Half-Life 2 Review (5 of 5 stars)
I can't tell you how much I love good science fiction, and I mean good science fiction. When I read something like Ender's Game, or Rendezvous With Rama, I am right up there with Shakespeare. Star Wars and the Matrix are great examples, same with the Terminator.
And video games have some surprisingly good sci-fi as well. Their combination of visual and music and interaction, plus the obvious fact that this is a computer after all, gives us a unique twist to sci-fi. Alpha Centauri proposes that men have reached the next planet and we split off into different extremist factions, each with more atmosphere than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. The music is electronic and makes the Blade Runner seem akward. Homeworld does more than any other work I've seen to express the strangeness of space, it's pure insanity and madness. It's music also fits in a masterful way (anything that quotes Agnus Dei is special), another common thread in my favorite sci-fi. Quake and Doom also have ground-breaking music for their times.
Half-Life is also one of the great sci-fi masterpieces. It makes the claim that Area 51 is the greatest government conspiracy of all, and it makes it believable by putting you in a first person view of these events, you never break that 4th wall to this experience. It introduced scripted sequences to games, little events that you could watch from any angle, and made FPS games more than mindless shooting. People ate it up.
Half-Life 2 came out this holiday season, and it trumps the first game in every way. I especially like the sci-fi elements again. There is an artist beauty to the enemies in this game, they look like cyborg machine/creatures and yet they are beautiful and graceful. Even the mindless human-converts have this interesting look that you want to study. And the game still refuses the break the fourth wall, offering no explanation for the time between the actions of the last game and this one.
Plus it's fun as hell to play. It is said that Half-Life is the greatest game of all time and Half-Life 2 is merely the greatest First Person Shooter of all time, but i think time will prove that HL2 is the better of the 2. The gravity gun, like scripted sequences, is something we are only beginning to comprehend. I wrote a beautiful post about how each physical object in gravity DM has its own strategy, how the desk does something completely different than the car or the shelves. Also how a game in a certain map seemed to naturally rotate around the center of the map, until ppl were fighting over one specific area in the middle.
I like Valve, I think they have had an amazingly intelligent run of games and can see no signs that they will slow down soon. I think they're like Pixar, they'll make masterpieces for a while.
And video games have some surprisingly good sci-fi as well. Their combination of visual and music and interaction, plus the obvious fact that this is a computer after all, gives us a unique twist to sci-fi. Alpha Centauri proposes that men have reached the next planet and we split off into different extremist factions, each with more atmosphere than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. The music is electronic and makes the Blade Runner seem akward. Homeworld does more than any other work I've seen to express the strangeness of space, it's pure insanity and madness. It's music also fits in a masterful way (anything that quotes Agnus Dei is special), another common thread in my favorite sci-fi. Quake and Doom also have ground-breaking music for their times.
Half-Life is also one of the great sci-fi masterpieces. It makes the claim that Area 51 is the greatest government conspiracy of all, and it makes it believable by putting you in a first person view of these events, you never break that 4th wall to this experience. It introduced scripted sequences to games, little events that you could watch from any angle, and made FPS games more than mindless shooting. People ate it up.
Half-Life 2 came out this holiday season, and it trumps the first game in every way. I especially like the sci-fi elements again. There is an artist beauty to the enemies in this game, they look like cyborg machine/creatures and yet they are beautiful and graceful. Even the mindless human-converts have this interesting look that you want to study. And the game still refuses the break the fourth wall, offering no explanation for the time between the actions of the last game and this one.
Plus it's fun as hell to play. It is said that Half-Life is the greatest game of all time and Half-Life 2 is merely the greatest First Person Shooter of all time, but i think time will prove that HL2 is the better of the 2. The gravity gun, like scripted sequences, is something we are only beginning to comprehend. I wrote a beautiful post about how each physical object in gravity DM has its own strategy, how the desk does something completely different than the car or the shelves. Also how a game in a certain map seemed to naturally rotate around the center of the map, until ppl were fighting over one specific area in the middle.
I like Valve, I think they have had an amazingly intelligent run of games and can see no signs that they will slow down soon. I think they're like Pixar, they'll make masterpieces for a while.
1 Comments:
Speaking of great science fiction, have you read John C. Wright's Golden Age trilogy? Incredible!
Reminded me a lot of Wil McCarthy's Queendom of Sol books. The two series complement each other.
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