FPS NIGHTMARES

[popcorn]

I would like to read a review of the bizarre first-person adventure game Normality. One of the fucking weirdest pieces of shit I've ever played.

[PlanktonSideburns]

I would like to read a review of the bizarre first-person adventure game Normality. One of the fucking weirdest pieces of shit I've ever played.

Love that game so much

This is my review

[Ferris]

Knowing that you and popcorn think of that when seeing the word "normality" explains an awful lot.

[Wonderful Butternut]

I tried to watch Yahtzee Crosshaw and his buddy do a let's play of that game, but I lost the will to live half way through. It just seemed like such an awful, awful game.

[Lemming]

Glared at the box art for nearly a full minute before realising I've actually seen Normality played on a stream. I'll mark it down on the list and give it a spin when I want to hear the outstanding voice work of Corey Feldman.

[popcorn]

Glared at the box art for nearly a full minute before realising I've actually seen Normality played on a stream. I'll mark it down on the list and give it a spin when I want to hear the outstanding voice work of Corey Feldman.

I just looked up some let's play and clicked to a random place and was treated to this fine example: https://youtu.be/nboSooSxM5Y?t=5730

[Inspector Norse]

I read up on Corey Feldman's life story after that.

Wow.

[Lemming]

Going out of chronological order here, because I've been playing a bunch of games simultaneously (including the newly released Wasteland 3, which is fucking wicked) and I ended up finishing this one first.

Tresspasser (1998)





RELEASE DATE: October 28th, 1998

STORY: After a plane crash, a total loser finds herself on a desert island - with DINOSAURS! Battling both terrifying raptors and her own bizarre hand-eye coordination issues, she's got to get through hordes of lizard bastards to reach freedom.

MUSIC: Jurassic Park theme blares out at one point.

FEELS ABOUT HALF FULL: If you've heard of this game, you already know what its defining feature is, but in case you don't... essentially, the controls are fucked, and that's why people remember the game and why we're still talking about it today.

The game features a theoretically very innovative system in which the player has total control over Anne's (the aforementioned plane crash loser) right arm. You can move it around, grab things, throw things, aim your guns, press keypads, thwack dinosaurs with big heavy things, and more. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite come off, and as a result the game has been forever doomed to be essentially meme material.

In theory: you deftly grab and throw heavy objects to hurt your opponents, then effortlessly grab a gun and aim some precise headshots against the oncoming raptors. You throw your gun when it's out of ammo and quickly grab a nearby plank to parry the dinosaur's attacks, before finishing it with a hard smack to the head.

In practice: you flail uselessly, you rotate your arm very slightly and your gun just slips right out of your fucking hand, you grab it again and then a dinosaur nudges your arm and your entire clip empties uselessly into the air as a result, then you die and your head snaps downwards towards your chest, buried in your cleavage as you ragdoll down the nearest hillside. You then figure out you can do obscene far-right salutes, as seen in screenshot one, and amuse yourself with that for a while before tripping down a cliff and being killed again.

The thing is, though, that the hapless arm flailing only lasts about twenty minutes or so. After the first couple of levels, anyone with reasonable skill should have gotten to grips with the arm system, and from then on, it sort of works. It's idiosyncratic, no doubt about it, but it's a set of unique mechanics to master (which is what any good game is about, surely) and they're functional - at least, until you have to insert a keycard or enter a code on a numpad, at which point the game goes straight to fucking hell. But for the most part, it works, and when you learn to pull off reliable Desert Eagle headshots on dinosaurs, the game starts to flow smoothly.

And the odd controls really help the game. For the first time since System Shock, the controls actually make you feel as though you are the protagonist. In System Shock, flicking quickly through all your different augmentations, manually reloading guns, and frantically shutting down several of your systems to conserve power really made you feel as though you were the cyborg Hacker. In Trespasser, having to slowly and carefully manually aim your shots, being generally slow and unathletic, and getting absolutely demolished in close quarters combat really makes you feel like you're playing as Anne - in other words, an actual human with limitations, rather than a floating gun as in most FPS games. You'd better get good at shooting fairly quickly (and the game gives you a range in the first level to practice on, which is of great help), because if a dinosaur closes the gap, they will knock your weapon out of your hand. This was, I thought, an insanely cool mechanic. Raptors will ram into you, knocking your arm back. If you're quick or lucky enough, you can sometimes keep hold of your gun by making the right arm movement, but oftentimes your wrist is snapped back and your gun falls to the floor. This leads to some properly great tension as you scramble to retrieve the gun while the raptor keeps blocking you, sometimes even stepping on the gun and knocking it away.

Other great moments brought about by the physics system include dinosaurs being able to knock objects aside to reach you, knock over a car that you're hiding in, and more. Weapons have weight too, meaning that aiming a shotgun feels different from aiming a pistol, which is awesome.

The physics system is genuinely very sophisticated as well. Unlike in other physics-heavy games, such as Half-Life 2, you can really feel the weight of objects in Trespasser. Many are too heavy for you to lift, and your arm (which, again, is your primary presence in the game world) is forcefully dragged down if you pick something too heavy up, essentially removing control of your character from you. Trying to lift anything heavy will usually end in you fighting against the object's weight until you eventually drop it. The game is rife with physics puzzles, most of which are a lot of fun - seesaws, throwing objects at each other to knock them from high places, stacking objects to scale obstacles, etc. You jump pretty weirdly, which sort of undermines a couple of the puzzles, but honestly it's not that bad. If you just hit jump repeatedly, you'll end up getting caught on whatever you're trying to scale, and a few more presses will cause you to edge up onto it, letting you continue. Not great but not awful.

