sorry, I probably should've 5 starred your submission. It's definitely 5 for evil money-grabbing bullshit.

I love how anti-Valve this site has become since Chet left it, or maybe it always was and I didn't notice. But in a way, if it wasn't for Valve, who knows if we'd be having this conversation at all? I'd still probably be on IRC and in the goddamn #gamingage room.

It's a very nice package. Have you played it?

People trying to convince themselves there is some kind of upside to them paying 0 for shitty, piecemeal games tend to project an awful lot. A lot of people just don't want the brief embarrassment of saying "Yeah, I got had, oh well..lesson learned" so instead they construct an elaborate apologist stance on why it's totally reasonable and cool that companies try and fuck their own customers over.

Valve is a company that hires psychologists to ensure that their games have just the right amount of behavioral hooks so anything is possible. I'm sure their viral marketing tactics are second to none, but the ardent fanboyism of their cultists should never be underestimated.

not to mention 0 for hats!

In fairness to TF2, the game is entirely free to play and all the buyable stuff is mostly cosmetic and/or optional. If Valve has made a gajillion dollars off of the marketplace for TF2 and CounterStrike, it is literally because of the stupidity of the players, not because Valve is scamming people.

Every one of the apps on my phone can cost well over 100 dollars. And not much happens, really. The best example is Sonic Dash. Punchy Sonic alone is 15 bucks. If I want all the characters and all the powerups at once, it costs more than buying a next gen system. And it's the same fucking 3 stages and 2 bosses. At least TF2 is fun.

Or, what StanleyPain said but with 100% more Sonic talk.

age of wonders 3 is really fun.

for EH and SP

Oho, FUCKING Starbound. It's totally not a reskinned Terraria, you guys!

Speaking of Starbound, did they ever fix it so your saves weren't routinely wiped between versions? Minecraft took years to develop (slowing dramatically once Notch started raking in the millions), but at least with Minecraft, I could spend hours screwing around in a half-built game environment, knowing the castles and pirate ships and gigantic statues of Pedobear I was creating, would persist and still be usable once the game finally updated.

Yeah, I'm not a member of the PC MASTER RACE and even I knew that this wasn't an actual Valve product.

Now now, Starbound will be a great game in like a year.

It's nice to see that Evil Homer has changed from "Minecraft was never finished and doesn't update" to "Minecraft updates too slowly."

Are you getting your video game opinions from Google now instead of just pulling them out of the air, EH?

Two things, SPK. One, those comments are not mutually incompatible; Minecraft is an unfinished, unupdatey mess; my point here being that at least Minecraft's persistent save system means that playing a half finished product *isn't* a waste of time. And two, my previous comments about Minecraft have been made a year, two years, possibly even longer ago then that. Minecraft is *still* not properly finished, and the game has had a development cycle longer than the entire lifespan of the Super Nintendo system!

*Of course* my opinions on Minecraft are going to change over the course of these many months and years, because Minecraft itself is changing - slowly, gradually, even imperceptibly at times.

Yeah. I was really disappointed with Half-Life 2 and didn't even finish it. It was pretty, but the story just wasn't there. It's kind of like Out of This World, which did pretty much the same story first. The moral of the story? Don't fuck up at work, and if you're going to be dealing with things like particle accelerators and other heavy objects, don't drink on the goddamn job. The second one was fun with the gravity gun and all, but I really hated the 1984/messiah/whatever post-matrix bullshit and I finished halfway through when I had to run around with that girlfriend interest or whatever.

Half Life 2 was brilliant for its time, but Episode 1 and 2 were pretty weak. Considering how HL2 did a lot of things to revolutionize the approach to narrative in shooters, the incredibly cliche tropes in the Episodes was really disappointing.

Yeah.. I got it with the organge box so I was a little late to the table. One thing that pissed me off about HL2 was its linear gameplay but you could still go back in a lot of the parts. I got through that whole boat part and then didn't play for a week or so, and went back the wrong way because I didn't remember.. something.. can't remember what exactly but I spent about an hour going in the wrong direction. Not a big deal but that's something that's supposed to be reserved for real life because it just pissed me off.

