6b4fb2 No.16882219[Last 50 Posts]
What games seem normal at first but actually have a very surreal feel and elements to them /v/? To explain more what I mean, Half-Life did this very well, and I don't mean just the opening sequence and the G-man.
The thing about Half-Life is that the more you get into the game and its expansion packs the more you realize how much of a fucking mess Black Mesa is and how weird is the actual story. I have always felt by playing through Half-Life that Black Mesa is a death trap, but only after playing through Blue Shift did I realize that it is completely intentional on the part of the developers. Everything in Black Mesa is a fucking mess, and it's probably one of the worst companies to work in, not only are the tensions high due to the equipment being pushed, but the fact that through the entirety of the faciltiy shit is getting fucked, with all of the scientists and staff acting either incompetently and in bizarre ways create an atmosphere of complete and utter bizareness that only gets amped up once the aliens actually attack. Everything tries to kill you, and with the miltiary just going in and starting to shoot you to cover up the entire mess, alongside with G-man doing his thing and even the soldiers questioning in some voice lines the idea of the operation, makes you realize that there might be some conspiracy going in the background, which puts you into an even weirder situation, realizing that The Resonance Cascade might have been planned all along, the fact that G-man turns out to be a god-like entity at the end of the game makes everything even weirder and makes you realize that Half-Life 2 literally stuck a story that completely didn't fit onto the first game, the Combine feel as if they were pulled out of their fucking ass, and considering HL1 as its own thing actually makes more sense than when combined with HL2 but that's besides the point
What other games start out as a seemingly generic plot and become more and more weird as time goes on?
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cb273a No.16882233
The first Thief. You start as a really good thief doing his job and as the game progresses you get into weird shit like a place made just to mess with you and the downright supernatural.
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44f260 No.16882247
>>16882233
To be honest the first thief blows it's load a bit too early because literally in the second mission you are greeted by fucking zombies in the mine, and it doesn't take long for stuff in the ruins to appear. Still a great game, but I also get heart attacks when trying to play it due to how tense it is and a great recommendation anon.
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44f260 No.16882248
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e3aa42 No.16882288
The Darkness and to a lesser vibe, Resistance and any other alternative history that replaces good writing with easy what if scenarios.
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874fbe No.16882323
>>16882219
The combine only really tie in via the Nihilanth, which is a pretty fucked up place to pull them from because you can barely understand him most of the time.
And even then his lines that "tie in" were more obviously for whoever Gman works for. But its something. He clearly was fucked up by someone and so they made an extra group.
The thing with HL is it has one very gamey factor; its intentionally designed to have totally different design choices and a decently fresh slate.
This is was explained at some point in regards to what episode 3 would have done for a future half life 3and why they didn't end up calling the episodes Half Life 3.
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27b215 No.16882366
-Resident Evil 4
-Command and Conquer
-Spec Ops the Line
-Pathologic
-FarCry
-Hitman
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ff5cd3 No.16882379
This one had PC port so try it out
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2bdf5a No.16882488
Every Mario game is an endless landscape of Lovecraftian horrors that acquire a veneer of normalcy the instant before you see them and lose it the instant you look away.
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44f260 No.16882492
>>16882323
It doesn't make sense anyways, even when we consider that Half Life was supposed to be about Gordon being thrown around by G-man into different places and time, solving shit for him, then they've already written themselves in a corner by making stakes with Combine far too big, and making the world change far too much in Half Life 2 already.
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874fbe No.16882497
>>16882492
Yeah the combine got scaled up way too much.
Xen stuff isn't as restricting whereas the combine are basically an endless unkillable problem that will warp any plot that comes into play.
>the world change far too much in Half Life 2 already.
To be fair there, its not the "acid rain and death air" of the beta; there are somewhat normal places like in episode 2.which was a pretty late decision, but final is the only thing that matters
The only notable idea that probably would work is a more literal version of Gman just sending Gordin out on missions; but from a larger mission range i suppose.
Earth is pretty much a fucked setting if you don't want to basically stick with HL2 at this point.
Which i suppose was what episode 3 was building up to from what we know.
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874fbe No.16882498
>>16882497
>Which i suppose was what episode 3 was building up to from what we know.
I meant the higher emphasize on time/dimensional travel what with their new use for the borealis.
And such use for such things, not the Gman mission thing.
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000000 No.16882548
my biggest problem with Half-Life 1 and 2 is the sheer amount of difference between the two. In HL1 you're just random science guy with a gun and special suit killan' aliens, but in HL2 the tone completely shifts and you're now bearded Jesus sent to liberate humanity from an alien race, and everyone is ok with it even though you're technically the one that started it in the first place. The difference in plot and setting also fucks me up; there is absolutely no continuity between the two games. You go from a high-tech lab in New Mexico to an Eastern European shithole where everyone from the first game also happens to be and now there's a new race of aliens that just controls everything? It doesn't explain that they found Earth because of the resonance cascade, just "they just showed up and fucked us up".
I do like HL2 because even though it's not 2004 anymore and we're not worshiping it like the best game of all time anymore, it's still a fun game to play through from time to time.
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874fbe No.16882574
>>16882548
>In HL1 you're just random science guy with a gun and special suit killan' aliens
This is a issue that stems from being a sequel, Gordin by virtue of the last game happening cannot be "normal" anymore. Similarly the use of characters technically from HL1 also intensify this feeling.
The location issue was totally avoidable though, they just didn't really try to make the location make any sense to contain a large amount of black mesa staff.
Wait didn't the combine literally track earth from the Resonance Cascade? Or was that fan theory or something i picked up.