Even aside from the hand control scheme and the physics system, "immersion" is the order of the day for the whole game, and a lot of its ideas are interesting. Instead of a HUD, you get all your health and ammo information in the game itself. Looking down lets you see your body, and Anne has a weird heart tattoo on her chest which displays your health. This generally works, but ammo is a bit more bullshitty. When you grab a gun, Anne will say how much ammo is left in it. For pistols, this works fine because she says the exact number of bullets left, but for shotguns and SMGs she just says "it's full", "feels about half full" and "almost empty". The problem is that her estimates are fucking shit and as a result you've basically got absolutely no clue how many shots you've got left much of the time - great!

Dinosaur AI is pretty good, with raptors often attacking in pairs or more to encircle you and ambush you. Different dinosaurs also fight each other in the wild, meaning that staying undetected will sometimes let you slip by while enemies fight each other. Not all dinosaurs #NotAllDinosaurs are hostile, and if you had a dinosaur phase as a kid, you'll know on sight which ones are herbivorous (aka friendly) and which are carnivorous (aka psychotic bastards). This stealth aspect to the game isn't just window dressing, you can actually move through quite a bit of the game without aggro'ing any dinosaurs, and it's yet another cool feature Trespasser brings to the table, which many of its contemporaries don't.

Anyway, what else is there to talk about: the graphics are great and maps of very impressive size are rendered here, full of detail, plants and wildlife. Despite the game being fairly brief and set all on one island, levels are fairly distinct, and your journey takes you across thick jungles, forces you to traverse vast canyons, brings you to an abandoned village made for employees of the island, and finally up a huge mountain which was easily my favourite part of the game.

The story isn't much - I don't know if I've ever actually seen Jurassic Park, maybe when I was a kid or something, but the story to this game is as follows: there was another Jurassic Park, different from the one in the movie I guess, and this one is SITE B, an island complex. Anne is the only survivor of a plane crash and she washes up on the island, and immediately sets about complaining about the whole affair, with cool 90s cynicism. The island is abandoned and the phone lines are inoperative, so she decides to just wander around (through packs of fucking dinosaurs) until she finds a way out. Between Anne's complaining, you also get Richard Attenborough reading journal entries being like "IT HAS BEEN A YEAR SINCE I PARTOOK OF MY EXPERIMENT, AND ALAS, DINOSAURS HAVE EATEN MY STAFF". Eventually, Anne goes up a huge mountain, kills a mega t-rex, and is rescued by the military.

So not much going on there, but hey, it's an excuse to get chased around by dinosaurs, and Anne is fun enough as a protagonist, more memorable than most of the generic silent protagonists of the era. And again, the control system makes it easier to project yourself onto her, because you just know that you'd be equally shit at firing a gun, and you can't jump higher than like half a meter either.

Also, I remember the first time I played this, I was 100% convinced that when you call for help at the end and a strangely cold-sounding military guy responds that help is on the way, the military were going to open fire on you to silence you and make sure the secret of the island never got out. That's a way better ending than the actual one (which is just a fight with a shit t-rex in a stupid fenced arena) and would also have allowed players to experience a fight against armed opponents with these incredible controls, which would have been pure gaming excellence.

FINAL RATING: It aimed high and it didn't always come off, but it didn't quite fail either. At the very least, it's an ambitious game that's trying to really push the genre forward, rather than just being another shooting gallery. There's moments of greatness in here, the graphics are impressive, the ideas about "immersion" are flawed but exciting, and it's hard to really have a bad opinion of the whole thing. 3 Disastrous Keycard Insertion Attempts out of 5.


THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM GIF:

[Gambrinus]

I've never been massively into computer games, and am notoriously crap at first person shooters, but this is one of the best threads anywhere on the internet. Thanks for keeping it going.

[I.D. Smith]

Going out of chronological order here, because I've been playing a bunch of games simultaneously (including the newly released Wasteland 3, which is fucking wicked) and I ended up finishing this one first.

Tresspasser (1998)





RELEASE DATE: October 28th, 1998

STORY: After a plane crash, a total loser finds herself on a desert island - with DINOSAURS! Battling both terrifying raptors and her own bizarre hand-eye coordination issues, she's got to get through hordes of lizard bastards to reach freedom.

MUSIC: Jurassic Park theme blares out at one point.

Love this thread and love this post. Had the game back in the day (98/99ish) and despite its shortcomings, I loved its attempt at making a proper Jurassic Park survival game. Very glitchy - I seem to remember taming a Raptor by patting it on the head with the floaty arm - but I still loved it. As you mention, some tense moments because of the AI and physics. I remember being trapped in a house in the worker's village level, with no ammo, using my body to keep a door shut as a Raptor tried to poke its head in. Also remember watching a T Rex in the distance, fighting a Stegosaurus in a random (I'm assuming it wasn't scripted and just occurred through AI) battle. Great stuff.

I think the main character, Anne, was played by Minnie Driver...possibly.

[purlieu]

The story isn't much - I don't know if I've ever actually seen Jurassic Park, maybe when I was a kid or something, but the story to this game is as follows: there was another Jurassic Park, different from the one in the movie I guess, and this one is SITE B, an island complex. Anne is the only survivor of a plane crash and she washes up on the island, and immediately sets about complaining about the whole affair, with cool 90s cynicism. The island is abandoned and the phone lines are inoperative, so she decides to just wander around (through packs of fucking dinosaurs) until she finds a way out.

Sounds like Isla Sorna, the island featured in The Lost World.

[PlanktonSideburns]

This game sounds aces. Gonna get it!

Sounds like a great game for someone to update and mod a bit

[Inspector Norse]

Why are you trying to shoot the brachiosaurus

[Lemming]

I remember being trapped in a house in the worker's village level, with no ammo, using my body to keep a door shut as a Raptor tried to poke its head in.

The same thing happened to me! I started hurling boxes at the door in an attempt to keep it shut as the raptor mockingly edged through the gap. The same level had another great physics moment, where the player is tasked to build a staircase out of several boxes, and mine was so badly constructed that it started to collapse as I went up it, threatening to drop me down into two raptors who were circling right below.

