Civvie 11's Half-Life Video

[Artman2004]

 

A few days ago, Civvie released his Half-Life video. It's good and I recommend you watch it.

[Serum]

No idea why the concept of Civvie doing a HL vid had never crossed my mind until now. A welcome surprise

[seed]

This time around it felt like I was listening to hybridial's ramblings on why HL is bad at times, hehe.

 

Good as always otherwise. Watched it back when it was fresh out of the oven, but I'm glad to see Civvie has been echoing something I've brought up a while ago too - developers eventually took the wrong lessons from HL, which later got amplified by several orders of magnitude back in the 2000s and early 2010s.

[thestupidmeddy]

3 hours ago, Serum said:

No idea why the concept of Civvie doing a HL vid had never crossed my mind until now. A welcome surprise

Though he mentioned it in a lot of his videos. So it was inevitable that he won't do a video on Half Life. 

[hybridial]

1 hour ago, seed said:

This time around it felt like I was listening to hybridial's ramblings on why HL is bad at times, hehe.

 

Oh so he actually criticised the game for being fucking boring? :P

 

I decided not to watch it, I don't care about the game, I'll watch Civvie when he does a game I think is worth my time, like some shitty Dosbox FPS or something. 

[cu2]

I mean, come on. Civvie's comments are priceless and are (most) probably worth your time

[Biodegradable]

8 minutes ago, hybridial said:

I decided not to watch it, I don't care about the game, I'll watch Civvie when he does a game I think is worth my time, like some shitty Dosbox FPS or something. 

 

You're missing out, fam. I haven't played the majority of the games Civvie's made videos on and some of them don't interest me at all, but everything that man makes is so much fun!

[hybridial]

I'm a big Civvie fan but my disdain for this game is too much. Like it's existence makes me angry and I would only be happy if Civvie made a total hit piece on it and shat on it for the entire hour, but it's not going to be that. And if it's not going to be that I'd rather just not acknowledge it and get on with my day. 

 

I think I put it to SOSU best in discord, it's not that the game is the worst game ever, but it's the most boring game ever and that's easily worse. Well, except HL2 managed to be much worse, somehow. :P

[Chezza]

@hybridial If part of your disdain is due to everyone putting Half Life on the pedestal but it happens to be too flawed and boring for yourself, I can see where you come from.

 

In saying that, there's a lot I like about HF but I never loved the game like I have with Doom and others. As for Civvie's review rest assured it isn't some raving about how Half Life is amazing video, if anything criticism but does state he enjoys it.

 

I believe he compared it to the game version of Citizen of Kane. A film renown for introducing unique camera work, story telling etc that has positively influenced other movies, however it's not the movie we all would rate as our top choice or frequently watched.

[hybridial]

5 minutes ago, Chezza said:

I believe he compared it to the game version of Citizen of Kane. A film renown for introducing unique camera work, story telling etc that has positively influenced other movies, however it's not the movie we all would rate as our top choice or frequently watched.

 

I actually watched that far into it and would heavilly disagree. Citizen Kane did not make movies more boring by its influence, and also I think the claim is ridiculous anyway.

 

Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are games that deserve to be in that discussion not fucking Half Life. 

[Gez]

Man, the tram ride. It's a cool sequence, a way to build the world and build hype for when you finally get to play... the first time.

 

It just makes you want to murder your computer every single subsequent time. Doom, Duke 3D, Quake, when you can start shooting at enemies within the first ten seconds of a new game? That's good, that's timeless. Having to passively endure a scripted sequence you've already seen before for a long and boring while? Burn that shit down. Or at least make it skippable, please.

[snapshot]

map c1a0

[seed]

1 hour ago, hybridial said:

Oh so he actually criticised the game for being fucking boring? :P

 

No, but he said something like it was coming straight from your mouth:

 

"I still hold a grudge against HL for ruining video games for almost 20yrs". Odd if you ask me, since he otherwise still likes the games and plays mods regularly.