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000000 No.16882578
>>16882574
The Combine finding Earth from the RC is canon.
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96da86 No.16882661
>>16882219
agree with the spoiler. I must say that I liked half life 1 waaaaay more than the second one. Not only because of the story, but I found the multiplayer a lot more fun too. Back in my days I had a usb stick with hl/cs 1.6 on it and we used to play that shit in school all the time.
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27b215 No.16882670
>>16882548
Visually it aged like fine wine, gameplay wise it aged like shit.
Pacing is still great though.
It was still a rushed piece of shit bad sequel that gimped the dark tone it was going for in favor of quirky 2000s teen bullshit.
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874fbe No.16882733
>>16882670
Half life 2 made a shit load of terrible choices in the final stretch, and it wasn't just tone.
Though those could all be blamed on rushing as well, outside of a scarce few maps none of them are built to make the combine do anything besides shit the bed.
The game was clearly never intended to give you basically infinite supplies with their last minute addition of dynamic resupply.
A lot of the game is spectacle that was destined to get old.
Half Life 1 on the other hand basically never relies on anything thats reliant on spectacle of tech, and is a much more solid product despite showing some dev pains pretty blatantly.
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27b215 No.16882769
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>16882733
Well, they were already their sweet fucking time and with issues with Sierra.
Once the Kraut leaked the Source code Sierra told them make something playable or fuckoff.
Half Life 2 is wasted potential, a patched up aberration that still turned out ok somehow.
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874fbe No.16882795
>>16882769
>Well, they were already their sweet fucking time
They definitely were, and its related to absolutely fucktarded concept cycles; instead of trying to work with issues or take compromises for their precious tech showcases they totally redid the game.
Why rework the hydra, its too hard just scrap it. Air Exchange doesn't show faces constantly, so scrap it because we want people to constantly stare at our expression tech.
Constant revisions and constantly cycling through concepts left a game that was a total mess as you mentioned with the 2003 leak.
That entire leak is a broken mess of features they made but then decided to scrap instead of trying to refine at all. And so are all those story elements.
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d7a6a7 No.16882937
>>16882795
What were the major changes? i know there was a leak but i didn't know thy scrapped a lot from it.
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aeb5fd No.16882977
>>16882379
Pretty strange and annoying that MGS1 and MGS2 had PC ports while MGS3 and MGS4 don't. Even when MGS5 came to PC after it was released on consoles.
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874fbe No.16882978
>>16882937
Oh the list is fucking endless, from shit that was long gone from the leak but noted to have been programed like the Sacktick;
the still in the final game but never had their AI finished ichthyosaur, crab synth and mortar synths. Never really explained or mentioned in any materials stuff like the particle storm.it got a dialog talking about it and was one of the first NPCs coded
The game went through 4 story line stages, with the original story line basically leaving no map concepts except for citadel/city 17. And that story line was extended and none of the map ideas from then made it really either.
The final prison level for example, was originally three different things, the prison was an entrance to a place known as the Depot which loading cargo onto trains; which you went on to go to the Air exchange.
A place where the air was exchanged with a gas that forced everyone to wear a gas mask, which is why it got scrapped as mentioned.
Which leads to the pretty famous cut ship borealis; which seemed to be based around showing off fire physics before it was scrapped and the fire extinguisher with it.
And then there's Weather Control, a mystery map that by all means has no reason to not exist in the leakthe version of the plot still clearly called for it and yet no maps exist.
Weather control leads to the skyscraper map, that had two very different versions made for each era.
You had the wasteland mapswhich episode 2 was originally meant to take place in, drained sea beds where you'd see the also cut Houndeyes; bullsquids also.though bullsquids also were in canals and such
You had whole hosts of just random enemies as well, there was two different assassin enemies made, and the first one; the alien assassin or as its called internally breeder had a zombie version.the second one does basically replace it internally though
The combine assassins design was used for the elite, who wore a really cool camo thing at the time of the demo; and he also functioned as a sniper.
The combine elite guard, whos gimmick was meant to be used for the Hunters, but was removed last minute; he was only killable with props and basically used a hand held strider weapon, which the player could use.and i think it was meant to be the strider killing weapon at the time?
The street cleaning Cremator is also a pretty famous cut enemy, and with him went his weaponthough it seems they wanted to just give it to striders somehow.
You had controllable manhacks and a much more extensive city 17. Citizens didn't all just use sorta unfitting guns for an uprising and had stuff like molotovs and a sorta throwing random crap weapon.
You also had controllable missiles and cranes. The citadel was meant to be a place you actually went through.episode 1 was clearly made from citadel and air exchange concepts
Scanners could talk, and use tear gas or somethingthough the concept art makes it more likely a spray of some flammable liquid, since they were meant to light you on fire.
You had the wasteland scanners, which not only shot grenades, but could do a sort of magneton type thing and fuse into a trio.i don't even remember what that achieves though
Combines could summon manhacks naturally, and so could the gunship shoot its belly gun.
Stalkers were a very active enemy choice and weren't just use for "don't you feel sad for them" factor. There was a literal tank boss.
And the hydra thing i mentioned was technically made of 8 different entities forming its tendrilsonly like three are programed though, and overall is a very impressive thing visually.
The leaked game is basically a totally different beast from the final. I'm just leaving out the whole array of maps still left in the leaks, from a very clear gold source version to a different to the final version.
