The Stack

The original Half-Life memorably begins as a literal “game on rails”, with the player confined¹ to a train car as it passes by various scenes you’ll encounter later in the game. It’s essentially a cross between a theme park ride and machinima.

The equivalent scene in Half-Life 2 comes toward the end, when Gordon rides around the invaders’ cavernous citadel in a coffin-like restraint hanging from a network of rails, a device seen earlier hauling prisoners around. Where the Half-Life train was a vehicle of foreshadowing, this is one of recapitulation and recontextualization, as you’re shown the things you’ve been fighting against — the gunships and tripod robots and cyborgs (for that’s what the Combine soldiers are, as the player certainly suspects by this point) — as mass-produced components of a vast, inhuman war machine that Hitler could only dream of.

It would be daunting to stand alone against all this if it weren’t for the fact that you know the game is ending soon and all you really have to stand against is a final puzzle-boss. The game powers you up for the last few battles, doubling your maximum “energy” (armor) and granting you a last-minute Ulitmate Weapon, after destroying all your other weapons to make sure you use only the Ultimate one.

The crazy thing is that the Ultimate Weapon is a powered-up Gravity Gun. The Gravity Gun is one of three special-purpose weapons in the game, the other two being the Pheropod that controls the bugs, and the rocket launcher. (A rocket launcher may not sound like a special weapon — it’s part of the Doom-standard arsenal, after all — but Half-Life 2 turns it into a special weapon by (a) only letting you carry three rockets at a time and (b) providing enemies that can only be killed by hitting them with more than three rockets. Thus, it’s not so much a weapon as a device the designers use to make you run around looking for ammo while getting shot at.) The Gravity Gun’s merits are basically that it can thump headcrabs at a slightly greater range than the crowbar, and that you can throw it into reverse to attract objects. The latter function is much more useful than the former: throughout the game, one can use it to pick up supply boxes lodged in unsafe or inaccessible spots, and there are specific scenes where you can use it to do things like pull the plug out of a force field generator while on the wrong side of the force field. In short, it’s more tool than weapon, and appropriately goes under the same hotkey as the crowbar. It’s a clear precursor of the Portal Gun in both its non-combat utility and its three-flanged design. But after receiving a shot of alien mojo, it becomes capable of hurling enemy soldiers about like rag dolls.

I talk about “aliens”, but the game is oddly non-specific about what the “benefactors” are. You see lots of clearly alien technology, but you never see what’s behind it. There are aliens, sure, but the only ones you see are mere animals (like the headcrabs and antlions) or on your side (like the Vortigaunts). The ultimate enemy in the game is not one of the invaders, but just their quisling, Dr. Breen. Breen is a transhumanist apologist for alien atrocities who seems to have bartered control of Earth for protection against the creatures unleashed back in the first game. Breen is also a personal acquantance of Gordon from Black Mesa. Towards the end, it’s mentioned that Breen was an administrator there. This makes so much sense.

Breen is also the only other character who hints that he knows about the enigmatic G-man, the Agent Smith-esque prime mover behind all the events of the series (it’s implied that he supplied the “anomalous materials” that Black Mesa was conducting research on, which would explain how he met Breen). Occasionally throughout the games, the G-man can be seen watching you from inaccessible locations, as if checking up on your progress, and in the ending of Half-Life, he offers you employment, although if you refuse his offer, you simply die alone in an alien world. Half-Life 2 apparently begins with the G-man waking up Gordon and re-inserting him into normal time, and ends with him freezing time to remove Gordon until he’s useful again. Even within his role in the game, he almost seems meta, which makes Breen’s knowledge of him seem a little Metal Gear Solid-ish. I saw an article somewhere arguing that the G-man is the personification of Valve Software: he sets everything up, he’s omnipresent within the game, he takes you away from the Half-Life world for years at a time between scenarios, and he offers you a mere illusion of choice — something he acknowledges outright in the ending scene of Half-Life 2. The Vortigaunts call Gordon “The One Free Man”, which is supremely ironic, given both the gameplay and the story. On the other hand, he’s also the one character in the game who isn’t controlled by a computer.

1. Actually, you can get out while the car is in motion if you really want to. You just die immediately. [↩]

If there’s one thing the Half-Life games do well, it’s keep the player playing. Partly they do this by keeping the gameplay varied, following up an intense firefight with a puzzle area, or a tunnel crawl where headcrabs leap at you from close up with a rooftop scene where you have to take down a flying gunship by means of steerable missiles.