Why are you trying to shoot the brachiosaurus

Simply out of pure malice.

[Lemming]

Montezuma's Return! (1998)





RELEASE DATE: October 27th, 1998

STORY: Treasure!

MUSIC: There wasn't any outside the menu! Don't know if my version was fucked or if that's just how it is.

100% TREASURE REQUIRED FOR BONUS ROUND ENTRY: Called "Return" because it's based off an old game from 1984 called Montezuma's Revenge, which actually comes packaged with this game, if you're up for some dank sidescrolling action.

So, first-person platforming. People generally like to complain about platforming in FPS games. While I don't agree with a lot of that (I seriously think Xen is fine, and I unironically liked climbing the radio towers in Far Cry 3), what is clear is that developers weren't really thinking about basing an ENTIRE games around first person platforming. UNTIL NOW

Yeah, 10 years before Mirror's Edge came along and gave it another shot, here's a game entirely about doing ridiculous parkour shit in first person!

In Montezuma's Return, you start in mid-air and fall arse-over-tit down into a temple, at which point the action begins. Death-defying leaps, heroic rope swings, daring acrobatic maneuvers and outfoxing enemies are what it's all about in this game, and it's great!

Except for the fact that FUCKING MOUSELOOK DOESNT WORK. What were they thinking with this? It's a game entirely about moving in every direction around a huge 3D environment, and the mouselook is FUCKING BROKEN. It's unuseable and your only choice is to play with the keyboard - left and right arrow to turn left and right, page up and page down to look up and down. Christ! It's like being back in the dark ages. This isn't a bug - the mouselook is actually just completely broken. Try the game yourself if you want to see exactly how, it's hard to explain. Basically moving the mouse at all causes your head to rotate 90 degrees, no matter how much you actually moved the mouse. The lightest tap will make you turn, so your only option is to forsake the mouse, avoid touching it under any circumstances, and use the keyboard. The one concession to sanity that the game makes regarding this is that it automatically looks downwards when you start falling from any height, so at least you can see where you're going.

Alright, now the elephant in the room is out of the way... the game is graphically great. The art direction isn't always top-of-the-range (the enemies universally look like shit) but on a technical level, the game stands up alongside the other graphical titans of the year, such as Unreal and Half-Life. Lighting is extremely impressive, textures have bump-mapping and are sharp and detailed, and enemy models - despite being stylistically shit - are relatively high-poly.

You have some control over the order you play the levels in, with the tougher ones unlocking as you go on. Level design is the game's strong point, with plenty of puzzles, deathtraps, platforming areas and the like. The influence of Tomb Raider over the gaming industry was still clearly pretty strong in 1998 (rightly so because Tomb Raider 1 and 2 are two of the BEST GAMES EVER), and this game takes its share of cues from there, but also goes off in its own direction. Unlike in Tomb Raider, levels have absolutely no logic behind them at all, so you won't be seeing anything that's meant to be a semi-believable ancient ruin, or doing puzzles with ancient door mechanisms or whatever. Instead, it's all a series of disconnected, abstract traps and ledges. There's no story or atmosphere to get sucked into, then, but of course there's nothing wrong with having a pure gameplay focus, and the devs make great use of all the tricks the game has. Levels also have moving parts, which usually result in you having to do things in a time limit. For example, one early level has a weird airship thing that, when activated, will independently sail through a long corridor full of moving elevators. After pressing the switch, you've got to race to the other end of the corridor, leaping from elevator to elevator at the right time, and beat the airship to the end so that you can grab onto it and be carried over into the next area. Most levels end with a boss fight, and they're usually pretty well-done, combining platforming and combat together. One is a lava monster that throws low-poly molten coronavirus particles at you.

Issues with controls aside, platforming is mostly smooth and functional (unless you grab onto a pole and start swinging on it, in which case all bets are off). You gain ludicrous amounts of momentum very quickly and can leap rather great distances, so levels occasionally start to feel like a 3D first person Sonic the Hedgehog. The game teaches you all the moves you'll need to know pretty early on, and then it's up to you to use your skillset in increasingly challenging ways. The levels also do a great job of chaining things together, so in the later levels you'll have to navigate jump-pads to attach to a pole, swing from it (IMPOSSIBLE) onto an elevator, then hop to another elevator but oops this one plunges down into lava and you get the picture.

While the platforming is good, the same can't really be said of the combat. You have no weapons and must punch and kick. While your fist and foot have reasonable range, they do very limited damage, so every fight turns into a stupid spectacle of you backing away, spamming 5 kicks a second like Chun-Li when the enemy gets close, then moonwalking away again. You also have a stamina meter which measures your ability to attack. This didn't impact the game at all really, especially since it recharges fast.

The game's got a ton of charm to top it all off - when you get fucked up by falling from too high a place, you start doing that weird accordion-wobbling thing they do in old cartoons. When you get killed, you get an FMV cutscene showing the exact way in which you got brutalised, and there's a unique one for every single way to possibly get killed in the whole game. Rooms also routinely explode into a rainbow of trippy colours whenever you press a switch, which is cool, and shows off the lighting effects nicely.

FINAL RATING: Great level design hampered by very dodgy controls and uninteresting combat. Still a lot of fun to do the puzzles and platforming challenges. 3 Petrifying Aztec Cat Things out of 5. If it had mouselook it'd easily be higher, but as a spoiled modern-gaming chump, I just can't fully get to grips with having to use Page Up and Page Down to look when the FUCKING MOUSE IS RIGHT THERE.



Had a run of games hovering around 3/5 recently. Will any of the year's remaining games get the VAUNTED 4/5 RATING?

THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM IMAGE:


Except imagine he's spinning around uncontrollably then detaches from the pole for no reason and falls to his death.

