I just had to end it on a Half-Life 2 reference.

......Do I count this as modern or old school? Well, either way, I'm finally tackling Episode Two (after years of anticipation!), and I have to say that it's.....not that good. Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad game.....actually, let's go with that. For whatever reason, the game embraces first person shooting mechanics when it absolutely shouldn't. Features that could once stand on their own feel out of place or at odds with each other, and there's not much hope that Episode Two can recover from such mistakes.

I see that you have already prepared your nooses and pitchforks. But hold off on that for a second, because I'm gonna start things off by listing a feature that I actually like: the world design. I'm not even completely sure what I like about it so much. That's not an insult against the game, but more a comment on how difficult it is to pin down what makes the environments work. Is it the vague hints of a supernatural, spiritual ethos permeating the atmosphere? Or maybe it's the dead, industrial forest motif going on? Again, I don't know what exactly it is; all I do know is that it works. The world looks absolutely gorgeous, and I just want to explore every nook and cranny, see every little thing that the world has to offer me. It's a great way to ensure that I stay through to the end.

And the story is.....problematic. Actually, that's misrepresenting the situation. The story does some interesting things. We pick up immediately after Episode One, wherein Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance blew up a giant tower or something. Unfortunately, said tower-blowing-up has created an evil portal or something, and it's up to the two heroes to close said portal once and for all. Well, until a Hunter rips Alyx's guts out that is. Although an early plot twist, it's handled really well, conveying just enough emotion to matter, but not so much that it's imposing. But that's not important. What is important, however, is that the story now shifts away from the Combine and more toward the relationship between Alyx and Gordon. Of course, being mute, Gordon can't directly express his character through dialogue, but all the stuff he does to save her should prove just how much she means to him. It's an interesting look at how to characterize somebody through actions rather than through words.

Until the game puts a gun in your hand, that is. Did I not mention that? Episode Two's a first person shooter. You look at things and shoot them. Why? I'm not quite sure. It's an awkward fit, to say the least. You spend much of the game saving Alyx from a large wound in her stomach, not a giant turtle king that's captured her for his own amusement. What place does shooting have in this world? I'm not even certain the game knows itself. Most of the weapons Gordon finds in the game are just that: found. They're lying around for him to pick up, as if the game couldn't figure out how to give him these murder tools in a way that mesh well with the story it was telling. It's almost like Valve felt obligated to work shooting elements into the game somehow, and the larger experience suffers because of it.

I believe we can establish this by looking at just what you're fighting over the course of the game. For a good half of Episode Two, it's nothing but antlions and zombies. Both enemy choices situate you as the bad guy. Those zombies can't aggress; they have no free will to do so. They're screaming in pain, and only attack out of desperation. Your response? Gun the ever loving crap out of them and don't look back. Well, that's worrying. Maybe the antlions are better? I mean, at least they can aggress. In fact, they do, and I'm pretty sure it's related to the fact that the people of this world essentially built their houses on the poor things' nesting grounds. Knowingly, I might add; one of your Vortigaunt buddies mentions how his kind are skilled in antlion eugenics, and have been for many a generation. This knowledge presumably carries with it the knowledge of what pisses them off, and I have to imagine tearing down their homes and replacing it all with noisy, disruptive machinery ranks up there as one of the better ways to get on their bad side.

Now, all of this could be ameliorated if the game acknowledged this and somehow worked that moral dissonance into the storyline. Unfortunately, that isn't really the case. I can't remember any point in the game where anything remotely like that happens. Yes, the writing characterizes some of your allies as idiots, but it does so for reasons completely removed from what I've been discussing. I'd say that their decision to build next to a goddamn antlion nest might as well be their smartest decision, but Episode Two doesn't even bring up said decision as a topic of discussion. It doesn't even encourage you to ask why the antlions attack you with such malice. In fact, they might as well be meaty targets who only exist for your own amusement. (The sick guitar licks certainly aren't helping.) The poor little guys are just defending their homes and their children from a small group of guys mercilessly killing their friends, family, neighbors, and who knows what else. What possible justification could the game give for any of this?

Well, to be fair, you do eventually fight an organized military force that knowingly and intentionally attacks you without much pretense for self defense (or at least not as much). But man, does the game take its sweet time bringing them out. It takes almost half the game before Episode Two's ready to acknowledge them, and when it does, it feels reluctant to do so. This much is evident as soon as said military force enters the picture. Alyx has just recovered from her horrific injuries (I guess), meaning she and Gordon can finally resume their journey to White Castle Forest. As they exit the caves, they spot a Combine battleship flying across the sky. As players, we finally have a clear antagonistic force to work against. Seconds later, you're shooting down the same antlions you've been shooting for the previous 50% of the game. Guess the game isn't quite ready to commit to an unambiguous bad guy, is it?