Half-Life was one of the first heavily scripted cinematic first-person shooters, which is actually why I didn't like it very much. You go from point A to point B with very little in the way of exploration. The best Wolfenstein, Doom, and Descent levels always had at least a couple of branching paths. Now the genre is filled with games that are basically rail shooters that allow you to control the camera.

IZ: so you were pissed about HL2 being too linear, but also pissed because it didn't hold your hand and stop you from going off track? Make up your mind!

The silent protagonist gimmick really didn't work in HL2. It's supposed to be more immersive or whatever because YOU are the protagonist, but that's kind of dumb because *I'm* not mute. There were all kinds of reasonable questions that NPCs COULD have answered in HL2.

SMA: If it was a non-linear game like GTA it'd be just fine, because you'd do something else and get your ammo back, etc. Like, it's not a huge deal, but you probably remember that scene where you just have to run run run through shiping crates and your ammo's pretty much gone and die a bunch of times doing it. The suspense is great and everything, but it doesn't leave you with much and that's the point. Then it's like "ok, there's the blue shipping crate, or was it that blue shipping crate?" Anyway you can't get anymore ammo or health but the enemies respawn right on cue. But yeah, it's a contradiction on my part. Valve should take into account folks like me who have no sense of direction and need garmins to walk to the store.

And the thing is, it's NOT you. It's Gordon Freeman. Unless your name is actually Gordon Freeman. He dresses and looks like most IT guys I see and is very relatable on an everyman level (also most IT/tech guys I know don't really talk that much,) but no he's not you.

Actually, no, I don't remember any scene with a blue shipping crate and respawning enemies in HL or HL2. I think you're remembering a different game.

And if you want "do it again stupid" gameplay, look no further than the GTA series, especially the mission in GTA IV where you have to take down someone on a motorcycle while you're riding a motorcycle. That'll give your directional challenge a run for its money while also punishing you by depleting your resources every time you die and the mission resets.

Until such time as the story is actually finished, I will always believe that Gordon doesn't speak because of a speech defect (Black-Mesa IS an equal-opportunity employer, after all - how's that for a Chekhov's Gun?). Heee taaaalks liike THISSSS, Misssster poe-teee VEEEEE.

The Half Life games always felt like tech demos to me. Once you got over the groundbreaking features like scripted stuff in the original or facial animations + physics in the sequel, you realized the actual GAME was pretty boring.

And Half Life 2 fell flat even for the groundbreaking stuff. Vampire Bloodlines came out at the same time using the same engine for detailed facial animations, with a much better story to boot. Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy came out months earlier and made telekinetic ragdolling a hundred times more fun than the gravity gun.

I remember hearing for years how Ravenholm was the scariest level in a game ever. When I finally tried it the experience completely bounced off me. It didn't hold a candle to the haunted hotel or werewolf segments of Bloodlines. It wasn't even up to the same level as Clive Barker's Undying which had come out a whole 3 years earlier.

Half Life reminded me of the Halo phenomenon where both seemed to appeal to people who didn't realize there was better stuff out there.

>>And the thing is, it's NOT you. It's Gordon Freeman.

Huh. Sounds like SOMEBODY'S never heard of the Multiverse Theory.

#askmeaboutmyKinType

Not true. We're very definite that things are bad now and used to be fine, and it's everyone else's fault for not liking and buying the same games we do.

Also you're a corporate whore if you aren't buying free-range, non-hormone-fed video games strictly from local vendors now, apparently.

It's one of those games that's definitely worth experiencing for yourself, so the new graphics and gameplay changes might justify the pricetag, but it's also kind of like reading Dostoyevsky or watching the original Star Wars trilogy. Yeah, you should, because it's part of history, but now there's so much more that you can consume instead that's influenced by what came before it. Basically, this seems like paying full price to see the Star Wars Special Editions. To me, they meant a lot because I hadn't seen the old ones, but to others, it's "but she's got a new hat."

I played a little of the first Half-Life but never finished it. I may just grab this too.

You just can't retroactively make all your games "PORTAL" spin offs!