I have some similar reviews with 0 hours because I usually play a cracked version of the game and then buy it if i like it just to support the dev. Maybe that’s what was going on here.
Lots of mods for older games circumvent steam, so steam does not know about the game running. Famous example was Skyrim and Skyrim script extender. If this is the case with mmod idk
If you launch the game outside steam the time isn’t accounted for. I know this because I love playing Timespinner with a randomizer. Inside steam I have 40h of played time. If the timer counted my randomizer sessions I’d have at least 4x that
Idk, of all the ways you could criticize Ubisoft, dragging this random guy just because he didn’t care too much for HL2 (and then took the time to write down his thoughts instead just going “game bad 👎”) feels silly.
They make some good points about how we view “classic” games too.
A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like “look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they’re almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!”.
Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I’ve tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.
On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being “revolutionary for their time” often don’t hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it’s possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.
When I look back at what I’ve played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don’t think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say “wow that’s a Control-like” game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that’s the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.
I have to agree with him, honestly. HL2 was novel for its time, but if you're playing it for the first time in 2026 then yeah, it really doesn't hold up to modern game experiences. I also dislike games that end ambiguously or on cliffhangers, and the lack of closure provided from sequel-bait endings like HL2's can be annoying to people who just want to play a complete story. I want to see it through to the end and get the feeling that my actions had any sort of consequence to the world, and HL2 really doesn't provide that.
And narratively, the fact that Gordon is a silent protagonist really doesn't make the player feel like they're a real part of that world, and rather they're just going along for an on-rails carnival ride. The player has no real agency to affect anything that isn't a part of the singular route offered by the game. This would be okay if it was a role-playing game, and the player is intended to use their imagination to fill in the blanks, but HL2 is a wholly linear game where characters just bark commands at you from start to finish.
Honestly, for being a negative review, I think he was very fair about it. It's an important part of gaming history, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a great experience for modern players.
HL2 has a ton of story, but it isn’t spelled out in cutscenes or written down in item descriptions. It’s discussed by NPCs and inferred from the environment. You experience it all in a first person frame, without third person cutscenes or by asking someone to exposit at you. You don’t even have to go out of your way with a guide on your second monitor to unlock that info, it’s right there with you, you just have to pay attention.
You’re a person in the world and nobody will be the explaining the concept of lightbulbs or the where the combine came from or how the city was built. But you can absolutely find out more about that in the game.
I will say that even then, it was missing a bit of “acknowledgment”. Kleiner and Alyx don’t even question where you came from or what you should be doing now you’ve suddenly arrived.
Some of that could be as simple as, if Gordon was non-silent, have him wonder questions while wandering C17: “What the…how long have I been gone? What the hell happened to Earth?”
“What the…how long have I been gone? What the hell happened to Earth?”
But, you KNOW what happened to the Earth. What would spelling it out add to the story, except replacing the wonder and accomplishment with a boring bit of exposition.
Having Gordon be a silent protagonist adds hugely to the first person experience of the game. Sure, you can add dialog and questions and elaborate, but that would detract from the experience. Picasso could have also added pointers to each of the characters in Guernica to explain how they relate to the bombing of the city, and it would make the painting a lot clearer… and a lot worse.
I want to compare Half-Life with SOMA here (so spoilers for both). They’re both great experiences, but Gordon is silent while Simon won’t shut up. Simon needs to asks questions because the story requires you to understand some things, and some people need very basic explanations. When I played SOMA, I kept waiting for there to be a secret plottwist that Simon was copied incorrectly and was thus either braindamaged, or modified not to recognise reality for a specific purpose. No, that didn’t happen, Simon is instead an absolute moron who completely fails to realize that everyone constantly being copied means that he too will be copied instead of having his mind relocated. The game treats this as some kind of big realization, when it was in fact absolutely blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention. It’s literally the core of the game. Simon, being a moron, then takes this out on the person helping him, because he’s a moron.
Not only is the main character an idiot, I’m being railroaded into taking decisions that are stupid, which are then reacted to as if I couldn’t possibly have foreseen this, implying I (the player) am probably really stupid too. That was a huge detraction in SOMA. Simon is an idiot for the sole purpose of getting the information to you, the player, because apparently you need to be informed like you’re some kind of idiot too.
On the other hand, Gordon doesn’t talk. That’s a BIG restriction, but it also means you don’t even have to option to ask questions. On the other hand, you don’t need to; all the reasonable questions you might have are answered in the game by environmental storytelling. Who are the combine? Well, we see them beating up random humans, speaking a weird garbled message, we hear speeches by Breen, we see the combine raid random apartments. It’s very clear who they are without Gordon needing to ask about it. It’s like starting a book in medias res, which is quite common in writing.
Half-Life 2 assumes you can make connections, and you need to do so because Gordon doesn’t talk. SOMA assumes you’re an idiot, and reinforces that constantly by Simon talking to people like an idiot.