I feel I should also mention that Gordon Freeman occupies no space within this world. Granted, that's one of the less important problems the game has to deal with, but it's a problem nonetheless. The Freeman does not walk upon the Earth, like you or I would, but glides ever so slightly above it, presumably with the power of his mind. That power's also how he interacts with the world around him, because I can't think of any other explanation as to how he can reload a shotgun while turning a valve. That one's a lot harder to ignore, since a good percentage of the game is nothing but turning valves. It's jarring, to say the least. (The lack of presence, although the high number of valves also leaves me worried.) It only serves to remind me that I'm playing a video game; exactly what Episode Two doesn't need. For a game whose greatest strength is the world it crafts, it sure does a lot to make you feel removed from it.

You can find one particularly egregious example just by looking down and walking forward. You don't see any feet moving down there, but you can hear footsteps being made. Hell, different sounds play depending on what you're walking on. Normally, that would be a fine attention to detail, but without any feet, this implies some very worrying things. It means that somebody on the development team was assigned to produce various footstep sound effects, and another person was assigned to make sure they play under very specific conditions, but nobody thought to animate or even model the damn feet that actually make these noises. What a worryingly strange dedication to (a lack of) detail.

How did Valve....OK, I think I'm getting it. Don't you see? It's all making sense now. The ten or so rockslides preventing me from exploring anything outside the immediate path; the boulders that fail to elicit a response from Alyx when they're Gravity Gun'd into her brain; the series of caverns I explored in search of vital medicine (that I could've reached via the elevator I used to exit said caverns); that stupid helicopter chase sequence where you're being attacked with explosions and rock music; the inexplicably weak second half of the story, forgetting about a newly introduced plot element until it's needed for a cheap twist at the end of the game....this is a dumb action movie. Thematic implications and creating a cohesive world mean nothing when you can just shoot to your heart's delight.

Of course, even under these standards, the game falters. It doesn't fail, mind you; the shooting can be quite decent. The frantic, hurried, chaotic pace to each encounter mixes quite well with the similarly hurried pace running through both of the major story arcs AND it's pretty damn fun. Unfortunately, said sense of fun is usually balanced with plodding shoot-outs that feel less like a triumphant bang and more like an impotent squib, so the shooting's a wash, overall. The puzzles aren't much better, often sufficing with simple physics puzzles or plugging things in (to fix short circuits, strangely enough); not exactly the most engaging material the game can muster. It's painful, really, typing out all these sentences utterly lambasting Episode Two. I mean, the ingredients are there for a good game. Or maybe for good games. It's the BioShock Infinite problem all over again: decent enough components when examined separately, but when you look at them in the context of each other, it's hard to ignore the mess it becomes. Tell me, reader, if you can. This game sucks so much. What is it, exactly, that makes it worth playing? Can you name even one thing?...I thought not.

Review Synopsis

• Just shoot shit up, man. Ignore the myriad story problems with this set up.
• And the far less significant mechanical problems.
• At least the world's interesting (although if we're going that route, I'd probably cut out the middle man and recommend Dear Esther instead).

I think we'd ALL like Twilight Princess a bit more if it was just Ganondorf licking everything in sight.

OK, so what's the story behind this decision? The word "episode". That's it. Both of these games have the word "episode" in their titles. But strangely, things worked out fine in the end, because both of these Episodes share very similar problems. Much like Half-Life 2: Episode Two before it, The Phantom Menace can't quite get its story and its gameplay in perfect agreement. What should have been a space-hopping epic topped off with tales of political intrigue ends up a clumsy, plodding mess of an experience.

Of course, the traditional narrative (for lack of better phrasing) isn't completely off the hook, despite its initial promise. It all begins with the greedy Trade Federation (not my words) blocking trade with the planet of Naboo. The Galactic Republic, pissed that they're no longer able to buy swamp roots or whatever the hell the planet produces, decides to send in some Jedi Knights to muscle away the problem. So far, so good. We've got the promise of some tense political maneuvering to look forward to, along with monks whacking things with their laser swords in case the former becomes too boring. How are we gonna deliver on that?

Well, if you're The Phantom Menace, you focus most of your energy on dull, boring subplots. Jar Jar Binks readily comes to mind, and while I agree with you that he sucks a bag of racist dicks (the dicks are all wearing Klan hoods), I personally see Anakin as more corrosive to the story. Once he enters the picture, both of the appeals I listed before are thrown right out the window, which is a lot worse than you're probably thinking, since this is the Star Wars universe and everything. Anyway, the story moves away from that other stuff and towards pod races and freeing the boy from his slave life.

All because Qui-Gon Jinn needs some spare parts for his ship. What an underwhelming motivation, especially given how this ordeal comprises pretty much the entire second act. If you're gonna devote so much attention to some kid you introduce a third of the way through the story, he'd better play an absolutely vital role to what's happening in the story. Sadly, that's not the case; he's freed, mentioned as the chosen one (mentioned because he kind of disappears after being freed), and overall does nothing to justify the level of importance placed upon him. Is that really why people want to play this game? For a little kid who just sort of exists? What about the robots pursuing the Queen (who happens to be PrincessAzula, for some reason)? Don't they deserve some development?