More insidiously, though, they keep you playing by simply never giving you permission to stop. Most FPS games divide play into levels, and make it very clear when you go from one level to the next, usually in advance, making it easy to say “I’ll just finish this level and quit”. In Portal, for example, level transitions are signalled by arriving at an elevator. When you get in the elevator, the next level loads, as signalled by the word “Loading…” appearing in the middle of the screen. When you emerge from the elevator, the first thing you see is a sign indicating what level you’re on — the idea of levels is part of the story as well as part of the underlying technology. When you reach the point in the story where the levels stop, you no longer get the elevators, but you still occasionally get that “Loading…” message as you walk along.

And that’s mainly what happens in Half-Life. The transition is something you don’t see coming, and once it happens, you’re already in the next level, so you might as well keep playing. Beyond levels as unit-of-loading, the game is divided into Chapters, which are units of story and which are often themed around new gameplay elements (kind of like in DROD). But even the transitions between chapters are subtle, only signalled by a chapter title briefly overlaid on the screen while play continues as normal. The new weapon or monster or whatever that defines the chapter doesn’t necessarily show up right away, either.

The game is not without obvious stopping points — every once in a while there’s a Resistance base where you can replenish your ammo and listen to people talking plot. But I’ve been finding that I don’t stop at those places. I stop when I’m repeatedly failing to get through a fight. I figure that if I’m making no progress, it’s because I’m approaching it wrong, and should try it with a fresh mind later. This means that my typical session starts with a tough battle. This can’t be what the designers had in mind.

Apparently the folks at Valve decided that one of the flaws in the original Half-Life was the lack of sex appeal. Every human (or apparently human) character is either a wrinkled scientist, a security guard¹ with an unflattering uniform and a hick accent, a faceless enemy soldier, or a creepy probably-alien G-man. And with the exception of some special-forces ninjas who you hardly ever see (because they’re ninjas), they’re all male.

Half-Life 2 corrects this by (a) handsoming up Barney and making him into a hero of the resistance, and (b) introducing the young, attractive, tough-as-nails Alyx, daughter of one of the scientists and occasional companion to the player on missions. Alyx provides essential technical support as well as essential dialogue, driving the plot whenever she’s present. She’s handy in a firefight, too, helping you to flank the enemy: there’s one bit where she suggests that you surprise some CP troops by coming through two different doors at once, and it works beautifully if you follow her advice. And when you part ways, she says “Gordon… Take care of yourself” in a tone of voice that makes it clear that she’s the action hero’s designated love interest.

But personally, my heart belongs to another: the nameless resistance sqaddie who, alone with me in a courtyard littered with dead soldiers, spontaneously shared with me an incredible insight into her character. “Sometimes,” she said, “I dream about cheese.”

I’m probably not doing justice to the profundity of that statement. The delivery probably has a lot to do with it. But this is a person who’s living in a battlefield, who has to fight for every moment of her existence. And still, sometimes, she dreams about cheese. It was just a strange and beautiful moment.

The tragic thing about nameless squaddies, in both Half-Life and Half-Life 2, is that they always die. They come to you with great faith: you’re the famous Gordon Freeman, hero of the Black Mesa incident! With you on their side, they stand a fighting chance! And then they start following you around, and they help you survive encounters that would hav been very difficult otherwise, and then, one by one, they either get killed because you told them to go somwhere, or get killed because you didn’t tell them to go somewhere. But I took some personal interest in Cheese Girl, hoping that she, if no one else, would survive until we parted ways. No such luck. She was, in fact, the first to die. Later, though, thanks to the fairly small NPC pool, I met her again. And she joined my team again, and got killed again. It’s just like Silent Hill 2.

1. known as Barney — yes, there are multiple security guards, but they’re all known as Barney [↩]

The Half-Life games have a reputation as the thinking person’s gorefest. They focus more on environmental puzzles than the typical FPS. They pander to the intellectual mystique by giving us a bearded, bespectacled action hero with a PhD in theoretical physics. But mainly, the original was one of the first games of its genre to try to tell a compelling story, and to do it entirely through the FPS medium rather than through cutscenes or journal entries.