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d391ef No.16882999
>>16882233
Thief 2 does this well, but also really works coming out of the first game. The very first mission shows what separates 2 from 1: instead of raiding some fop's castle, you're raiding some fop's art deco manor outfitted with light switches and dumbwaiters. In the mission where you raid a shipyard you can get a glance of one of the mechanist robots inactive in a crate and automated security cameras get a glance of you, and then in the next mission you see one of the walkers in action. It's a perfect buildup, and I feel like nobody talks about how great Thief 1 and 2 are besides simply saying "they're really good".
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db6cc6 No.16883022
Isn't the deal with Half Life that there are a lot of different factions at play, and the Combine basically took advantage of the events of HL1, to travel through the worm hole and invade Earth? Whatever the G-Man is up to, I don't think he's directly a part of the Combine, and was potentially luring them to Earth for his own ends.
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d7a6a7 No.16883068
>>16882978
That seems like a lot, but at the same time i know cut content is par for the course in game development, is that more than usual? no idea.
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874fbe No.16883095
>>16883068
A lot of cut content generally ends up as earlier revisions, variants and maybe a few cut maps for normal games. Even shitfests like Jurassic Park Trespasser has a tiny amount of cut content compared to what was in the leak only.
And there would be more content that existed in earlier versions even. HL2 is extremely abnormal because they clearly refused to stick to a concept for even a little bit after implementation if it struck them even mildly wrong.
HL2s leak was a year before release need i remind, but even then its not normal for games to actually develop through multiple concepts; at least not at the programing stage.
Some games might look like this at a concept level, but i doubt even that would be common at all.
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874fbe No.16883857
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>>16882978
Since i forgot a crane did make it into the final, i meant the crane that only ever existed in the factory city 17 map.
For whatever reason it existed.
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9a8aed No.16883893
>>16882219
Towelket 1 and 2 are this in spades. Starts with introducing some normal kids, and then alien invasions happen, being sent 2 million years into the future, exploring the 4 stomachs of a cow, entering a dreamland resembling your mind…
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eab2db No.16884016
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3fdfcf No.16885829
>>16882977
As long as your PC isn't a turd you can use PCSX2 for MGS3 and RPCS3 for MGS4 now thankfully. :)
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3fdfcf No.16885831
>>16882219
Half-Life 1 is honestly in a league of its own. An excellent action game with a horror atmosphere.
Dusk does a fairly good job at imitating this sort of atmosphere, where you start out killing rednecks and shit and by the end you're fighting this otherworldly supernatural… things. Not a brilliant game by any means but it was still better than any other game from 2018 that I played and it did a good job reminding me of why retro FPS's are still appealing to this day not just because of their gameplay, but their atmosphere.
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3fdfcf No.16885839
>>16885836
>courtesy of pic-related
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4caa88 No.16885841
>>16885831
HL1 didn't have any more of a horror atmosphere than Doom or Quake. Having bizarre shit, zombies, and gore was just what FPSes did before they turned into Call of Warfare and Borderlands. Even Duke Nukem 3D had the babes stuck in the alien slime stuff and the blobs that crawled up your screen. Hell, even SiN of all things had the protagonist turn into one of the mutants for a while–they even killed off the goofy sidekick in the spinoff cartoon.
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b07872 No.16885872
>>16885836
>>16885843
Git gud
Also opposing force has worse and the real bullet sponges enemies.
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21fa00 No.16885885
>>16885839
Did nothing wrong. Makes better games than soytendo at least.
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b07872 No.16885886
>>16885883
Shock Troopers take more damage than the fucking marines and then you have the black ops enemies.
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f6509b No.16885897
>>16882233
Thief 2 was the first Thief game I played because it was on a disk that came with gaming magazine that I bought, Played a few missions, really liked it and decided to play the Thief series in chronological order. I'm a big wuss when it comes to scary video games and I really wasn't prepared for Thief 1. It's undoubtedly a masterpiece but also way too tense for me.
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5259ab No.16885900
for me it two games come to mind one is Fallout 4, the beginning is so calm and relaxing you see what prewar life was like how they are just normal people not like the characters in the other fallouts and then the bombs drop and youre tossed into this strange world head first. The second game has to be assassins creed for me because when i started it i wasnt at all surprised ( i like history so i knew about the Assassins or Hashasins ) it was as more was revealed about the apple of Eden, which i thought cause of the nature of the laws of the Assassins would just be a stone or some other relic that is otherwise meaningless. However as it went on and more and more info was revealed through emails and dialogue i was caught off guard by the who aliens bit
>>16882219
i agree with you on the spoiler tbh. However i understand (from the wiki) as to how they are connected and such, but if you dont read the wiki youre fucked
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0508e4 No.16885912
>>16885899
>fighting them doesn't feel like a chore, since you can dodge their projectiles
Because dodging half a dozen fast-moving, perfectly accurate projectiles in narrow corridors is such an improvement over dodging two or three weak, slow-moving projectiles that sometimes just bug out and crash into the wall for no reason, in an environment full of sharp corners that completely break the homing gimmick.
>You have your squad with you to distract them
You have two or three grunts with you for a grand total of two small fights, and in both instances they don't last ten seconds unless you babysit them. They actually die quicker than barneys because they usually run out into the open and get blown away by a dozen black ops.
Besides, you both forgot the real problem:
>voltigores exist
>the voltigore nest exists
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4a355b No.16885925
>>16882366
Good god Resident Evil 4 has a surreal plot that sounds like fanfiction if you just bulletpoint it.