So far, I've only talked about how the.....I still don't have decent phrasing. How about we talk about the gameplay? Specifically, the level design, largely because it doesn't do the story any favors. First, the dead space. You're gonna spend a lot of time in these levels simply wandering around, looking for some purpose that the developers forgot to implement. This brings the pace to a screeching halt. The lack of (otherwise outstanding) music certainly doesn't help. What was once exciting becomes prolonged, and what was once prolonged becomes torturously awful.

But perhaps more importantly, the level design renders the world ridiculous. Most of the levels force you to jump between ledges, push boxes, collect pass keys, and engage in every other staple of early 3D game design. It's about as fun as you'd expect, but to look at it in terms of fun would be to miss the point entirely: how does any of this fit into the world? I mean, without all that other stuff, the worlds are amazing. They're just so intricate and thoughtfully designed. The worlds you explore just breathe life and personality, almost as though people actually live in these worlds and conduct their daily business in them. That is, when they're not pushing blocks to fetch their car keys (which, for whatever reason, are hanging off a support beam) or removing their groceries from their secret-activated cabinets to make room for medkits or the errant grenade. You see the problem here, right? It's exactly what happened with Episode Two before/after it: I'm reminded that I'm playing a game. No longer am I Qui-Gon Jinn, confusingly named Jedi Master, effortlessly slashing my way through the droid armies; now I'm just some schmuck pushing buttons to make things happen. Of course, The Phantom Menace doesn't fare much better when it's trying to create atmosphere (fucking Mos Espa), but game-centric design isn't the way to go, either.

This even holds true under fun conditions. By which I mean light saber battles. Because it's impossible not to have fun with a light saber, especially when you're using it to slash bullets instead of people. (You also get to fight using guns and grenades and stuff, but why a magic space knight would use any of that is beyond me.) Yes, actually bouncing those bullets back is awkward and takes getting used to. They reflect back based on where you're facing, but the precision means that a laser can hit you right on and be reflected 90 degrees into the next star system. For many, that may be too precise, and while I agree with you, I add the caveat that such precision brings with it a new layer of skill in learning how these systems work. Think of it like the cherry atop the true appeal to be found in the combat. That appeal, of course, is watching a group of droids open fire on you and somehow manage only to kill themselves.

But let's flip this around and look at the combat in terms of the story. You're supposedly playing as some of the top Jedi in the universe on a mission of the utmost importance, so it's safe to say that they know what they're doing. Why, then, do all their fights come across as clumsy drunken slapstick? Seriously, it's hard to name a single fight that didn't end with the Jedi recklessly swinging their sabers about and hoping something happened. A major military conflict is not the place to reenact your favorite Three Stooges sketches, guys.

Darth Maul gets it the worst. In the movie that I don't know if I've ever seen, I have to imagine he fulfills some sort of role as this super ominous bad guy who has a reason to exist. What that reason is, the game doesn't make clear. The guy introduces himself by pushing over some rocks and then slapping you about for no explained purpose. He continues to do this until you chuck him down a giant hole on a completely different planet. In short, Darth Maul's less a foreboding villain who connotes dread and more an insane nuisance you have to deal with every now and again. Hard to take the story seriously when this is the closest thing we have to a clear antagonist, isn't it? I'd also mention how Queen Azula can survive an entire belt of ammunition to the face yet collapses dead when her escort walks 50 yards away from her, but I feel I've made my point by now.

Simply put, this game's crap. Or, perhaps more specifically, this is crap because it's a game. The combat and the levels mi....OK, there's no chance they would've worked in any other game, but they especially don't work here. The Phantom Menace has an agenda, and block puzzles don't fit anywhere into it. There might have been a way to make a good game based on The Phantom Menace (I seem to remember that pod racer game being pretty good), but this certainly wasn't it. Tell me, re-wait, I've already used that one......I'm gonna need a bit more time to come up with a decent Half-Life 2 reference. In the meantime, this is where I get off.

Review Synopsis

• Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute. But let's ignore that in favor of some ultimately inconsequential pod races.
• Apparently, "a galaxy far, far away" doesn't preclude Mars. (That's supposed to be a Doom joke. Because of all the colored keycards.......*ahem*)
• I have to admit, though, that the game is extremely faithful to the highly visceral fight between Darth Maul and the two Jedi.

Oddly, your problems with HL2-Ep2 don't mirror my own. Most of mine tend to involve the actual set-pieces they came up with, like that endless spelunk through the meandering antlion caves or the horrible tower defense-ish final assault of the striders. I do think the gnome quest added to my enjoyment of Episode 2, but it doesn't make those dramatic cutscenes any easier to take seriously when you're holding a tiny, happy gnome statue throughout.

The Episode One game just makes me wonder what kind of quality gaming experience you anticipated going in. There's been a distinct lack of decent Star Wars games in the past few years, and most of those weren't hamstrung right out of the gate by basing themselves on a horrible failure of a movie. Best to just be an evader of the dearth of quality that the Star Wars franchise has become. (That joke's never going to work and I should stop trying to make it happen.)