That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Perhaps the only major issue with using environmental storytelling to give City 17’s base exposition is that the game is both a sequel, and intended as an entry point. I remember as a kid playing HL2 (with very little knowledge of HL1) and as soon as I saw the aliens in gas masks corralling everyone, really wondered what sort of story I missed in the first one. Leaving people to figure things out is definitely cool, I’m just offering ways to point out clearly that you, the player, didn’t miss anything key, because in today’s media deluge, often the reason for that feeling is because a story is slapdash and poorly written - as opposed to simply hiding the details in plain sight for the player to find.
Interestingly, there are some notes in an art book where the G-Man originally gave a longer opening speech to explain what’s happened in your absence, but they removed it. Overall it was probably the right move, but I’m curious how it would have felt.
That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Yeah, the DS1 remake had Isaac talking, and they did it pretty decently because he’s not constantly surrounded by people who have answers to questions that Isaac has. The game is still about finding out what happened, and nobody can answer that, so you can’t talk about it. You’re discovering it with Isaac AND the other survivors. In DS2 you can’t really ask all that many questions about unitology, because people don’t really know the answers either.
But it would ruin all the interesting stuff about HL2’s history discovery. If someone just tells you “Oh yeah, the combine conquered the earth, and now they’re using these hybrid soldiers to suppress humanity after their military conquest, and their citadel is slowly expanding an ever more repressed population in this city” that’s not nearly as interesting as finding it out. But if Gordon asks, anyone would know the info, because they lived through it. By having a silent protagonist, people can just assume Gordon’s been around and knows this stuff, and not magically kidnapped by a supernatural magic guy in a suit who keeps mysteriously following him around. Half the fun in HL2 is figuring out the world, it’s a core concept of the game. You learn something for yourself, you figure it out by putting it togehter. Having G-Man spell it out would remove the fun. And having Gordon spell it out for the player would definitely detract from the game too. HL2 really hit that level of natural discovery, and making it optional to the game enjoyment.
Of course, launching it today removes a lot of the fun too, since there will just be 5000 youtubers repeating eachother about the game.
It doesn’t exactly need to be a secret plottwist, given the game literally starts with Simon’s brain damage, but there is also a bit of optional exposition about half way through about the gen 1 brainscans being primitive. Admittedly, it being consistent with the plot didn’t make Simon any less infuriating, at least for me.
I mean, Kleiner saying “I had expected more warning!” is a sort of mixed surprise. If he’s been gone for 20+ years, the natural reaction I might expect is “What…? That’s impossible! We all thought you were dead! Or lost in Xen forever!” Heck, even Kleiner’s reaction to the “slow teleport” you and Alyx take late in the game is much grander. “I had…given up hope of ever seeing you again!!”
Yeah, that’s probably because Kleiner knew the G-Man was involved in the interdimensional shit and had Gordon in stasis (or whatever), and he expected more warning when Gordon was on his way back, not just have him dropped on the doorstep, whereas the slow teleport was entirely experimental, accidental, and unexpected.
My personal example are HD packs for ps2 games on emulator… My backlog there is really long and I loving the fact that i can play them on a higher resolution :D
First Forza game looked so damn good at the time, like almost real for the videos (yes I know but when your peak graphics is really surpassed you think it’s real). Nowadays that never happens cause I’m old and time passes so quickly. I do stop to enjoy the flowers now and then still. Sometimes quite literally in video games to check out how things are progressing I love jungle scenes and they sort of needs tons of plants.
I did that for Control when I played that, I was just ready to be done. Im guessing by every other part of the review the person was also just ready for the game to end
What does that have to do with anything? If someone’s mentally checked out of the game so much that continuing to play through it becomes a slog, I can’t blame them for cheating just to get it over with.
If you’re not going to enjoy playing the game then you’re better off not finishing it, because by finishing it that way you’ve robbed yourself of the joy of overcoming the challenge.
What challenge? HL2 is not a particularly difficult game. And there isn’t going to be any joy in overcoming whatever challenge you’re talking about if they’re hating every second of the game. Its not like we’re talking about a souls-like where they cheated because they couldn’t defeat a boss. No, they cheated because they got bored, not because of some imaginary skill issue.
And they’re not better off quitting if they still want to know how the game ends.
Not to play the devils advocate but they do have an argument. Not in the physics point because physics haven’t been done to death so that part of Half-life 2 IMO is still fresh. But the rest of Half-life 2 can be dull and boring and nonsensical if played today. Half-life 2 was such a cultural shift that everything great about it has been dissected, analyzed and improved upon wherever possible.
Much like Half-life 1 the things that made the game great are industry standard now. You’re used to the greatness so all you see are the flaws. The boat section is too long, the car section is poorly paced, the story is too cryptic, the list probably goes on. But anyone who played it at launch knows how fucking sick the game is because there was nothing else like it.
Friends of mine who played at two different points far after launch still found it to be just as great, even if the physics and facial animations were no longer best in class.
I personally played it some time after Portal 2, probably 2015 or so. I found it great, particularly as far as lore and pacing are concerned. Sure, there are bits that drag, characters that aren’t well written, and plot/lore details that are too ambiguous, but I’d much rather that than hand-holdy, surface-level plot of most similar shooters, or plot told through YouTube videos and flavor text like many modern shooters. IMO, its still one of the best at what it does, and its still a personal favorite for that reason.