>Sent to Spain to rescue the President's daughter who got kidnapped just before your job as her bodyguard would begin
>Find out there's a death cult in the village
>The people are turned into zombies by a mind controlling parasite that is the secret heirloom of a royal family
>Los Illuminados knows Umbrella is after their good shit, works with their agents anyways
>Los Illuminados actually has a surprisingly decent plan of sending Ashley back to the president infected so that she can infect him and Saddler can use the mind control to manipulate the president into slanting policy in his favor
>Along the way Leon fights a giant salamander, multiple Lord of The Rings ogres (some of which are in BDSM gear), a one-eyed man who's 7 feet tall and turns into a centipede monster, a midget with serious Napoleon complex and his Xenomorph bodyguards, an Umbrella agent who can turn his arm into Soul Edge and Saddler. Who kills Louis with his penis.
If you just read out the plot of Resident Evil 4 with no pictures or context it sounds like an Evil Dead script
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d2fffa No.16885932
>>16885899
you clearly haven't played opposing force recently because there's quite a few sections were you have to fight black ops units all alone by yourself and the squad is pretty useless unless they are fighting bogeys because they don't instantly die to their hitscan weapons
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f0f6e9 No.16885941
>>16884016
I still don't know what the fuck was going on in Infinity.
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b828e6 No.16886161
>>16883095
Perhaps this is why Gabe has such a hard time talking about HL2
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b524cd No.16886333
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36109c No.16886551
>>16885925
>>Los Illuminados actually has a surprisingly decent plan of sending Ashley back to the president infected so that she can infect him and Saddler can use the mind control to manipulate the president into slanting policy in his favor
All they had to do was to join AIPAC
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199fec No.16887047
>>16882219
>What other games start out as a seemingly generic plot and become more and more weird as time goes on?
Custom Robo.
>Starts off like a ripoff of medabots, or beyblade
>Generic bad guys terrorize the city and you stop them
>as the game progresses you learn the city you're in is quite possibly the only one to still exist
>A supernatural force of nature caused the apocalypse, and was only stopped by chance, as it possessed a children's robot and took form
>The remnants created a walled off environment and had their memories of the incident erased
>The Villains led by your dad and the brother of one of your party members, turn out to be the only people working on a solution to destroying the monster, but some retard initiates a coup
>Last part of the game is you and your friends venturing in the wasteland to destroy the demon once and for all
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884e30 No.16887048
>>16882219
>and makes you realize that Half-Life 2 literally stuck a story that completely didn't fit onto the first game, the Combine feel as if they were pulled out of their fucking ass, and considering HL1 as its own thing actually makes more sense than when combined with HL2 but that's besides the point
I'm working on a project that'll be about discussing the story that the Half-Life series was building up toward (not Epistle 3), and I've got a couple of things to weigh in on this point with.
I'm just gonna quickly hammer this post out before I go to bed, mind, but consider the following:
There's a mid-development story document for Half-Life 1 that was released to the public, I believe, in 2016 (available at https://valvearchive.com/archive/Half-Life/Half-Life/Documents/Design%20Documents/NIHILANTH.txt ) and that reveals a few specific things about the game's universe - which are very significant given just how little in the game's universe ever gets explicitly revealed and how much is instead left to just be implied through the game world.
>Teleportation has been mastered by a chain of superintelligent (compared to us) aliens. Mainly, they use it to exploit and enslave the races they encounter; their exploitation may be open or it may be extremely covert, involving political manipulation of the worlds they control. It all depends on what they want out of the species they intend to dominate. The civilizations which are potentially the most dangerous—and also the most useful—to them are those which have independently arrived at the creation of a teleport technology which could surpass their own…for as in all things, even advanced alien superscience is bound to become obsolete, and the drive for a more powerful technology is unending.
tl;dr the Universal Union if not the colonial government we see in HL2 were something that had existed at least in broad strokes in the Half-Life universe since before HL1 was finished and released. There are discrepancies between that story document and the storyline in the final game (just off the top of my head, Xen in the final game is not what this story document describes it as; the role it was to occupy in the world at the time of this story document is left instead to be filled by what cut lines from HL2 refer to as "The Aleph Universe"), but…
As for HL2's colonial government itself… I've got a take on them: They're a minor, possibly renegade bureaucratic faction from among this incomprehensibly advanced civilisation who, with limited access to the technology or resources of their broader civilisation (is the bureaucratic nature of their broader civilisation denying them access to that technology and resources, or are they avoiding asking because they don't want their broader civilisation to notice what they're doing?), have placed themselves in charge of humanity for reasons unknown. Except for a few small hints in HL2's dialogue and world design that corroborate neatly with what's described in the mid-development HL1 story document I've just linked. HL3 would have made it much clearer how much sense they make.
By the way, let me just toss pic related into this discussion without bothering to explain what it has to do with Half-Life.
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884e30 No.16887053
>>16882978
I've got some takes on all of this as well, but since I'm really due for sleep I'll just see if I can let this screencap from my project's outline document speak for itself.
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023c02 No.16887177
>>16887048
The very top has so much meaningless technobabble I'm having trouble not descending into maddened screeching.
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884e30 No.16887917
>>16887177
Hey, I'm back, tl;dr that stuff was a big inspiration for the Half-Life Universe.
I can go into more detail, but the short version is that Tesla's idea of there being a field of global resonance whose energies can be tapped to bring revolution or disaster, his idea of there being a highest level of the universe from which the rest of the universe flows, along with the concepts that have been built up in the conspiracy theories that surround him involving there being space-age technology that's existed in secret for decades and there being such things (flowing from the highest level of the universe) as psionics and "energy healing" are all integral to Half-Life's universe and the stories of the games so far. Hopefully including Half-Life: Alyx, now that that game's out. Fingers crossed that it's not the big, setting-breaking piece of fanfiction that I've been scared it's going to be.