That actually got me thinking (imagine that) that for all the accomplishment in storytelling and characters brought to life by what was, at the time, a revolutionary facial/character animation system...

Why would Alyx interrupting the scene between Eli and Gordon at the end there inferfere with the very first acknowledgment by another character that the G-man was interfering with events, and no one decided to stop and work out that problem before the hard ending (and ostensibly the cliffhanger ending to the entire series). The silent protagonist thing just doesn't hold up in those circumstances. Unless Gordon really is a mute, in which case people never acknowledge it. Could have been a touching thing for Alyx to find out once she finally realizes that Gordon has literally never spoken a word to her. Unless they start including a Mass Effect dialog wheel, that's a huge detriment to modern videogame storytelling.

As to the enemies - zombies are former humans who are being controlled by a parasite on their head, and even the first game establishes that merely removing the headcrab doesn't save the host. The fact that most of the body is already mutilated and it basically replaces their head is kind of irreversible. Antlions - actually, any of the alien species brought through the portals opened by the "accident" in the first game, aren't native to the planet earth. They made their homes beneath the already established - though mostly abandoned - surface of Earth. The mine *probably* existed before the events of the first game. The point is that neither of them are innocent creatures, even if they're basically being used as weapons by another alien race.

The fact that the game takes longer to get you back to fighting combine forces is a design decision, since you spent a good amount of time fighting them at the end of Half-Life 2 and throughout most of episode 1. It was an active attempt to break up the combat situations by throwing you against some underutilized enemies as well as some new ones. Not going to say I completely enjoyed the extended romp underground - especially the parts running away from the larger antlion queens or whatever through narrow and linear tunnels where the escape routes were sometimes frustratingly difficult to notice immediately in the rush.

As to the unambiguous bad guy, the whole series did have very clearly antagonistic enemies - the Combine being the most obvious. You spent the first game fighting hostile aliens and eventually were pointed towards the idea that humans were the initial aggressors by Black Mesa's portal experimentation and invading the Xen "borderworld." Then you ended up also fighting the military because government coverup. There was also the G-man as the never-explained, sometimes benevolent, sometimes antagonistic enigma, but hell if I should mention that because I'm not sure Valve ever had a plan for what he would end up being. It always felt like one of those things they would shoe-horn together at the end because videogame stories.

@andrewb: Agreed, Valve never had an idea what to do with the G-man, they just wanted a mysterious figure who sorta talks like Carl Sagan.

I'm not going to attack you for having an opinion, but I do have to ask why on Earth you complained about the lack of feet in this particular game when most FPS games do lack feet but also have sound effects. It's just a super weird complaint that makes you sound like you've never played an FPS before, at least never played one not named Halo (2 onward) or FEAR.

Tell me, reader, if you can. This game sucks so much. What is it, exactly, that makes it worth playing? Can you name even one thing?...I thought not.

It has been a very long time since I first played Half-Life 2 (2008), but I'll take a stab at it.

Episode 2 doesn't really seem to hold up on its own because it's so detached from a beginning or a conclusion and doesn't do much with its story. When played directly after Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, though, it feels like a sort of escape-away-from-some-hellish-place story. As a story of people on the run, nevermind the specifics, it works really well. You're not trapped in or around City 17 like you are in Half-Life 2, you're finally free but you have to go and you have to keep going to make it out. It's a change of setting and a change of pace, it's definitely a lot quieter than its predecessors, and the sheer difference from those predecessors kept my interest and entertained me when I first played it directly after the others. Considering that this game is meant to be a part of a three-part whole (Episode 1, 2, and [a possible] 3), I think that's a valid point in its favor. I enjoyed seeing what's outside City 17 and I thought that being on the run was pretty thrilling and they did a good job of keeping up tension in the latter half.

Ultimately I don't think they did all they could with that idea, either, especially since the Antlion section just lasts too bloody long, but it definitely has merit.

I remember playing that starwars game on ps1 when I was a kid and liking it. That doesn't really mean anything though, and its probably actually a piece of shit. I also liked the fifth element game. Think I might look up a lets play of that.

I always got the feeling that if you pieced together Episode 1, Episode 2, and whatever they had planned for Episode 3, you might have had what was one singular full game. The antlion section in Episode 2 lasts awhile, sure, but it would be more tolerable as a part of a more complete package. The antlion section in Half-Life 2 was also incredibly long, but it was a part of a much larger whole and broken up between fighting antlions and using them as a weapon against the combine.

I guess I lost my bet, I say referring to my previous joke about the 40-1 odds that you'd blog about a game I have played between now and whatever game it was I asked you about. I should have actually kept track of this.

I really liked Half Life 2 Episode 2. The world design is the best part of the Half Life series, though, so at least you're right about that.

Those are less set pieces than they are general gameplay scenarios. Doesn't change my own lack of enjoyment with them (shooting sticky grenades at giant robot spiders always felt very clumsy).