[hybridial]

2 minutes ago, seed said:

"I still hold a grudge against HL for ruining video games for almost 20yrs". Odd if you ask me, since he otherwise still likes the games and plays mods regularly.

 

Well here's the thing, you'd even agree with the fact Developers took the wrong lessons from Half Life.

 

I certainly think they did. Now where the blame lies is... a complex argument but when you're like me and think the game is fucking boring on top of then I'm quite happy not just to hold the grudge but to also hate the game itself. And yeah, god, we got 20 years of boring games that wanna be movies, you have people on here defending the dogshit that was Alien Isolation, Civvie clearly gets this position I hold but he's obviously not quite the hardliner I am.

 

I just want things to happen in the game I play without entire segments devoted to storytime when I don't fucking care and when they don't do it well, and Half Life did not do it well at the time and it certainly doesn't do it well now. Chezza is quite right that the pedestal makes me resent it as much, it wouldn't be worth resenting if it wasn't on one really. 

[seed]

17 minutes ago, hybridial said:

Well here's the thing, you'd even agree with the fact Developers took the wrong lessons from Half Life.

 

I certainly think they did. Now where the blame lies is... a complex argument but when you're like me and think the game is fucking boring on top of then I'm quite happy not just to hold the grudge but to also hate the game itself.

 

Well, good news then, because barely anyone even takes inspiration from HL anymore - and they can't really do it anyway since nothing has happened on the front for so long, and Alyx is a VR exclusive title that will stay that way for good. The days of HL inspired gameplay are long dead, that ship has sailed back in 2008, we'll need an actual sequel for that to ever happen again, and even then, the impact is questionable, there's a lot more variety in game design nowadays than when HL2 hit.

 

I've already agreed that developers took the wrong lessons from it, or rather they took what worked in HL but failed to make it work in theirs, hence the outcome. Games trying to be movies is still an entirely different argument to make however, HL was not and did not try to be cinematic, unless you count G-Man speeches but those only occur at very specific times. The blame lies elsewhere for this, no idea where exactly though, and that's something that never bothered me anyway - I only play games I know I'll like, and know exactly what to expect from them, and if I don't, then I skip them, no problem.

 

17 minutes ago, hybridial said:

dogshit that was Alien Isolation

 

Sigh...

 

Alright, I'm outta here.

[Gez]

Dunno, when I last restarted Skyrim and got the cart ride I thought "fuck Half-Life and its tram ride for letting people think this is an acceptable way to start a game" and also "shit, I forgot Alternate Start is the first mod to install".

[The BMFG]

oh boy i wonder how long its gonna take him to make the hl2 vid

[hybridial]

32 minutes ago, seed said:

Sigh...

 

Alright, I'm outta here.

 

Alien Isolation is kind a whole other story, and it's indefensible as a game, and both the most expensive, and worst made stalker based horror game I ever played. It is a genre that I have loved over the years, and when I'd call your big fancy AAA movie licensed game a far, far less effective product than a SNES game (Clock Tower), you have fucking failed on every level. 

 

It is the example of people liking it because of superficial elements and not even applying any critique to the game's content because it's not only terrible, it's BLATANTLY terrible. As far as I'm concerned the content of the game means I have nothing to prove, the people defending it do. 

 

 

I forget who said it but when I posted this video someone said it was just "nitpicking".

 

Sure yeah, calling a game the Death of the Art Form, is picking nits and not expressing a deep dissatisfaction with what the game is. 

 

*Edit* I guess I'll stop paying attention to this topic here because I feel myself getting worked up, I mean I'm sure if people comprehend one thing they know I feel kinda strongly on this particular aspect of videogame design, and I still think it's worth making the points that I do in regards to the general effectiveness of what certain videogames do, because I do feel, genuinely, that videogames are games and mixing in movie elements that remove or don't utilise interaction in a meaningful way is not playing to the strength of the medium and is simply not the right way to go for an action orientated genre. Now if it's an RPG, or an adventure game, that's maybe a little different, but if it's a shooter, then I expect to be entertained by the content of the game in a consistent way.