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4caa88 No.16887923
>>16887917
It's always great when supposedly integral parts of the story are completely not mentioned in the actual video games for literally a decade or whatever of the story existing. If all this exists only in outside materials then it's basically irrelevant backstory wank by one or more of the writers. I am pretty unconvinced that this is going to turn into some Tolkienesque uberuniverse or that folks are going to start agreeing that Valve was coherent all along. Maybe if any of this actually makes it into one of the games it'll be different, but we already have all this media out there for years and years that doesn't have a lick of this in it.
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884e30 No.16887930
>>16887923
None of the connections in Half-Life ever get explicitly stated for the benefit of players who won't put some thought into the world for themselves, but Half-Life 1 involves the player surviving a disaster in the Earth's field of global resonance, going through a secret government black site that's existed for decades, battling black ops clean-up crews along the way, to travel beyond this dimension and meet with extra-dimensional beings with psionic powers before having it revealed that something either from our government or pretending to be from our government not only already knows about all of this but has already mastered all of this. Half-Life 2 at one point in development was going to explicitly reveal the existence of a highest level of reality with the goal of mankind, of Earth's colonial government, of the Universal Union or of all three being to reach it and take control of it. Half-Life 2 Episode 2 has literal energy healing as a key point in its plot.
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6476e9 No.16887946
Condemned I suppose, it's grim as fuck throughout then it gets weird, especially the second one.
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4caa88 No.16887950
>>16887930
I had more to say about this, but I think, really, it comes down to this. If Valve wants people to appreciate their story, they need to find a way to actually work it into the games, which they haven't done yet–unless, that is, they are expressly aiming the actual story at the one out of a million players who cares enough to try to do Valve's work for them. A good way to get that ratio up would be actually releasing a game once in a while to keep people interested, because all the work by Valve's writers is wasted if the larger company burns away goodwill with gamers by never actually releasing games.
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884e30 No.16887971
>>16887950
Well, a big part of my project as I'd had it outlined before HLA's announcement was going to be how I believe that Half-Life's very understated world-building and story-telling has made it very easy for Valve to forget what they were doing with Half-Life now.
I'm not necessarily fussed about whether or not "the community" actually pays attention to what they were going for with the series, but when Valve might as well be "community" members just writing fanfiction themselves at this point (fingers crossed that's not what HLA is, but that is to an extent what the Episodes were and that definitely is what Epistle 3 would have been), I don't necessarily disagree that something's gone wrong with what they've been doing.
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a16065 No.16889407
>>16887971
>>16887930
>>16887917
>>16887048
>>16887053
Good lord whats happening in there? take your autism to the containment thread not here faggot.
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e75d73 No.16889418
>>16882219
Bloodborne sort of fits. It starts with you are just traipsing around a Victorian-esque city in the grip of a plague. Sure it's a plague that turns people into werewolves but that could be the start of any Castlevania game. Then as you progress you get the hint of things being off and then by the time you make it to the Unseen Village and the moon gives birth to an abomination you understand that you are in a very different setting than you first thought… to say nothing of the various Nightmare realms.
Basicilly you start out in the setting of a Hammer film and you end up in the setting of a H.P. Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith story.
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cfd41d No.16889428
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884e30 No.16889945
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28c101 No.16890037
>>16884016
>>16886333
I loved the atmosphere of the Marathon series. Dont know how to describe it, but it was almost thi magical realism feel to it. Probably just nostalgia though since this was the first game I ever played.
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ca1a3b No.16890053
>>16889428
>your entire life is a planned out quest to see whether or not you can replace god and keep the grand game going for the next generation
Alternatively, it can interpreted as a meta-critique of games that send you on a grand quest whose entire purpose becomes moot when you eventually win and the cycle of replaying a game you've already beaten before that serves to preserve some part of the game "world."
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a24fb0 No.16890373
>>16882795
Anybody that says "Half Life 2 was better in beta" or anything approximating that is retarded and doesn't understand art.
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1e9140 No.16890393
>>16890373
Games are not art.
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af17b9 No.16890397
>>16890373
>anything approximating that is retarded and doesn't understand art.
Ah yes, the only factor making a game; its art factor.which doesn't even mean something precise to most people
Weaker setting, subpar weapon/enemy variety are irrelevant because that was the version that was completed in the end. Lesser scale also doesn't matter, who cares if the final level is a fucking tram ride.
Aesthetics are also a toss up, i consider pretty much any of the beta citadels better looking than the finalexcept maybe the one sitting in the inner city map, that one is pretty terrible.
I honestly preferred the 1984 movie esq 2001 city 17 better as well. Hydra base and Eli's den both seemed more interesting than their fusion, Black Mesa East. And the list can go on and on.
The beta might be a mess of concepts, but loads of them are more solid than what HL2 is. Of course, as i noted; the "beta" isn't a singular concept because they kept on shuffling through them.
Now the real shitmeme is that the leak did jack shit, they were already rushing HL2 by the time of the leak; and the game was already conceptually similar.still managed to lose more shit though
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9c7540 No.16890406
>>16890397
>turned the combine flamethrower into an on going in house meme that extends to this day
Valve has gone insane.
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f49bc9 No.16890446
>>16890393
How are they not art?
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a24fb0 No.16890461
>>16890397
>its art factor.
Already missed the point. That statement was supposed to encompass the whole game. It's just experimentation and the only reason people talk as if literally anything in the leak is better is because there was a leak in the first place and it's not what they got. Grass is greener and all that.