NEXT GAME: Either Extreme Paintbrawl (1998) or SiN (1998), depending on which I finish first (though I can't imagine I'll be playing Extreme Paintbrawl for longer than about 30 seconds).

[Inspector Norse]

Puzzles, traps and unforeseen obstacles?!?!

[PlanktonSideburns]

Loving the game summRized in bottom image bit

[Lemming]

SiN (1998)





RELEASE DATE: November 9th, 1998

STORY: When the evil CEO of a biomedical company produces a mutation virus that turns people into shitty mutant things, only super-cop John Blade, UNRESTRAINED BY NAMBY-PAMBY LAWS ON SO-CALLED "POLICE BRUTALITY", can save the day.

MUSIC: Probably the best thing about the game. Bunch of standard-issue electronic tracks with the occasional action-y guitar screech.

ROCK AND ROLL!: God I hate this fucking game. Sorry to anyone who's a fan, I know there are SiN fans out there, but Christ it's bad.

Let's start with the good: uhhh. Well, the game's graphics are fine on a technical level. It's about on par with Unreal and Half-Life. It's let down by art direction and fucking lighting but in terms of just sheer... technicality? It's fine.

Now, onto the bad: firstly, the story is abominable. I know 90s FPS games aren't exactly the medium to go to when you want a great story, but this is just unmitigated shite. Blade is a complete twat and so is his dickhead assistant JC. All their dialogue is essentially just this:



Elexis Sinclaire is a bottom-of-the-barrel villain with almost no presence in the plot, and the less said about character design the better.

The whole thing is sort of going for a comic book feel - I've never read a comic in my life and even I can tell that - so if it's an intentionally dogshit parody of something, I'm missing the joke. I wish I could say it had some so-bad-its-good sort of value, but really, I just found it boring and the constant chatter from the lame characters annoying. On top of that, it makes no sense and you have no clue who the fuck you're fighting and why half the time. I didn't even know where the hell I was meant to be for a good chunk of the story.

I got a laugh out of the first couple of levels at least, where super-cop John Blade arrives at a bank robbery with a fucking minigun and kills everyone in sight, with the game allowing for civilian casualties too, and then proceeds to, quote: "close in for the kill" against the leader of the robbers. Translates great to the 2020 climate of police brutality discourse. Then he investigates SinTek corporation, and starts shooting at security staff and also at unarmed people (you're forced to kill several unarmed civilians)... in order to investigate whether or not they're actually engaged in any criminal activity in the first place. Luckily, it turns out they are. Totally vindicated!

Story and what the game tries to pass for characters aside, the combat is dangerously bland, less impactful than the disappointing Quake 2 in a lot of ways. The game falls down hard on the most basic FPS mechanics. All your weapons are shit in various ways. I won't list all of the issues here but I had some kind of problem with every single gun. Possibly the most annoying is that the assault rifle thingy, which you'll have to use a lot, doesn't fucking shoot straight, the bullets fire slightly down and to the right of the crosshair. I don't know if that was just a problem with my game/computer or if that's how SiN is, but for fuck's sake. It's especially annoying because the game basically mandates headshots. Shooting an enemy anywhere other than the head is a total waste of your time and effort. Enemies that die in one or two headshots can literally take up to 20 hits to the chest. Get fucked. You're also lucky if bullets hit anything half the time, it's not uncommon for your bullets to travel harmlessly through enemy models, like that Star Trek episode where they're at the OK Corral and the bullets just fly through them. Fuck knows what's going on with hitboxes.

Level design is almost uniformly shit. A trick the game absolutely adores is making you walk face-first into a locked door. "DAMN, SECURITY DOOR!" Blade will say, because he went into arrested development at around age 12 or something and has to verbally yell out whatever he's thinking or feeling at any given time. A "SECURITY DOOR!" usually means you have to do something, somewhere, to get it open. Often it's something completely unintuitive that you wouldn't expect, like shooting a very small unremarkable prop that actually turns out to be explosive, and then the locked door on the other side of the map will magically open with no indication that it's done so. Enjoy the fun as you then backtrack to the door while waves of boring new enemies inexplicably spawn in rooms you've already cleared.

SiN also loves to use snipers and turrets in many levels. Snipers just fuck you from halfway across the map while being virtually invisible, while turrets are almost insta-kills that exist to punish you for being detected during the awful stealth segments. Needless to say, you will get detected, since the stealth is broken to the point of detection being arbitrary.

Everything's dark as fuck. Sometimes this gets to the point where you literally cannot see in front of you, and your only light source is either muzzleflashes or glowsticks, and the game doesn't give you that many glowsticks. You end up wandering around in pitch blackness, something that seems to happen in a lot of early(ish) 3D games, and it's a load of shit. The game is lit like fucking shit on almost every single level. This is annoying in good games, like Unreal, but in bad games like SiN it's enough to drive you up the fucking wall.

Blade's boring adventure takes him through a range of locations, from a dark sewer where you can't see anything, to a lab where you can't see anything, then a dam where you can see outside but not inside, then an oil rig where you can't see anything, then a terrible underwater level or two where you can't see anything. Can't remember what comes next, but eventually there's a level in which Blade turns into a mutant, which is crap, and then a vehicle segment where you can't see anything, then it's off to Sinclair's mansion, where you can't see anything. A mixture of shit plot, shit level design, shit combat and NOT BEING ABLE TO FUCKING SEE ANYTHING combine to ensure that each and every one of these locations is completely uninteresting.

Before anyone asks, yes I turned the brightness up in the options menu.

Oh yeah, there's also several forced stealth missions, just in case you were having too much fun.

There's also vehicle segments. No comment.

