, rather than redundant levels.  These were rare things back in 2004.

"The Council" might be the most interactive adventure game/movie I've seen yet.  I enjoyed the Telltale Games, but The Council makes them look bad by showing us exactly how much more the Telltale stuff could have been. The Council is set in 1793 on an island of a wealthy powerful man, and you play a member of an international secret society searching for his mother (a major member of the organization).  And on this island a party is taking place with a group of similarly powerful players, some fictional and some real.  Party guests include a Cardinal from the Vatican, as well as George Washington and Napoleon (still just a lieutenant), meeting for the first time.

What makes this so interactive is how many different ways you can play through the story. The Telltale games all had major decisions that influenced who stayed in your group, which adventures you took, but were tricky in how they all worked you back to the same place.  It didn't take much to save a game, and replay a section a second time, and then you could say you pretty much saw every variation the game had to offer.

The Council does this, only times ten.  You have various traits, like 'manipulation' allowing you to maneuver conversations your way, or like 'vigilance' letting you notice little details, 'etiquette' which gives you a unique way to act or respond, and 'agility' letting you reach items or dodge situations. There are about fifteen of these, and you can build them up by choosing to do things, reading books, and how you start.

You can start as either a diplomat, detective, or occultist, which gives you a head start on five traits. It's hard to be a jack of all trades type, so you tend to want to focus on some, and this is tough for most gamers who like to inspect and try every aspect of the game, because as you play you keep getting little flashes like "opportunity missed - needed subterfuge", or politics, or languages, or science, or occult, etc..

Aside from these traits, there are also about forty extra skills you can work towards and learn, and when you finish them you get a bonus, or a penalty, depending on what it is. You might be caught doing something and all the guests are a little more wary of you, or by successfully handling multiple confrontations, your convince trait is knocked up a point.

And even treasures you find, like books that raise a trait, make you have to think how you want to play the game. You might collect 4 books in a chapter, but at the end of the chapter only get to use one of them to upgrade a trait.  You really have to choose how you want to play the game, more than how you think will be the easiest way to play the game.

The trait choices really do change the way the game plays, and how much you might enjoy it. The skill tree is brilliant because depending on the class you choose, the other traits aren't locked out to you, but are mostly just more expensive in experience points to take. Want to be a Diplomat, but want to build up heavy in science knowing you are going to come across chemicals and engineering puzzles? You CAN put a lot of points into science, but it will cost you much more than if you were an Occultist character.  Same if you are a Detective, but want to build up the linguistics skills of a Diplomat, because you know there will be clues in Latin, French, or other languages that you normally could not read.  I played through the first part as two different characters just to get a feel for it, and this system really works!

The story is great - I don't want to spoil it for you. It's worth trying just to watch it. The game does give you a pretty good direction you are supposed to go in, but you get rewarded for exploring off the beaten path where you get new gossip, dirt, on people, that will make a difference when having a conversation with them later.  If you explore and find a secret letter to one of the guests, you might be able to manipulate a conversation by mentioning their sister, for example.

The graphics and art direction are superb. The voice acting is even better.  Some reviews for the PC seem to knock the look and feel, and I'm wondering if some of the other paths I have yet to take will have glitches. Or if because I played it on an Xbox I'm looking at a superior gaming engine.

The whole first part of the game is free (on PC and Xbox), and well worth trying, as it gave me at least 4 or 5 hours of enjoyment on it's own.  (And over 500 free Achievement points!)

(Writing about the skills system is giving me a flashback to the first RPG I played that had a similar skill tree, it was on the Atari ST back around 1992, and the name is escaping me, but I remember how killing monsters gave you experience points, and if you were a barbarian putting those points into doing more damage with an axe was minimal, but for a wizard very expensive.  And the opposite with improving your spell casting.  So you could have a cleric who could pick locks, but if you weren't a thief it was very costly to learn to do so.  It was brilliant!)

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint is one of those games that is widely underappreciated.  When it came out, I was way behind in my games, and didn't hear much about it.  About a year after release, it had a 'free weekend' on the Xbox, and I played it for at least twenty hours.  I loved it.

Reading reviews of it, it got poor numbers, and mostly bad press.  I was surprised, but imagine that if I had seen the game then, and not after the game's many updates, I might not have returned to it later.  And that's a shame, because this is a really fun game.

And I'm only playing it one way, and there seems to be at least three or four ways to do it.  I tend to play stealthily, alternating between very up close and with long range sniping.  I approach an enemy camp, launch a drone to 'tag' the various types of enemies, use a sniper rifle to pick off the lone soldiers whose corpses won't be seen by anybody, and then work my way into camp, picking off individuals and hiding the bodies one by one, until something is spotted and alarms start ringing, and then I pull out the automatic weapons as it has now become a more traditional shooter.

I know several players start that way, with machine guns and shotguns, blasting their way through, but that's not as fun for me.  There are huge multiplayer elements I've barely tried, lots of different vehicles, robot enemies, and more.

I've played it for dozens of hours during two more 'free' weekends on the Xbox, and it really didn't get boring as there is a storyline of some interest leading me around.  But I can go on a free for all lone attack on a base whenever I want to.

I'm going to eventually be so caught up with my other games that I'm going to buy this one and its various add-ons, and likely put hundreds of hours into playing it.

Half Life Alyx Observation

Half Life Alyx - the Virtual Reality game, and my surprise.

How was Half-life Alyx not the "killer app" that made everyone jump on Virtual Reality?  It came out one year ago.  The reviews were universally fantastic when it came out a year ago.  No real competitor has been released since.  It was the highest rated game of the year, actually, and even tied at 93% with the highest rated game of last year. The game's execution is perfect. the franchise is one of everyone's favorites, people have been begging for the next one for years.

And the release timing was pretty good because everyone was stuck in their homes for the first lockdown.

Yet the whole month after it came out, the game boards were full of people talking about Animal Crossing and Final Fantasy 7 being modernized.

For those that don't know, a "killer app" is software that makes people buy hardware just for that. For old computers, Visicalc was something businesses immediately knew was a game changer.  Word processors too.  The Atari 2600 supposedly doubled all of its sales in the weeks after Space Invaders came out.  I'm surprised VR needed one, but I knew if it did, it was going to be either a game, or something spectacularly educational.  Like realistic training drills for something like flying a plane or driving a car.  (Of course something pornographic was always an option, because for VCR's it was of course porn, and probably even the motivation for the web and computers for a lot of people too.  But I can't imagine anything dirty that is truly immersive is going to be done in VR anytime soon.)

How is Virtual Reality still not mainstream in the gaming community? Some people spend $600 on their graphic cards every two years, so a $500 or even $1000 VR rig shouldn't be out of the question.

I do want to add that Valve missed a golden opportunity to have VR headsets shaped like head crabs!

Here is one great video reviewing the game.  And it's pretty funny too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnwsL6BO8ls