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af17b9 No.16890478
>>16890461
>Grass is greener and all that
Not exactly something you can fully back up, its not like a lot of these features were implausible.
Nor can you fight against the length and variety argument. This is not a argument that can stand by itself inherently.
If raising the bar was the only thing, the same issue would occur; but with a lot more "did they even manage to do any of this". Especially in regards to shit like Airex and the controllable manhacks.
"Merely experimenting" your way into being forced into a crunch time where you over-rely on play testers to neuter your game still shows how much the game faltered on.
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ff0ed9 No.16890480
>>16890446
You have to ask the following question: in what ways does the Art label benefit videogames. Das rigth..None benefits.
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a24fb0 No.16890484
>>16890478
>Not exactly something you can fully back up
What do you want a fucking graph?
Did you forget you're talking about Half Life 2 and not Diakatana or some shit?
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af17b9 No.16890487
>>16890484
Half life 2 isn't some perfect game and never was.
The gunplay is mediocre, the enemies aren't particularly amazing to fight.
Its main success is pacing, i wouldn't call the plot super amazing either. Its setting is okay, but honestly needed more bite.
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a24fb0 No.16890493
>>16890487
thanks for your review. It is very much appriciated
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f49bc9 No.16890494
>>16890480
What? i'll call a spade a spade benefits or not
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af17b9 No.16890501
>>16890493
A massive retaliation that definitely makes your view seem more valid.
Definitely. Just like your every other post.
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c2ca1c No.16892469
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4afc19 No.16892475
>>16890446
How are playthings or board games art?
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f49bc9 No.16892737
>>16892475
Just by being crafted and with the intent to make you feel something, even if that something is fun.
I get that most of the "games are art" crowd are a bunch of retards praising shitty walking sims but that doesn't mean you should be so contrarian as to take the complete opposite position.
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f41131 No.16892911
>>16892737
Games are games, and the #1 priority for a game is how enjoyable operating the game is, nice music or art-style is a bonus.
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8858a8 No.16892929
>>16882219
Pepsiman
Just the thought that this game was made is enough to make you wonder who the fuck greenlit it. The more you play it, the more you realize that at various points in development several things happened to get it shipped.
The very Japanese team behind the game deliberately made FMVs as shitty as possible, the lead actor behind them even went ahead and said the Japanese contractors asked him to act WORSE for the ads.
The game was in retail. It wasn't sold with Pepsi, you had to go to the store and ask for it.
Predicting the Korean LibRight Megacities, there exist a Pepsi-City in the Pepsi-verse, whose main product, currency and livelihood revolves around Pepsi. All its citizens work for a Pepsi factory. A factory that has no actual Pepsi in them either.
Pepsiman can summon CAR-BO-NA-TED SO-DAS to refresh citizens in distress, but he himself has to buy a can for himself. Does he die if he's not drinking enough to sustain himself? Are you drinking his life essence or blood?
According to the narration, Pepsiman is basically just a rescue team member, why are there people out for his blood like the bikers or RedTruckola?
And finally, why did all the funding for the game go into music and sound effect and very little in anything else? Why does the product placement want to kill you? Who greenlit this seriously?
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8858a8 No.16892932
>>16882488
The UMA in Mario games have always been weird as fuck, not from a creepy perspective, just for how weird of an easter egg they are.
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963cde No.16893027
>>16882574
Valve could have just picked a new character, to be honest. Every other Half-Life sequel/expansion until HL2 featured a different character. Blue Shift was supposed to be Barney's story, Opposing Force was a Marine's perspective and Decay was another scientist. It would have been completely on-point for them to make HL2 feature a new character – there was no undue attachment to the Gordon Freeman character before HL2, because HL2 memed all of Half-Life's "deep lore" into existence.
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fb39e1 No.16893394
>>16882978
>You also had controllable missiles and cranes
Those made it into HL2, anon. Rocket Launcher has guidance and there was that coast map that had you use a magnetic crane to move the buggy up on the dock.
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f49bc9 No.16893396
>>16892911
Yes.
Is that a counter argument or do you agree with me? i genuinely don't know
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fb39e1 No.16893410
>>16887048
>the story that the Half-Life series was building up toward (not Epistle 3),
I assume you're disregarding Portal and Episode 2? I don't remember much of that "leaked" script, but the plot point of going to the Arctic to acquire the portal tech from the Borealis was made canon by Ep2.
Also, who the fuck is the g-man? A characteristic of the Combine civilization is that they have shitty portal tech, while the master race humans have developed a more sophisticated teleportation tech (uses less resources even if Portal wasn't a thing), but this guy G-Man seems to have access to even better tech since he just appears and vanishes wherever the fuck he wants with no huge device to teleport him. Unless he's a Vortigaunt.
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023c02 No.16893421
>>16893410
He's probably a Shu'ulathoi adult form, the Advisors were a race of beings that are supposed to exist mainly in their larval state, and mature into forms they can design, but are mostly simply reproduction machines, I think one or more of them instead made the G-man.
https://twitter.com/breengrub
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fb39e1 No.16893447
>>16893421
That doesn't explain why he has better portal tech than everybody else. Remember that even back in HL1 he could create interdimensional portals while carrying just a briefcase.
The only resemblance he has to anybody is the vortigaunts, at the end of HL2 he stops time for Gordon and the vorts were there at the start of Episode 1, they were all using the same magic bullshit, but that isn't something the Advisors have shown to be capable of, their magic is more on the psychokinetic spectrum.
