The more sandbox the game is, the more generic it has to be. It enables them to fill the game with lifelike reactions from the NPCs and movie-like pacing. If you kill them before the game intends – before you reach the crate of rockets – you can get trapped because the Striders aren’t around to blow open key walls for you.) Note that in this case being “tightly scripted” (or railroaded, if you will) is not a bad thing. (In HL2, during the final push to the Citadel, you have to fight your way past a bunch of Striders. You have to be careful with Valve games, because they are very tightly scripted and thus not very flexible when you leave their tightly scripted rails. The real goal on later trips is to is see how the game behaves when you do things the designers don’t expect. Giving myself a pistol that does 2,000 damage is also stupid in a hilarious sort of way.īut all of that is just a diversion. It would ruin the game if I did this on the first play-through, but on later trips it can be fun. Those are very powerful and tend to be severely rationed in the normal game, and it’s fun to cut loose and bomb the enemy senseless. Allowing myself tons of grenades or (better) alt-fire explosives for the machine gun is a favorite of mine. In Half-Life 2 the main sort of cheating I enjoy is upping the allowed ammo restrictions so that I can carry tons of whatever weapon I’m currently interested in, and then going to town with it. When I do this I usually play on “super-easy” by cheating my way through the thing. I’m usually experimenting with scripted situations, looking for hidden areas, and testing alternative solutions to problems and puzzles. I start on Medium, but on subsequent play-throughs I’m not really interested in the combat. I would find that sort of thing infuriating and tedious now, but as I’ve aged I’ve been increasingly stingy with how much time I’m willing to spend re-experiencing the same content. It took several tries to make it, but it did a good job of squeezing some additional hours out of the game. I suppose you could call this “Sisyphus” difficulty. If I died, I started a whole new game over from the very beginning. The most obsessive was when I beat Quake on Nightmare difficulty without dying. I’d play through on Medium, then Hard, then “Nightmare” (or whatever super-hard was called in the given game, if it was available) and then continue to play at the highest difficulty with various self-imposed limits. When I was young and poor I tried to get the most out of my games by ratcheting up the difficulty. (It’s actually a pie chart, those are eyeballed percentages on my part.) 15% play on Easy and the last 10% play on hard. Portal 2 may change this however.Another note on the Half-Life 2 Episode 2 stats from yesterday: About 75% of players leave the difficulty on Medium – the default. Portal is also tangentially related to the Half Life plot, but isn't too important as it doesn't have much story of its own. If you want to be quick, you can skip everything but Half Life and Half Life 2. Half Life 2: Lost Coast is just a tech demo for graphics options that went into later Source games.
#Half life 2 playthrough ps2
Half Life: Decay (skippable - PS2 only).The recommended playing order is pretty much the release order: Half Life: Source is pretty much identical to Half Life. The Source versions are a remake of the original games on the engine used by HL2. The same is not true for the Half Life "One" series, as far as I know.Īs for Portal - it does contain some side references to corporate entities in the Half Life universe, but as it is that's more flavor than actual plot. The HL2 episodes are not an accessory part of the story, but actual sequels. My advice is to play the original Half-Life 1, then Half-Life 2, and if you'd like to extend the pleasure, sequels Episode 1 and Episode 2 for Half-Life 2 are quite good, but not as good as the two main games. Needless to say it's smoke and mirrors, there's absolutely no significant difference between the two.
#Half life 2 playthrough Pc
The Source version of Half-Life 1 is, and I quote:Ī digitally remastered version of the critically acclaimed and best selling PC game Marine, a security guard and two scientists (since Decay is a cooperative multiplayer game), respectively. The expansions and spin-offs for Half-Life 1 which were not developed by Valve are quite skippable Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay return to the setting and events of Half-Life 1, but portray the story through the eyes of a U.S. The must-play Half-Life games are Half-Life 1, then Half-Life 2.