FINAL RATING: Bad story, bad characters, bad level design, bad combat, bad weapons, and the icing on the cake is that you can't even see what the fuck is going on. The game might get away with a lot more if it was built on a bedrock of good FPS mechanics, but no, the combat and AI are shit. I honestly think that, every time someone criticises Half-Life, they should be forced to play SiN. At gunpoint. See how much Half-Life criticising you get up to after seeing what else was on offer that year. 2 Can't Fucking See Anything It's Too Dark out of 5, and that's being slightly generous. Again, sorry if anyone reading this is one of the world's few SiN fans, they do purportedly exist, but holy shit I hate this game.



This is an actual in-game screenshot.

THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM QUOTE:


Next game: Possibly Extreme Paintbrawl (1998), which actually came out before this but I'm having trouble getting it to run. I'll try again, but otherwise it's Half-Life (1998). Get ready for a stupidly long post.

[H-O-W-L]

SiN being too dark is a modern hardware issue unfortunately. You basically have to whack the granny out of the brightness to get it looking as it was intended. It was also fraught by a very very buggered (and I mean in the sense of 'they were taken from the rear and actually physically rogered senseless') development crunch time at the very end, when the final bugfix/tuneup/rewrite passes needed to be done. Unfortunately the same happened to the sequel, and so SiN is now dead.

Oh and you've been very good about it so far but please do not let anyone convince you to play Half-Life: Source instead. Such a shit, shit  "port". Valve literally made it to show that you can machine-port Goldsrc games to Source without any human intervention necessary-- and it proves why that's a fucking dreadful idea, because it comes out looking like fucking pork pie filling jettisoned through a road grille.

[Mister Six]

Why give SiN two of anything (except fingers up in the air, possibly) when you had nothing positive to say about it at any point?

[Lemming]

SiN being too dark is a modern hardware issue unfortunately. You basically have to whack the granny out of the brightness to get it looking as it was intended. It was also fraught by a very very buggered (and I mean in the sense of 'they were taken from the rear and actually physically rogered senseless') development crunch time at the very end, when the final bugfix/tuneup/rewrite passes needed to be done. Unfortunately the same happened to the sequel, and so SiN is now dead.

Oh and you've been very good about it so far but please do not let anyone convince you to play Half-Life: Source instead. Such a shit, shit  "port". Valve literally made it to show that you can machine-port Goldsrc games to Source without any human intervention necessary-- and it proves why that's a fucking dreadful idea, because it comes out looking like fucking pork pie filling jettisoned through a road grille.

Not surprised to hear that SiN was a victim of rushed development, a lot of the maps that don't flow well (which was more or less everything other than the first three levels IMO) feel almost like a first draft. The bank robbery, the construction site and the subway at the start of the game all feel like they've been polished a little more than the rest, maybe the devs got more time to work on the early areas.

I've already experienced the horrors of Half-Life: Source. Terrible as it is, those absurdly stiff Marine ragdolls are comedy gold. Plus the fact that gibs inexplicably make the cardboard box impact sound from Half-Life 2 whenever they hit anything.

Why give SiN two of anything (except fingers up in the air, possibly) when you had nothing positive to say about it at any point?

A score of 1 felt a little too harsh, since I've been trying to reserve that score only for the worst shit imaginable, or games that are literally unplayable (like that Terminator game from ages ago, and Super Noah's Ark 3D). SiN was at least playable from start to finish without any game-breaking bugs, combat mostly worked even if it wasn't any fun, and the game's visuals are alright in the rare fleeting moments where you can actually see anything other than darkness on-screen.

If I was pushed to say something nice about the game other than the graphics, I'd say that the devs at least made a sincere attempt to put some variety into the game and keep it from being just another corridor shooter. There's a couple of vehicle sections, the underwater sections were a nice idea, and the concept of a level in which Blade is mutated and the core gameplay totally changes is a cool one. All of those concepts/areas were either tedious or actively irritating to actually play, to the point where I almost wish they had just made a run-of-the-mill knockoff corridor shooter instead, but the designers had a genuine go at making a game with its own identity.

[H-O-W-L]

I've already experienced the horrors of Half-Life: Source. Terrible as it is, those absurdly stiff Marine ragdolls are comedy gold. Plus the fact that gibs inexplicably make the cardboard box impact sound from Half-Life 2 whenever they hit anything.

Oh, it's worse-- they all only have the hitbox of the initial skull gib (despite there being a fucking legbone that doesn't even have a round element at all) and they all use the basic 'generic' physics impact type. I've worked with Source for 12 years and I can safely say that HL:S is the nadir of Source games, which is something.

I also have a very soft spot for SiN: I really like its Get The Freebies style insanity and the promise of what it wanted to create -- a nineties-nightmare-comic style setting. I'd say aesthetically it manages it, but everything else fails to meet that promise. It's one of those "Icarus" games that burned as it tried to soar, and I really wish it had just been given another year or two in the oven.

The publishers straight up forced it out the door to compete with Half-Life, for what it's worth. The devs have said they were aiming for Christmas 1999, like, ideal world scenario, and ultimately they ended up releasing in November 1998, way, way too early, to try and compete with HL1. Obviously HL1 slaughtered them in the sales charts, and they plummetted to the ocean.

And then SiN Episode 1 attempted to do the same (albeit more amicably with Valve) alongside HL2: Episode 1 and similarly burnt as it soared. The wax ignited like phosphor, and gnawed down to bone, and the whole studio went with it -- into the ocean to meet Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and other Source games in the great ocean graveyard.

[Ferris]

[tag]when will lemming get to the fireworks factory timesplitters[/tag]

[Ferris]

(Though obv these are still great reviews and I'm really enjoying them, that sounded a bit churlish, sorry)

[Mister Six]

The publishers straight up forced it out the door to compete with Half-Life, for what it's worth. The devs have said they were aiming for Christmas 1999, like, ideal world scenario, and ultimately they ended up releasing in November 1998, way, way too early, to try and compete with HL1. Obviously HL1 slaughtered them in the sales charts, and they plummetted to the ocean.

l

Rushing a game out early to complete with a high-profile competitor that has had plenty of time to be properly made has to be one of the stupidest business decisions imaginable.

