martyns

Jeff in Half Life: Alyx. I hope everyone gets to experience Jeff one day, Jeff is terrifying.

I've been lurking on Giant Bomb since its inception, I am Martyn, a pleasure to meet you all. This site and its content has brought me a big pile of joy over the years, seemed as good a time as any to dive in.

I've been playing video games since they were on tape, the death squeal of the Spectrum 48k, grinding to life still puts a smile on my face. When I'm not being a smug PC gamer I animate, mostly for film and games.

I love beautiful films, dumb music and being outside, in the nature.

I've been watching/reading the content created by various members of Giant Bomb for probably 20 years now. Yet I only felt compelled to subscribe a few months ago. I've found their lockdown content has been the right level of honest and engaging for my world right now. I'm not interested in aggressively polished, breathless streams with people who feel like they've got one eye on a Disney deal.

I spend most of my time watching Giant Bomb while I work, so a sense of familiarity is important, but there's also a grounding to their content. It doesn't feel like there's an autocue, or sometimes even much of a plan (even if there is), and that I find hugely appealing. If I want high art I'll watch the Criterion Channel, if I want simple* entertainment Giant Bomb is perfect. It's enough for me to engage but not so much that it overwhelms my already stretched senses.

This might not be the right place for this closing comment as it runs contrary to the thread, but I want to finish by saying thank you Giant Bomb, you've done a great job at lifting my spirits over the last few months.

*Simple is not a pejorative here, more an indicator of the lack of unnecessary complexity.

-Attempting to program a BASIC game printed in Your Sinclair magazine. Failing miserably to copy the 30 lines of code accurately and ending my programming career at the age of 6.

-Getting a SAM Coupe and being blown away by the FMV (full is a lose term here) and sprites that didn't clip through the background colours (as they had on my Spectrum).

-Going to my friend Bruce Lee's house and playing Sonic on his Mega Drive. IT WAS SO FAST, so fast. I would dream of that game.

-Visiting my best friend who'd moved from rural England to suburbia USA with his family. Sneaking into the basement to play Home Alone on his SNES after everyone had gone to bed. Waking up his parents in the process and getting into all sorts of trouble.

Wolfenstein on shareware disc, Doom WADS with boobies, Marathon on my friend's Mac, Running Descent on my 3DFX GPU, Command and Conquer at a LAN Party, being blown away by my neighbours Atari Jaguar, Duke Nukem on Wireplay and the horrific phone bills that resulted in, and many many other moments.

@imhungry:

Thanks for your sage advice. Turns out there was a super important dialogue option buried deep deep in Titus's conversation tree. That triggered the next stage and now an awful lot has taken place.

Sadly I still feel tainted by my significant pause and largely want it to be over. Think I'll clamber to there end, take some time off and replay it at some point, just to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Disco.

It seems there are certain steps you'd need to take before you get the shivvers check on the sign (currently I don't). I just presume I've not taken them yet, but I may have misinterpreted the walkthroughs I shuffled through.

I guess I'll dig into peoples dialogue trees deeper, see if there's anything buried I missed. Thanks for the tips, if all else fails I'll do your if all else fails tip.

I am the seeker of help.

I was loving this game, I really was. The mood, the pacing, the writing, the feeling that my choices were having a meaningful impact on Harry's physique, and how that played out - all fascinating. Then came my 4th day. My skill checks dried up, the engaging dialogue options ran out, I began aimlessly wondering.

I felt like I was getting a good steam, the church is a rave, the body is gone, I've found my badge and coat, I've been on a date and unpicked a ghost story. The neighbor trusts me, as does the barman, who'll be sealing up the hole in the neighbors wall. I've discovered my name (my proper name), I've discovered my car, I only have half a dozen quests and none of those are currently accessible, so I am stuck, oh so very stuck.

I'm so very stuck that I resorted to conversing with every single NPC, attempting to find the few remaining XP points that would allow me to unlock just one skill that in turn would allow me to further some important conversations (Convincing Titus that's he's being manipulated, for example). But even when I finally managed to scrabble them together I failed the check. I then proceeded to take the quest lines that I had no desire of participating in (forcing the women out of the village, agreeing with Measurehead etc). This felt both unpleasant, and ultimately turned out to be useless as I still didn't get enough XP to progress the story.

I finally gave in and read online what to do next and discovered that I needed to speak to Ruby. Turns out I've not unlocked enough of the game to activate the shivvers on the sign, so here I am. In limbo, without any way to obviously progress. If anyone has any viable way that I can move the story forward, I just want it finished now, I went from having a really wonderful time to feeling like it is a really dull slog.