I don't think I was expecting much of anything. I just saw the word "episode" and thought it'd be a good (read: surface value) pair. The quality became more promising once I got into the game and saw the premise it was setting up (to not deliver on).

But there's a pretty huge time gap between Half Life 1 and 2. You'd think that would be enough time to adjust to all this alien stuff and maybe let the Antlions have the mines or work with the Vortigaunt to find out how to live peacefully with them (I think we got that in the first Half Life 2 with the squishy ball thing; where the hell was that thing?).

(I'd argue on the zombie thing, but I feel like that's going down a philosophical rabbit hole I'm not equipped to handle.)

I guess it's just one that didn't really work out, since it brought up all these questions that didn't exist when you have a clearer villain.

The problem is that for most of this game, you're not dealing with these antagonists. You're fighting enemies that make you question Gordon's morality as a hero, and not in a good way. More in a "we didn't plan for this" way.

Oh, I know I have a similar example for this; I just can't think of it right now.

And holy shit, did I outclass Valve with my fucking Katawa Shoujo threads? That's a very scary thought.

Oh, I've played other FPSeses, and I complain about it there, too. (In fact, I think I complained about it with BioShock Infinite? I know I had that thought.) Well, at least I complain about it when there's a heavy focus on narrative. It's like I'm playing as a floating camera instead of a person.

I feel like this applies more to Episode 1 than it does to Episode 2, although if I'm being generous, it'd certainly apply to the parts between "prepare for unforeseen consequences" and "we have to bomb the giant space portal". Those two arcs (which take up the bulk of the narrative) see Gordon firmly planted in a very specific area. True, these areas are visually different from City 17, but it's hard to apply the "on the run" model to these parts. The greater focus is on that damn Alyx dying arc, which is where the game stumbles hardest.

@video_game_king:

I feel like this applies more to Episode 1 than it does to Episode 2, although if I'm being generous, it'd certainly apply to the parts between "prepare for unforeseen consequences" and "we have to bomb the giant space portal". Those two arcs (which take up the bulk of the narrative) see Gordon firmly planted in a very specific area. True, these areas are visually different from City 17, but it's hard to apply the "on the run" model to these parts. The greater focus is on that damn Alyx dying arc, which is where the game stumbles hardest.

Maybe it's because I'm still rubbing the sleep from my eyes, but by "this", are you referring to being stuck in or around City 17 or the "on the run" story? You're still on the run in Episode 1, but you're also still in City 17. City 17 is a wonderful setting for a game and a half, but a change of location for Episode 2 was welcome, as was the change of pace. And the parts where you get out of the car to go explore a nearby house, while numerous, also provided a different kind of tension from the previous games. And I'm on the verge of early-morning rambling.

Episode 2 is a "road" story. There. That's what I'm getting at. It's a story of getting from one place to another and dealing with the numerous things that go wrong in between, which is a sort of narrative that FPS's don't seem to do all that much (or they skip the traveling part)

The "on the road" look at the game.

I'd say that this constitutes less of the narrative than your argument would suggest, but I fear that I repeat myself. I'd also say that I'd like to see this on the road story in more FPSs, but that feels tangential to this game.

Huge as in roughly 20 years. Enough time to come to grips with this hostile alien life which was sent to the planet either by accident or used as a weapon against them, sure, but they were a bit too busy being occupied by an alien race commiting genocide and sending the surviving stragglers to live as slaves in the few fortified positions left on the planet while they sucked the world dry of its remaining natural resources to make good with the new invading wildlife.

As to the zombie thing: parasites shot into human settlements using artillery shells filled with them by the unambiguous antagonist faction - the Combine - long used by the race as a biological weapon, clearly hostile and controlling human bodies with no clear hope of ever turning them back into their former selves, even if they weren't multilated in the process? Little difficult to see the humane side of not shooting them to death when they're going to try to kill you. I guess technically, given how slow they saunter, you could play a mostly non-aggressive run of the entire series in regards to that one species, but...

Yes.

But also, Valve tried to make something of a story which began in the era post Doom/Quake - an era where video games lacked the technology and the intent to tell a more coherent and complex story to begin with. It was easily the best attempt at the time, and the reason I fell in love with it and would visit a friend's house just to play it because I didn't have a PC. Though still, I'd love to hear from the original writers otherwise, and they did a good job with what they had to work with, but there was never an endgame to that story built from the getgo. It was an engine to build more games and make more money. Then Valve went in multiple other different directions, and there is a reason we'll likely never see another Half-Life game.

Okay, think of it this way. A nest of hornets pops up in your backyard, you don't cede control of the backyard to the hornets. You kill them motherfuckers and there's nothing morally questionable about it. You're just over thinking shit.

@pyromagnestir:

The difference is domestication. I don't know many beekeepers who collect honey by firebombing their bees.

If a single bee sting was highly capable of killing them, they probably would.

I can't remember exactly to what extent the antlions are domesticated. There was that item that let you control who they attacked, but they seem to be rather vicious by nature and maybe that thing is hard to come by, so killing them is just a matter of timeliness?