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023c02 No.16893458
>>16893447
You're right, I was going to say he could be another race of alien on an advisor body who went rogue, but that still wouldn't explain why the Combine had no access to his portal tech.
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af17b9 No.16893547
>>16893394
Like i remembered later, why i was thinking of a cut crain was a different entity for some reason. There was two crane entities.
The other one is actually for an engine block.
As a fun fact; during 2003 the gunship encounter during coast was made like the finals helicopter.
While you killed the helicopter with this canister launcher you used the craneas in the used one to get the canisters to.
I can see why it was cut though, not exactly the most functional thing.
The missile guidance i'm talking about is a full "player becomes missile" type thing, there's even an unused "missile defense" entity for it.
Not the RPG feature that existed even in HL1.
>>16893027
Gordin himself definitely was a key half life character, i don't think you can avoid using him for a "half life 2".
Especially since HL1 leaves him on obvious sequel bait.
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db6cc6 No.16893607
>>16892469
That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself. As a developer you aren't trying to just create the hardest game ever, like some masochistic IWTBTG shit. You're trying to craft the best learning curve so the game is a challenge without being obtuse. By the sounds of it, that maze level they removed from Episode 2 probably wasn't a lot of fun.
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db6cc6 No.16893610
>>16890487
I'd be hard pressed to find a game that does HL2 better than HL2. You could definitely do it, but I'm not sure anyone has. Maybe Metro 2033?
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af17b9 No.16893638
>>16893607
There certainly is a place for playtesters, but there is a definite limit to what you should do with them.
A smooth experience with a good curve is generally a good thing, but sometimes this devolves into a "child proof experience".
Maze levels tend to be shit, so i doubt it was much of a loss to anyone.
>>16893610
Half life 2 certainly does have a pretty unique final product.
Don't think Metro 2033 really is that close to final HL2. Kinda shocked i can't think of any proper clones.
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db6cc6 No.16893655
>>16893638
Well, Duke Nukem Forever tried.
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5a6179 No.16896148
>>16893610
The beginning of HL2 is truly unique as it's essentially HL1 gameplay in a massive urban clusterfuck. The only two games to come close are Mirror's Edge 1 and STALKER SoC/Clear Sky.
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023c02 No.16903030
>>16882219
Forget all that, I feel like I am going insane because I'm just noticing there are too many areas that look like the H.E.C.U. had been preparing for a while before the incident took place with giant pieces of artillery strewn about and big clearly military looking crates and boxes too large to have been carried by individual soldiers, didn't the whole black mesa incident take please over the course of two days at most?
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023c02 No.16908610
Speaking of Half Life because the only other thread seems to be locked, I really hate how G-Man kept getting increasingly smug. It's like a famous actor becoming increasingly comfortable appearing in cheap corny B-movies.
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fe1300 No.16908880
>>16882233
The Thief reboot also has a surreal feel to it, because it was hacked together at the last minute from all sorts of unfinished scraps they had. But yeah, Thief: TDP is the best a game has ever been at taking your from normalcy to batshit crazy surreal stuff.
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66080e No.16908882
>>16908610
I kinda agree since I remember in HL2 there was only 1 scene where the gman smiles (the beginning), ever. However he feels less robotic now that he has a ton more graphical power to drive his face. Overall I'd say it's a solid improvement.
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cfb3b6 No.16908893
Invidious embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>Professor Layton 1 & 2
As you play through these two early entries in particular you start to get the feeling that something is off, but you don't know what. The further you go the more there seems to be some eerie sadness to the towns you explore.
The first game (Curious Village) is about a recently deceased affluent man who hid his fortune, including his mysterious "greatest treasure" in a small village in rural England; no one has been able to find it, so Layton has been put to the task. As you continue though, strange things occur. A stranger is lurking around the town; a murder occurs; there are rumors that people go missing for several nights and then reappear as though nothing had happened.
In the second game (Diabolical Box), Layton receives a letter from his old archaelogy professor. The letter says that the man had acquired a rumored artifact called the Elysian Box and was going to dare opening it after several weeks of study without fruition. There is just one problem, the box is rumored to be cursed. Layton arrives in his former professor's apartment only to discover him lying there, dead. The box is gone and the window is open. The only clue left behind by the deceased man is a train ticket labeled with a destination that can't be found on any map.
Both of these games can get surprisingly spooky.
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cfb3b6 No.16908907
Invidious embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>9 hours 9 persons 9 doors
9 people have been kidnapped and put on what seems to be a full scale replica of the titanic. They each have a watch on their wrist that can't be removed, with a number on it, 1 through 9. They are told they have to go through escape rooms until they get to the #9 door, which is the exit, before the time limit of 9 hours is up and the ship sinks. They soon realize though, that due to the rules of the game, only five of them at most will be able to go through the #9 door. As they go through the escape rooms, they discuss various topics, and this is where the game gets truly bizarre. 90% of what they discuss has some basis in reality— in other words, they are nearly always talking about something that is true, or based on some kind of rumor, or idea from a novel, or topic from a research paper. An early example is the discussion of Futility, a real novel that seemingly predicted the sinking of the Titanic with astonishing accuracy (the ship is nearly the same size, sinks due to crashing into an iceberg in April in the Atlantic ocean, there aren't enough lifeboats, the ship is even named Titan, etc). A game that starts out like some kind of Saw wannabe becomes scary in its constant references to reality beyond the game, and the curious player finds himself wondering whether each discussion is another reference or something that the author has this time invented himself.