[Lemming]

Wonder if SiN's rushed release was partly down to graphics? Half-Life looks strikingly good whereas SiN is already looking very slightly aged for late 1998, closer to Quake 2 than to Half-Life. You can see how that might cause the publishers to panic a little - from old magazines and very vague memories, I'm getting the impression that having "CUTTING EDGE GRAPHICS!!" was much more of a selling point back then than it is today, where we've resigned ourselves to the fact that graphics have more or less peaked for now and a lot of games are made on the awkward looking Unity and Unreal engines.

[tag]when will lemming get to the fireworks factory timesplitters[/tag]

I ask myself this question every day, but the chronologically ordered fpslist.txt must be obeyed. I'm even letting Extreme Paintbrawl stand in the way of Half-Life.

[H-O-W-L]

From my understanding, the internal publisher thought was that SiN would be a "Half-Life Killer". Remember the craze of Quake Killers? Yup.

Yeah.

... Yeah ...

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

It's one of those "Icarus" games that burned as it tried to soar, and I really wish it had just been given another year or two in the oven.

That is a wonderfully mixed metaphor.

[Lemming]

Oh god, here we go:

Half-Life (1998)





RELEASE DATE: November 19th, 1998

STORY: Gordon Freeman is late for work.

MUSIC: Easily one of the coolest soundtracks in any videogame, one of the best of all time right behind Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex. Adrenaline Horror, which plays during HECU ambushes, is a classic, and I always really liked Military Precision, which plays when you're getting pulled through the waste treatment deathtrap. Nuclear Mission Jam is so good they reused it in Half-Life 2. The ending credits theme is pretty fantastic too, there's something weirdly appropriate about it despite it being a breezy upbeat note to end a relatively dark, tense game on.

SQUAD! WE'VE GOT FREEMAN!: Here we are then. Depending on who you ask, this is either the high watermark of the FPS genre, or the beginning of the end. Honestly, there might be some truth to both camps - this is one of the best FPS games (and best games in general) ever made in my view, which I'll hopefully explain well enough in this post, but it is also a hugely influential game that would have elements of its design imitated constantly over the following years, and you could credit it with killing off most of the FPS genre's hallmarks such as big open levels, keys, etc. Although I think that was a trend already in progress, given the direction taken by Unreal and others.

If you've not played Half-Life, you really really should, but this post is going to be spoiler-riddled and generally written for people who've already played the game, so if you've not played the game and don't want THE EXPERIENCE spoiled, turn back now.

Let's kick off with a overly long and wordy Gabe Newell quote:

Half-Life in many ways was a reactionary response to the trivialization of the experience of the first-person genre. Many of us had fallen in love with video games because of the phenomenological possibilities of the field and felt like the industry was reducing the experiences to least common denominators rather than exploring those possibilities. Our hope was that building worlds and characters would be more compelling than building shooting galleries.

This is officially the most fuckheaded possible way of saying "i like stories in videogames", but I agree with him. "Phenomenological" is a weird word for it, but he's right - the best videogames offer you an experience in a way that no other medium really can, and you feel like you've really visited a fictional world, interacted with it, lived through its events.

All the way back in the review for 1994's System Shock, I wrote my opinion about how if you're going to put a story in a videogame, it will pretty much live or die on "presentation". That's more or less what he's talking about here, I think. System Shock is a great videogame in terms of its mechanics (way ahead of the time), enemy variety, level design and all that. But what makes it one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had is largely down to the way the game attempts to provide an experience through its worldbuilding, plotting and characters - you really are trapped on a decaying space station with a maniac AI, and you really are racing against the clock to get the hell off it. If I was a dickhead, I might refer to this aspect of game design as being, I dunno, phenomenological.

Half-Life is one of the easiest games to cite to demonstrate how this can be done. It's a shame that videogames overall haven't really followed the design set out by Half-Life (and later greatly expanded on by the likes of Deus Ex and others), and instead nowadays we're all too often stuck with 20 minute cutscenes because game writers all seem to really wish they were just making films instead.

On the face of it, Half-Life's story is really basic - an experiment goes horribly wrong, 1950s B-movie style, and the survivors have to contend not only with the facility collapsing around them, but also alien threats and later the US government trying to silence them. It's all been done before but the reason Half-Life still manages to grab new players (I'm constantly amazed to see that kids, as in literal children, are still getting into it and making fucking memes about it in 2020) and is widely regarded as one of the more memorable experiences in gaming is entirely because of the way it's presented.

At the centre of the game's ethos is the idea that you are Gordon Freeman. At no point in the game do you lose control of him (bar that twenty second cutscene where you get knocked out), or have your perspective separated from his. His actions are yours, his thoughts and reactions are yours. And most people who play Half-Life seem to come away feeling as though they've had a personal, unique experience, which is a huge accomplishment for a game that's basically designed to ensure that every player has almost the same exact playthrough every time. No cutscenes, no stopping to read diary entries and data logs (System Shock fell down a little with those - I have 45 real-life minutes until the space station blows up, I don't have time to read a FUCKING INANE DIARY ENTRY), no being trapped in a room and forced to listen to NPCs talk at you (okay, that happens twice, but only once after the disaster and it's very brief). It's telling a story in the way only a video game can - by putting you in control and never taking that control away.