We're not exactly talking about dogs here. And even dogs get put down from time to time for being too vicious.

The only way I'd consider it morally questionable is if the antlion were an endangered species, but it seems to me they're doing alright.

guilty admission:

I can appreciate Half Life 2's greatness, I don'like Half Life 2. It ain't fun other than gravity gun multiplayer.

also C.G.Isores? Nice one duder!

What about cows, then? They're perfectly capable of killing a man, but you don't see many farmers brandishing shotguns....when milking cows.

We've only ever seen them in the context of City 17, and without any hard numbers (how many antlions we see in-game vs. what's considered endangered), it's hard to use that argument. Instead, I'll just point back to my Vortigaunt point and say that in the 20+ years they've been on Earth, they probably could've taught the humans they've been interacting with how to handle their domesticated space bugs. I assume they'd be pretty knowledgeable; they've been doing it for years, and antlions produce highly valuable medicine. That's hardly something a society could ignore.

@slag:

thats the same way i feel about half life 2.i understand why people like it,but its boring to me.

Capable, sure. But inclined to? Hell no. Cows are docile unless provoked by extreme, usually accidental circumstances. Though a cow is more likely to kill a person than a shark, it seems, so maybe they should? Since people sure as hell would probably want to have protection around when dealing with sharks. And antlions seem to be more quick to violence than sharks, and more deadly.

I imagine people at zoos or circuses or perhaps certain veterinarians or wherever people have to deal with animals that are more violently inclined have the means to take them down in case of an emergency. If you were dealing with a bear or a lion regularly and didn't, that would come off as foolish.

In the context of Half-life humans also aren't the dominate force on the planet. The Combine's in charge. The folk looking to change that might not have the luxury of learning or implementing techniques from the Vortigaunt when they're fighting a war for control of the planet. Or the Vortigaunt might not have any techniques, they might do the same things the humans are. I can't really recall if they delved into such issues.

So unless I'm wrong about that alls I got to go off is the experience of coming up against them in the game, and from what I recall, the antlion is a very territorial and violent species, easily capable of taking a human life. Occasionally you get some control over them, but they're still prone to violent outbursts only it's directed towards the people you want killed and not yourself, so perhaps it's not reliable as a permanent solution. And they seem to be quite populous, especially in certain regions, and having too many of them around seemed extremely dangerous. Like having too many wolves around would be, and wolves have always been treated to some measure of population control, ain't they? So I see no moral ambiguity with killing them.

I have yet to finish a Half-Life game. I started two someday but stopped for a reason I cannot remember though I recall not liking it much. Maybe I should try to play HL1 with the Black Mesa mod.

But it's generally an emergency; a last resort. In this game, it's more or less the first resort. It's just an example of the narrative existing as a thin pretext for mechanics.

Kind of incredulous when they've mastered the art of making these creatures fuck. Then again, it's also incredulous that you can implement artificial selection in a species that breeds in colonies (with a queen at the top), so maybe the antlion premise never made sense in the first place and the cracks started showing here specifically. (The "we're fighting a war" thing seems more plausible, though.)

I was going to argue with the limited control thing, but then I realized that this is attack the minutiae when we should be focusing on the broader issues. Whatever those are.

The Phantom Menace is a superb game for when it was released, one of the very first action games to feature a sort of moral choice and consequence system. Even more interesting: the difficulty is randomly selected and hidden from the player until you complete the game.

@fredchuckdave:

I can't tell if you're kidding or if we're talking about two completely different games.

@video_game_king:

Choice 1: Go through incredibly long and annoying fetch quest.

Choice 2: Murder NPC, take ship part. It seems like the guards only care if you murder more than one person but it was rather amusing running from them. It's the Jedi way. Qui Gon going around murdering helpless people on Tatooine is just fantastic, modern day Liam Neeson clashing with past Liam Neeson.

I don't understand the complaints about there being no justification to the combat against zombies and antlions. Zombies are just that, zombies. Mindless, created by the Combine to kill humans. They are victims of the Combine yes but become a tool to kill more humans. They're in the way and dangerous and you shoot them. Going through the antlions nest is necessary to retrieve the whatever it's called, i don't remember, to save Alyx. Even without that it's on the way to White Forest. Antlions are neutral, just defending their home from intruders. Sometimes the better choice is still to go through their territory and deal with their attacks. Either they take the long way around, probably full of Combine soldiers or go through that cave and exit on the other side. And besides all that, i don't know why you assumed they built their base next to an antlions colony. It's more likely the other way around. The human base at White Forest looks ancient and antlions are not native to Earth. They came in with the Combine. They're the ones encroaching on human territory.

The game is a shooter, you shoot stuff. That's the whole point. Having you fight only Combine soldiers in similar environments would be way more redundant than varying the enemies and environments like they did. Or maybe that's just a complaint you have with every game that involves zombies and/or hostile wildlife but if not i don't understand why you single out Half-Life 2 for that.