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35f66e No.16908960
>>16903030
OP here after a device change
This is a good point and shows that HL2 seemed to be pulled out of its ass. HL1 was pointing to some kind of conspiracy involving the government going on, probably being controlled by some bigger force like G-man. That being said it doesn't thing as if he was the only entity pulling the strings. Even the beginning evaluation files seem to point at Black Mesa being a test to hire unsuspecting suspects for the conspiracy.
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1a56c2 No.16908971
>>16903030
Pretty sure Black Mesa was already exploring Xen before the events of HL1 took place.
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0c6c91 No.16908973
>aw man this is a nice little block breaking puzzle game
>oh my God I failed and the universe is going to die
That's only one ending.
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db9834 No.16913187
>Somtimes I dream about cheese
what did he mean by this
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4caa88 No.16913240
>>16913187
It means that sometime during his lifetime the most common milk producing animals died off. With milk difficult or impossible to come by, nobody can make cheese. Guy liked to eat cheese and hasn't had any in decades because he has no way of getting it and it may not even exist within a thousand miles of him. There's no deep meaning.
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722e03 No.16913244
>>16882366
>FarCry
I can attest to this. The first level with those monkey things was terrifying for me the first time I played it, because it was just unexpected, and that on top of the weird character interactions… Now I want to play it again.
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1018d2 No.16913312
>>16913240
Cheese is gross though, so he mustn't mean it literally.
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b2ce49 No.16920715
>>16882670
>quirky 2000s teen bullshit.
I'd still go back to that shit in a heartbeat if it meant all of the modern-day social justice garbage could be done away with. I haven't been wowed by anthing since I was a teenager.
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023c02 No.16921978
I heavily suspect HL2 turrets are just Aperture turrets with the superfluous parts removed, which explains why they're so garbage and keeps in line with their theme of subsuming human tech.
Makes sense too given they're one of the very few items Aperture Science actually pushed into the market.
>>16913312
Cheese is delicious though, I just bought a big chunk of Parmesan for long term storage, of the cheeses I have available it's the longest lasting when sealed and in the freezer at 9 months. You never know when the dairy industry will collapse and I don't want to end up like that guy.
>Not only one of the greatest minds, but also greatest warriors of the 2000s is joining us in glorious uprising against Combine ocupators
>Finally going to meet him, I hope I make a good first impression
>I uhh… Sometimes, I dream about cheese.
>Nailed it
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4e7a59 No.16921990
>>16908882
if only the VA actually did a good job…
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722e03 No.16921999
No More Heroes starts pretty normal with some over the top stuff, but past Letz Shake shit is just very surreal, you get a magician whose magic being real is very questionable, a granny with a mega laser that kills your master, a lolita with a bunch of gimps, and a whole star wars allegory with jumping a bridge to a castle's woods, with your dead master's ghost within said woods.
Then No More Heroes 2 goes even beyond that, with straight up paranormal shit like Matt Helms, and goes peak with Alice Moonlight time travel shenanigans.
Dunno about Travis Strikes Again, but in the trailer of 3 Travis basically does Henshin and references Kamen Rider Decade, and you basically fight fucking aliens.
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4e7a59 No.16922003
>>16887048
i'm interested to hear more / know where to look when you're done on that project.
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023c02 No.16922004
>>16921999
>Alice Moonlight time travel shenanigans
I don't remember this, what are you talking about.
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722e03 No.16922028
>>16922004
It's Alice Twilight, my bad, and since you go through another Akashic Point to get to where she is, like you did with Matt and Cloe, then it is guaranteed that the place you fight Alice is not normal "Reality", and seeing how Travis is still acclaimed as a "hero", the point being called "The hero's face" for the giant Travis face in one of the buildings, then it's most probably a shit future where killing as an sport continued after Travis went missing AGAIN, this time for time traveling.
Akashic points works like Vinculum Gates in killer 7, which is also a very fucking surreal game. It can just be a shitty theory, though, but you can't deny that Matt and even Henry's hallucination are very fucking weird.
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5e96f3 No.16922060
Invidious embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>16921999
>>16922028
If you haven't tried Travis Stikes Again yet you probably should, since if your in it for the story / world building it's still has that heart and soul that's for sure.
I haven't gotten too far into it, but that's because after seeing the Day 7 intro they patched in, I might want to beat Killer 7 first .
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258563 No.16922461
The Tomb Raider games fit this description perfectly just like the Indiana Jones films they're inspired by. They all generally stick to the same formula; you start out on a fairly ordinary world adventure, shooting the shit out of endangered wildlife, stealing trinkets and medipaks from dead people, etc. but as you progress through the game you start coming across more and more fantasy-like elements. A little monster here, a little magic there, and by the final level you're usually wondering if you're even still on Earth.
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6dcc15 No.16922514
In FEAR, when you look outside in the Armacham HQ mission, there are no signs of life anywhere. No cars, no people, no nothing. I don't think there were any sounds either. You are told that the building is under siege by the authorities and the media, but there's nobody out there. It's also strange how enormous the building is, and some parts of it seem like they shouldn't even be there.
In Extraction Point it's noted that the city has suddenly been emptied of people, but there's one scene on a parking garage roof where you can hear normal city ambient sounds including sirens. Those sounds should not be there. The normality of the scene makes it unnerving because of how it stands out from everything else.
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a628d7 No.16922565
>>16922461
Holy shit thanks for posting that artwork. Tomb Raider 3 was my favorite Tomb Raider.
And I played the censored version. That means pink and purple fucking blood!
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929ac7 No.16922628
>>16893410
I figured he was from a corporation competing with the Combine, or at least an agent from a different bureaucratic arm trying to get the Combine to stay in their lane.
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