Gordon's suicidal run through the exploding Black Mesa facility is simply one of the best set-ups in all of gaming for me. FPS games have always tried to give some justification and context for the action - prison escape in Wolfenstein 3D, trapped on Phobos base in Doom, alien invasion in Duke 3D, etc. But before now, only System Shock and Unreal have really toyed with the idea of making that context the main draw of the game. You keep playing Half-Life because you want to see what's going to happen next, whether the Xen forces or the HECU marines are going to get the upper hand, whether or not Gordon is going to make it out alive, or even just which ludicrous deathtrap he'll end up stumbling into next.

Another reason the story is so effective is that a lot of care was taken to make it feel as though events are actually progressing regardless of what Gordon/the player does. I can't immediately think of any other FPS games that have done this before now - Unreal suggests that your presence has stirred an uprising, but you don't get the feeling the Skaarj are losing or gaining any ground, or that anything is really happening beyond what's right in front of you. With Half-Life, most of the story has absolutely nothing to do with Gordon. The wiki has a timeline of events, and pretty much all major events are things that you had absolutely no part in causing. The military arriving and making inroads into the deeper parts of the facility, the worsening intensity and frequency of Xen creatures warping in, the ongoing collapse of Black Mesa, the number of fellow survivors dwindling over time - all are events that you experience rather than cause. Check out the timeline here, and also maybe click here check out this video. The video takes quite a bit of creative license with what's actually shown in the game, but it's really fun to watch, and it shows how surprisingly well the expansions map onto the timeline of the original game. Watching it, you not only get a sense of the dizzying scale of the Black Mesa facility, but also the magnitude of the disaster and what a relatively small role Gordon plays in it (until Xen, obviously). The only thing he really does that's relevant to the grand scheme of events is launch the satellite rocket at the end of On A Rail, and annoy the military enough that they send out a few squads assigned specifically to kill him.

Black Mesa is a great setting because it feels like it's actually out to get you. The only comparison I can immediately think of in a videogame is the wasteland in the original Fallout, which almost seems as though it's a consciousness that's trying everything it can to fuck with you. In Black Mesa, every mundane-room-turned-deathtrap you encounter, every narrow escape from an exploding corridor or collapsing lift, every chunk of debris that almost crushes you to death, it all feels like the facility is laughing at you. It's awesome. Every room you come across does have a clear believable purpose, and the facility is laid out in a plausible enough way, which keeps the place from feeling like a stupid theme park, but some of the ways that ordinary places turn into lethal obstacles is borderline funny. The peak is probably Residue Processing, which is a collection of machinery that does appear to have a real purpose (waste treatment), but also appears to have been designed specifically to maximise the chances of killing anyone who falls into it - which, obviously, Gordon does. There's also the surgical unit in the lab in Questionable Ethics, which has turned into a multi-bladed spinning death machine.

Onto the enemies. The aliens are not only a genuinely outstanding and varied set of enemies that would work well in any FPS game, but like with everything else, they're a part of the world. You learn by seeing that headcrabs have natural predators in the form of the bullsquid, Vortigaunts are attracted to electricity, bullsquids will eat anything, houndeyes have pack leaders and like to nap, barnacles are attracted to wet and damp areas and like to position themselves near water sources, the Gonarch tries to protect her babies, and even the fucking roaches have unique behaviours. These enemies also all have very distinct attack styles and require different methods to deal with them. They're also just fucking cool - who doesn't remember the EXACT sound the houndeyes make when they're preparing to send you flying arse-over-tit across the room with a sonic blast?

The other big enemy, the military, are also a brilliant enemy type and a constant looming presence in the story. There's the early twist everyone remembers (and probably saw coming a mile off) where the first (living) soldier you encounter guns down an unarmed scientist and reveals that no, of course they're not here to save you, but the military are a constant threat throughout, all the way up until about half way through Surface Tension. Your first frantic skirmishes against the recon squads in the warehouse area have consequences - in the following areas, you hear soldiers yell your name (in their inhuman, distorted voices) before attacking. By the time you reach On A Rail, it's clear that you've really pissed them off because they're writing death threats on the walls and laying traps for you. It really feels as though you're in some kind of Die Hard knockoff scenario, fighting a desperate guerilla battle against a bunch of psychos who outnumber and outgun you with ease. Again, that's a pretty big accomplishment considering the game is, like all FPS games, about you being a floating gun who slides around corridors shooting at people.

The game's success in building the military up as a plausibly frightening and intimidating presence pays off hugely in the latter half of Surface Tension. Suddenly, they don't seem interested in you anymore, because the Black Mesa operation is going so badly wrong and the Xen forces are so unexpectedly overpowered that the troops are running for their lives. As you race through alien-vs-marines battlefields and slip through their lines (again, the game does an incredible job at making you feel as though you're really sneaking around and evading the military during Surface Tension, even though again: you're a floating gun blasting everything), you see the military on the retreat. Finally, there's the "FORGET ABOUT FREEMAN!" radio message everyone who's played the game remembers. The escalation of the plot is paced absolutely perfectly. Over the course of a few hours, you go from swinging your crowbar at headcrabs as you scramble to escape, to shooting down US Army helicopters and blowing up tanks, and it all feels completely natural and believable, despite the fact that on the face of it, the plot gets absolutely ridiculous.

As already mentioned, Half-Life is ultra linear, which is one of the big complaints levelled against it. I don't understand why linearity is seen as a bad thing - especially 10 or so years ago, when "open world" was the big trend and "linear" was almost exclusively used as an insult. It's Half-Life's linearity that lets its level design remain so laser-focused. Valve's basic approach to level design is a classic one - introduce a new concept and teach it to the player organically, then present them with a beginner challenge, then hit them later with a tougher challenge, gently holding their hand and making sure they know the rules of the game every step of the way. These challenges usually come in the form of big setpieces which are thematically interesting as well as mechanically interesting. If you've played the game, you can already name a bunch of these just off the top of your head - the tentacle monster, the teleportation chamber in Lambda Core, the cliffside that you have to scale while being pursued by a helicopter, the dam, the shark cage room with the giant alien fish, you get the idea.