The no feet thing is just nitpicking, not really worth addressing. I mean Left 4 Dead characters have a modeled body. So what? It controls and feels the same. As for that feeling of Gordon not actually walking but sliding or gliding around that is a result of how shooters were designed 20 years ago and Half-Life 2 is one. The game may have come out in 2004 and Episode 2 in 2007 but they are very much designed the same way shooters were in the 90s. Shooters were much faster then. No head bobbing also makes the game vastly more enjoyable to me. I much prefer faster moving, disembodied characters like Gordon than how most modern shooters play.

As for what makes it worth playing. The story and the way it's told, the gunplay, the speed and just the general feel of the gameplay is by far my favorite kind of shooter and i have since then by and large fallen out of playing shooters. I like shooters from that era and Half-Life 2's gameplay is the most refined rendition of that kind of shooters. More than anything i love the world they have crafted, the music, the sound design and just taking my time to look at it.

There's also a fight with that music:

Well in a zoo or whatever, shit is going by some standard operating procedure to keep things safer while still dealing with the live dangerous animals. If I were wandering into a lions territory in the wild, I'd probably be quicker on the trigger.

...I mean, animals fuck. They like to do it. It don't take much mastering to get an animal to want to fuck. That ain't impressive. Some of them will fuck just about anything, anytime, anyplace.

Take us humans for example. You could get some of us to fuck just by asking, though maybe you'd have more luck with a few drinks and a nice dinner and conversation first.

They just wander around in suffering, lashing out only when you get close enough to them. As @andrewb pointed out, you can probably go through the game without killing a single one of them. That weakens the self defense argument, and the gallery of tools with which to kill them weakens it further, since you'd need little more than a pistol to take out one of them, maybe a shotgun for multiple. (The "put them out of their suffering argument" doesn't make too much sense, since it's not your place to end their pain. After all, you're not the one who caused it.) But responding to the content of your argument, the game's moral justification for killing creatures incapable of malice (since, being zombies, they cannot exercise free will) is some sort of preventative aggression, IE "strike them before they can strike you." That's a terrible message for a game to espouse!

That doesn't sound like a defense so much as a deflection of my arguments.

Meaning we should ignore the fairly significant thematic issues present in the game simply because you get to shoot stuff? We shouldn't question what we're shooting, why we're shooting, the potential issues that shooting brings up? Because there are a lot that the game encourages you to ignore.

Yes and no? Episode Two's not the only game that has this problem, I'll admit that. (I'm not covering those games here because I've only enough space for two games a blog.) But at the same time, many other games find ways to justify violence against zombies such that it isn't (as big) an issue. In Resident Evil, zombies actively approach you in tight environments, ready to attack you, and you've very limited tools to stop them. In this case, it's self defense. In Project X Zone, you're generally working with a fantasy cartoon setting far removed from our own reality, and the violence against them isn't nearly as explicit (in that it's just whacking energy on them). In this case, it's pure fantasy. Episode Two has neither such defense at its ready.

But the game actively draws attention to it with the sound effects, and a lot of people defend the game based on its world and story. It's certainly worth addressing.

Even though Half-Life 1 changed shooters in the late 90s? And Modern Warfare (and Metroid Prime 3) came out the same year as Episode Two? In fact, Mirror's Edge came out just a year after Episode Two, meaning the technology was available to make this happen.

All I really have to say here is that we vastly disagree.

Especially here! I hated that damn helicopter section.

Yes, but generally, the aim is to incapacitate, not kill. Gordon's not particularly well equipped to do that.

You ever try getting specific animals to fuck, and other creatures not to fuck? Fucking is harder to master than it first appears.

@video_game_king said:

@pr1mus:

Perhaps search for a non-violent solution first, rather than shoot them as the first step? Again, he's speaking with people who very frequently work with these animals, but nobody bothers bringing up the possibility (or impossibility) of mitigating the violence. Instead, the antlions are merely targets to be killed for your own amusement. Also:

Not going through all those caves, he doesn't. If he didn't have to save Alyx, he could've blazed through that cave rather quickly, not killing any of them. In fact, wasn't the cave stuff a detour because she got impaled? Do we know that they explicitly planned on going through the cave before that incident?

@video_game_king: They charge and swarm you within seconds of seeing you. How could you possibly find a non-violent solution? It's the same as in Half-Life 2 while on the beach trying to reach Nova Prospekt. Step on the sand and they attack. The game makes it clear to try and stay on the rocks but if you mess up they swarm you and you have to fight back. In Ep 2 you are right in the middle of one of their colony and within the context of the story you are working against the clock, both to save Alyx and reach White Forest before the Combine. There is no time for subtlety.

You're whole argument against that section stand on the "fact" that the game does not offer justification for fighting Antlions while it in fact offers a ton of it. A Lack of time to save an ally and a base and the only way to do this being to pass through territory dangerously close to an antlion colony. Maybe they could have blazed right through quickly if Alyx wasn't injured but it's not the case. Even still antlions are not only found within the heart of their colony. Some are in the mines surrounding it, some even come outside and attack you even after you leave the mines. They have been shown throughout the first game and Ep 1 to be aggressive with humans well outside their colonies. Some attack you right in the middle of City 17.