I still like its facial animation more than most Danes. They had tools that even set up random NPCs to have full lipsync and expressions for minor lines, without a mocap studio. Most AAA work these days doesn’t have that, or they dedicate such animation to when you’re in a zoomed in view to receive quests.
I tend to agree with this. I had given up on PC gaming by 2004 so did not play HL2 until the Orange Box on Xbox in 2007 and my reaction was “Jesus this is boring!”
I’ve tried to replay it a couple of times since then, most recently on Steam Deck, but it just doesn’t click with me and I give up around the Canals.
That’s an insane claim to me. HL2 set the bar for worldbuilding. From the guy muttering “don’t drink the water” in the train station, to the people and vortigaunts building homes in the sewers, to the stick legged stalkers waddling around the citadel, HL2 took “show don’t tell” to heart. It was the most immersive experience anyone had played in a video game up to that point, or for years after.
I’ll grant you that other games have learned a lot from it, but I would say the vast majority haven’t. Games still come out today where everything needs to be spoonfed to the player literally for them to stop and process what they’re looking at, instead of just running and gunning mindlessly.
When you say HL2 can be boring and nonsensical if played today, the first thing that comes to mind are all the people who turn movie subtitles on, and then for 75% of the runtime their eyes are in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, not taking in any of the visual information the filmmaker is putting in front of them. Like, yeah, HL2 is quite boring when you’re not looking at it.
Half-Life was the same. The game doesn’t spoon feed you a narrative, the same way real life doesn’t have a narrator (at least one outside of your head).
You need to pay attention to your surroundings, listen in to NPCs talking, read posters on the wall, etc to piece together the story.
It was and is one of the cooler ways to do storytelling in my opinion. Cutscenes etc are fine but for a first person game, I love the immersion of the story happening around you rather then being loredumped on you while your agency is taken away from you.
Agreed. And in this line of more subtle storytelling, from the games I played from the franchise, if anything, it took all the way to Portal 2 for some things to start making sense.
Not only the author of the post frame the ineffably marvelous Ubisoft for their Assassin’s Creed only, or the people in the organization who are not even related to the case, and for literally unknown reason, but also the author of the review feels like a disrespectful bigot who has likely a bad time yet enough to make a choice to inscribe their pure hatred into someone’s effort, history, and indeed novelty. One might want to suggest them to try creating anything at least remotely marvelous to the subjects, they try speaking at, with their own hands…
Such a deep sorrow some people do not care about their actions, about anyone, including artists, developers, people in general… and ruin this world in hatred and utter, disgusting unfairness…
You do you, @Speedforce and that reviewer, and let’s hope no one will state something so awful about your work after decades, hatefully believing their word has any weight the world outside their mind of hatred.
You use AI for literally its most dangerous possible use case. And I assume you used a mediocre translator for everything else. Try DeepL, I found it has good results most of the time.
Sorry, no. And I am sorry you found LLM useful, and consider experimental/unverified data “dangerous”, likely inadequately or for the sense of hateful trolling, and it’s hard to live that way, I presume…
Watch Dogs 2 is a weird one. I absolutely understand all the criticism and see the flaws, but I still play it and the breaks between two runs only get shorter. I love its rendition of SF and the Bay Area, the game has that je-ne-sais-quoi that draws me towards it.
Thank you! I believe both titles are abs((float)$incredible)/INF… The story, characters, references, technical features, or every single bit and algorithm is perfect…
Not to mention upgraded kernels and shells, including drones and 'dgets!
Yet it all may not match the “good” you are searching for at this particular moment, or would it? How could we know!
Both titles were developed by different genius teams even, the former is Ubisoft Monreal, the latter - Ubisoft Toronto!
I.e. Even if MetaSploit and not Snyk’s or PortSwigger’s but FOSS is there… you may still find that the payload in all the exploits the solution provides you with, written by OSINT or more hopefully red… authors on the wires, is indeed a required parameter to be set upon execution/injection by you, the main host in the network! 🦋
How to not find Watch_Dogs 2 and Watch_Dogs Legion both very different and ineffably marvelous…
I uploaded a few screenshots found in some remote backups:
Oh I’m so sorry, it seems that you struggle with reading!!!
This isn’t anything to be embarrassed about, kids and adults have trouble with reading and comprehension all the time. I’d encourage you to get your parents or a guardian to look into education help. Even (at the worst) YouTube should have plenty of basic comprehension lessons available, which will make following these complex patch notes easier to understand!
Let me know when retro deck supports Switch emulators
Let me know if I can be any further help! More than happy to help you with reading. I’m also really good friends with the developers behind RetroDECK, so I can always pass on your beautifully and kindly expressed comments.
That’s nice but for me if a software is also available as a Flatpak it’s an advantage for people that use Flatpak. If it’s available only as a Flatpak (which this one is) it’s a disadvantage for all the people that don’t use it. 2GB for one app is insane. Duckstation is ~80MB
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