 

But aside from making my criticisms the only thing that really makes sense is to ignore those games that fail in my estimation to be worth my time. 

Edited January 23, 2021 by hybridial

[NoXion]

Fun video from Civvie as always, good to see he hasn't lost his touch.

The first time I played Half-Life, the only first person shooters I had played before that was Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad. So yeah, I was drawn in by the then-unique presentation of the game world, which despite being set in a secretive government research facility being invaded by aliens, felt even more grounded than DN3D's futuristic LA, which looks distinctly zeerust today.

 

Can't agree with the opinion that HL is boring. Maybe there are some boring bits in it, like Residue Processing which has nothing but the most tedious enemies to fight (headcrabs and barnacles) with the weakest weapons in the game, because the level designers thought it would be a good idea to put you back to square one for some reason. But I find chapters like We've Got Hostiles and Surface Tension, along with some stand-out fights in other chapters where you haven't been needlessly stripped of your arsenal, to more than compensate for the shortcomings of the game as a whole.

 

Xen was more frustrating than boring. The sudden change from intense firefights wouldn't have been so bad as a bit of a breather before the final denouement. But since the change is from that to platforming in lower gravity, along with the late introduction of the long-jump mechanic, you gotta find your Xen legs first. Interloper just plain sucks as a chapter and can go fuck itself.

 

I think it's misplaced to blame Half-Life for the mistakes made when others tried to copy its success.

[ReaperAA]

1 hour ago, seed said:

"I still hold a grudge against HL for ruining video games for almost 20yrs".

 

When Civvie said that, it almost seemed that he was possessed by Hybridial at that point :D

 

Now I personally don't enjoy HL all that much either (compared to other Retro FPSes that is) but blaming it for all the modern trends seems kind of unfair towards HL. Like Seed said, it is the developers of other FPS games who should be blamed for taking the wrong lessons from HL. This also applies for Halo: Combat Evolved where developers took the idea that every modern FPS should have regenerating health and 2 weapon limits.

 

HL was just another game that tried to be more narrative focused and realistic from other FPS game at the time. It's a trend that games were trying to go towards already before HL. Build engine games, for example, already had more "realistic" levels compared to games before it. If HL hadn't done this, some other game would have done this.

[Liberation]

I enjoyed the vid, like most of cv11's stuff tbh, normally gives me a good laugh.

[Ashurion Neonix]

2 hours ago, Gez said:

 Burn that shit down. Or at least make it skippable, please.

Thank God for Host_Framerate

[SOSU]

Can we please talk about how this video came out 1 hour after Civvie posted his :D?

 

[wallabra]

The rants are over?... Gee, finally.

 

Hey, you're finally awake.

 

Where's the legally obligatory Freeman's Mind mention/reference?

[SaladBadger]

Half-Life is a game I feel I'd get a looot more out of if I played it for the first time in 1998 and not 2013. I think Civvie's video has done a decent job of patching the gap here, at least. Granted, as a kid, to me games were games, no matter if they had a complicated story or no story, or they did environmental story telling or just had you shoot a bunch of things, so I kinda wonder in practice what I would have thought at the time. It's entirely possible to me it may have just been Another Game, a good one sure, but I wouldn't have seen the implications.

[GraphicBleeder]

6 hours ago, hybridial said:

 

Oh so he actually criticised the game for being fucking boring? :P

 

I decided not to watch it, I don't care about the game, I'll watch Civvie when he does a game I think is worth my time, like some shitty Dosbox FPS or something. 

Then you are missing out on alot of great videos my friend.

[wallabra]

I'm not a fan of Half-Life, I must say. With that out of the way, you guys need to frickin' chill. Hey, great idea: be mad at me instead! Y'all stoopid!!!

[[McD] James]

I'll watch it later when I'm in the mood for it. I like his videos and I'm a huge fan of Half-Life. Half-Life rightly deserves its place in the video game pantheon; it's one of the greatest works of art ever crafted by mankind, as well as extremely fun to play. 

[The BMFG]

i got some half life textures for THFS so this will be interesting

[The Bug]

civvie best