There's time for an elevator two minutes away from the medicine, though. And it takes all of three seconds for the Vortigaunt leader (or just some Vortigaunt guy) to grab the medicine, meaning Gordon and the other guys could've distracted the more dangerous antlions while our Vortigaunt buddy retrieved the vital medicine. But that would've meant less time shooting up antlions, which would not have fit with the direction the game is going for. The game's not encouraging you to fight them because there's no other way around them; it's encouraging you to fight them because it's enjoyable to do so. What's the mood when they invade the operation area (for lack of a better term)? I'd say the rock music suggests one of enjoyment and excitement. There's so very much wrong here, like a selfish world view that reduces the world to objects for your own amusement. Or maybe I'm reaching heights I can't handle.

All of half-life 2 blurs together for me, I remember being on a roof, then inciting a rebelion with 10 people and then driving around, and then something about going to antartica and then next time on half-life-2 episode three. And now its been like 10 years.

What the fuck are you talking about? The zombies totally attack you. The regular zombies come walking at you and will attack you. There is another zombie that throws fucking headcrabs at you. The fast zombie runs all around and will come up on you to beat you down. The zombine run at you with a grenade out. If killing them isn't self defense then I don't know what is. Did you even play the game or did you just watch the video you kept linking?

Was that the Phantom Menace game for PS1? Ugh...I'm sorry. I didn't know any better back then, my ability to judge the quality of games had not fully developed yet. Did that game even have an ending? I think I made it to Jar Jar world and got lost.

And there's a substantial argument (except for the "walking at you" part; you can defend yourself there without killing them).

This, however, is just confusing. (And dickish, but mostly confusign.) I've got screenshots out the wazoo to prove that I have played the game to completion. In fact, I use them in the blog. As for the "video I kept linking part", I have no clue what you're talking about. I linked three videos, and they were pretty different.

Same.

@video_game_king: The elevator does not go down into their nest where you retrieve the extract. It doesn't work until you make your way down there and fix it. I guess the game shouldn't have an elevator. Instead maximize backtracking up the cave and the amount of antlions you get to kill.

I wonder how many more made up facts you'll use to support your paper thin arguments. I mean you've come as far as suggesting the game shouldn't have music. This is just embarrassing.

Antlions: alien to earth, encroaching on human territory (not the other way around), going as far as attacking humans in the middle of a big sprawling and fortified urban center like City 17, extremely aggressive and attack on sight, shown to be able to kill armed humans. "Domesticated" by vortigaunts in a process that involves killing a queen and extracting glands from the still warm body. Jeez there sure are a lot of ways around them. I better make sure to be careful and not disturb them even if i only have minutes to save a friend!

I did not say that. I'm saying that it uses music toward a specific end, and that end masks the problems that I have been arguing for. If it's going to use music to create a mood, that mood shouldn't be "let's have fun and feel awesome!".

Twenty years time enough to learn how they behave (or learn from people who have already learned). Time enough to move away from the areas they have invaded.

That's not really how it goes down, though. Gordon grabs extract from a nest, not from the "still warm body" of the queen. That doesn't necessarily require outright killing them.

Again, he's working with the Vortigaunt, who have worked with the antlions for generations. I imagine with that work comes knowledge of how to approach them and extract what's needed from them without bringing harm to yourself. But as Alyx is in danger, I guess that morally justifies wandering through what has ultimately become their territory and killing every last one of them under the pretense of self defense (even though the game frames things in such a way that you're meant to derive enjoyment from it).

I'd also ask something about your Vortigaunt friend (whose name I don't remember) reaching you quickly if the elevator was out, because he certainly doesn't follow you through the caves, but I can't quite form the question right in my mind nor state its relevance to the current argument.

@video_game_king: The extract is the medicine to save Alyx, not what's used to control them. The glands from a dead queen are used in Half-Life 2 proper to control them for a short period.

You have for that period of time all of 1 Vortigaunt with you who is tending to Alyx to keep her alive while you go and get the extract. He can't go and get the extract in time if he leaves Alyx. This is made clear when he continues tending to her even after reinforcements comes and help fight back the antlions.

I think you are also greatly overestimating the amount of controls the vortigaunts have over the antlions. Like a zoo keeper working with a couple of domesticated wolves. Do you think said zookeeper would go hang around a wolf's den in the wilderness? Made doubly clear by the fact that multiple vortigaunts can't magically control them either when they attack after you get the extract and got back to Alyx.

Twenty years to move away from a colony of antlions established in a human mine directly connected to one of their bases, one of the few they still have and need? Or maybe all of City 17 while we're at it because why not.

You go down the caves, reach the room where you fix the elevator, Vortigaunt comes down in the elevator while you get the extract in the next room.