The level design also makes sure to keep switching between different gameplay styles. Gordon's journey seems to see him doing an almost perfect balance of combat and death-defying athletic feats. Leaping across chasms and collapsing floors, figuring out switch puzzles, riding on conveyor belts, pissing around with teleporters, and dodging laser tripwires (in a room with a live nuclear warhead, just for a laugh) - it's all here.

Combat itself is often based around environmental puzzles and gimmicks too - which is probably a big reason the game gets away with having relatively weak and unimpactful combat. The core mechanics are solid, your arsenal is varied, and weapons all feel decently powerful, but enemies don't have many reactions to being shot, and there's not much going on for the combat besides trying to shoot everyone before they shoot you. Luckily though, more often than not, the trick to killing your enemies isn't just shooting at them, it's using the environment in some capacity. Grabbing pre-placed turrets, luring enemies into explosive barrel traps, planting tripwires, luring soldiers into aliens and vice versa, trapping people in death-chambers, etc. On A Rail is one of the best levels for this. You have to fight numerous squads of marines, but virtually all of them have some kind of setpiece gimmick, all of which work fantastically to lift the middling combat mechanics into pure action movie fun.

Alright, let's talk Xen. I like Xen and I don't get the hate for it - I think it's largely received wisdom. Let's be clear, it is objectively worse than the levels based in Black Mesa, but compared with most of the games in this thread? Xen is fine. The level design is sloppier and the alien factory in particular resorts to some really lame enemy spam, but it's still got Half-Life's trademark feel of just putting cool shit everywhere - I bet you remember those weird ground-anuses that shoot you into the air, and surfing on the alien manta rays, and the strange room where you guide alien fireflies to lights to power a teleporter. Xen suffers because it's worse than what comes immediately before it in the same game. As a piece of FPS design in general, though? It's about average. If Xen showed up in Unreal, we'd think it was a great and memorable addition to the game. If it showed up in something like Shogo or SiN, it'd be easily the best part. The fact that everyone shits on Xen just goes to show how strong the rest of Half-Life is.

This review is pretty unstructured, I know, but there's so much to talk about. Not even sure where to mention things like the VOX system which provides chilling bits of plot/worldbuilding ("ALL-SCIENCE-PERSONNEL-WANTED-FOR-IMMEDIATE-QUESTIONING."), the weapon variety (the fucking Snarks!), the most memorable setpieces (the air vent that gets shot to pieces while you're crawling through it, the tram that malfunctions and smashes through a wall, the yard with the tank and the marine squad where you have to ambush them from sewer pipes, the gargantua blocking the generator...), the way the Vortigaunts have their own language, the way that the Xen chapters give you just enough information to sort of understand what's going on and who the Xen aliens really are, but never quite reveals anything too specific... there's way too many great details to get into, and the review is already too long.

Alright, so, did Half-Life really kill the FPS genre? We'll eventually see firsthand over the course of this thread, but I'm not really sure if I fully buy the idea that Half-Life killed off the Doom/Build style of games. They were already on their way out, Half-Life just hastened it by being good enough that everyone wanted to imitate it. I know this is an easy target to pick on, and it's really flogging a dead horse at this point, but I'd argue that Call of Duty - though a solid game on its own - is the game that really crippled the FPS genre, creatively. That's the impression that I get from the memories I have of countless linear, scripted-scene-heavy military shooters of the 2000s. Maybe I'm wrong, we'll see.

Either way, even if Half-Life was the major catalyst that turned the FPS genre into ultra-linear military shooter hell, that's not an argument against Half-Life, surely? Any more than we can blame Wolfenstein 3D for all the crap knockoffs chronicled in the early pages of this thread, or PUBG for all the battle royale knockoffs in recent years, or Dark Souls for the saturated market we see now. Or even Super Mario Bros for all the shitty NES sidescrollers that tried to mimic it. It probably also doesn't help that, as with these other examples, most FPS games that tried to copy Half-Life - including its own sequel - didn't get the formula anywhere near as right as Half-Life did.

The games that end up killing genres often seem to be the best ones, and no matter how critical I try to be of this game, no matter how objectively I try to judge it and look at it's flaws... it's still just really really good. I like being hyper-critical and picking apart things that I like, because thinking about how great things could be made even better is always fun, but in Half-Life's case, virtually nothing needs changing. Xen is the only notable weak point, and it's only a weak point because the rest of the game is so good.

Final note, the length of the game is absolutely perfect. It's one of the most excellent examples of a game not overstaying its welcome I've ever seen. The whole thing is only about three hours long, a little less if you know what you're doing and a bit longer if you don't. Either way, it's tight and brief, it hits all of its targets and then peaces out at exact the right time to leave you satisfied with what you've played but still simultaneously desperately wanting more.

Final final note: have you seen the world record (tool-assisted) speedrun? If you haven't played the game in years, watch this. The whole game done in 20 minutes. I bet all your favourite moments will come flooding back to you as you see the game flash by at light speed.

FINAL RATING: Half-Life basically deserves most of the praise it gets. It isn't perfect because nothing is and yet, other than Xen, I can't really think of much that needs changing or improving. It'd be nice if the gunplay was better but that's really about it. After 22 years it seems to have stood the test of time and still gets new players today, who rejoice at the scientist voices and other funny shit. I really think people will still be playing this in 50 years time - climate apocalypse notwithstanding - both as a piece of gaming history and as a game that will hold up even then. It's got to be 5 Shit 90s Ponytails out of 5.



THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM QUOTE:


Next game: Blood 2 (1998) but I still haven't given up on Extreme Paintbrawl. I was able to play it for about 30 seconds and it was proper shit, which means it's exactly the kind of thing this thread is all about, so I'm going to keep at it.

[madhair60]

An extremely boring game and the game that killed fun shooters.