The story told wasn’t just a simplistic good-vs-evil one, or even morally-questionable-vs-evil (as seems to be fashionable in the more violent games these days), but one of confusion, of terrible things happening without anyone wanting them. One of the more effective plot elements is the re-evaluation of the soldiers. At first, the PC’s colleagues believe that soldiers are coming to rescue them from the monsters they’ve inadvertently unleashed, but it turns out that their orders are to contain the incident by killing everything on the site, scientists included. The soldiers are initially depicted as brutes who enjoy murdering unarmed civilians — “I killed twelve dumb-ass scientists and not one of ‘em fought back. This sucks.” — which justifies in the player’s mind anything you do to them in return. But later, you overhear other soldiers talking about Gordon Freeman, the player character, who’s been declared enemy #1 at that point. One of them says “All I know for sure is he’s been killing my buddies”, humanizing their side of the struggle. The climax of this part of the story is when you overhear a commander declaring in no uncertain terms that he disagrees with the orders. If that had happened earlier, there could have been reconciliation, but it’s too late. When he sees you, he will recognize you as the person who’s been killing his men. He’ll try to kill you to prevent you from killing him, which means you have to kill him to prevent him from killing you. You have to wonder how many real-world conflicts play out the same way, fear of violence making it a certainty.

Half-Life 2 also has masked soldiers, the “CP” (opposite of the PC?), first shown abusing the citizens of the dystopian city where the game starts. If the player is ever given reason to sympathize with them, I have yet to reach that point. OK, there is a scene at a recruitment office, where an applicant tells you that, although he doesn’t like the CP, he’s decided to join them because it beats starving to death on the street. But that’s been it so far. The game has, however, been rehabilitating the monsters. One of the most common monsters from Half-Life was the Vortigaunts, very-rougly-humanoid aliens that can shoot energy beams. In Half-Life 2, a number of them have learned English and joined the human resistance, and provide you with lots of assistance, making me feel guilty for having killed so many of them back in the first game. And one of the things that the Vortigaunts give you is the means to tame the bugs.

The game calls them “antlions”, even though that name is already taken. They’re roughly the size of large dogs, and they burrow under the sand, emerging to attack anything that walks on it, endlessly spawning more to replace those killed. One of the more interesting bits of gameplay is a sandy area with scattered rocks, where you can move safely as long as you stay on the rocks. If you slip, bugs come, and you have to get back on the rocks before you can kill them all, but their attacks tend to push you off.

Now, the bugs aren’t the sort of thing that can say “All I know for sure is he’s killing my buddies”. They’re dangerous animals, nothing more. Once you have a Pheropod, though, they’ll never hurt you: they’ll just follow you around, unless you throw the Pheropod at something, in which case they’ll rush over there and attack whatever they find. You can use this to fight battles without putting yourself at risk, crouching behind cover while your chitinous minions do all the work and get slaughtered in great numbers for your benefit. (This is another way that it’s a thinking person’s game: scenes that reward tactial thought more than quick reflexes. It’s the polar opposite of Serious Sam.)

There’s some uneasiness about this kind of fighting, though, because you’re basically using monsters to attack humans. In fact, you’re using them only against humans, as it’s established pretty early that the bugs are no good at all against monsters. Back in the first Half-Life, it was whispered among the soldiers that Freeman was responsible for the whole emergency — that he had deliberately summoned the monsters. While it’s true that he had a hand in the experiment that created the rifts between Earth and Xen, there was nothing deliberate about it. But now, in the sequel, you really are summoning alien monsters and setting them on your enemies. I really hope that the CP is making video recordings of these fights, because there’s some priceless anti-resistance propaganda to be made from this.

It turns out that Half-Life 2 does have a lot of open-air scenes after all. It’s also a very linear game, but the line varies in thickness: sometimes you’ll be out driving a vehicle (I’ve used a fanboat and a dune buggy so far, both of which look like they’re made of scrap metal), with a large area around you to do wide turns in, and suddenly your path will be blocked by a gate that can only be removed by throwing a switch inside a nearby building at the end of some small rooms and twisty hallways.

When you’re outside, the game does its best to give an impression that the environment is larger than it actually is, and that you have more options than you actually have. Obviously it isn’t just FPS games that try to do this: adventures have been creating the illusion of rooms just out of your reach since the intro to Planetfall. What it means in Half-Life 2 is that attempts at exploring the periphery loop back fairly quickly, and the game takes advantage of the beefiness of its graphics engine to render unreachable scenery objects in full detail out to a considerable distance. I haven’t encountered the “invisible wall” effect found in many other games, constraining you when you stray from the path by halting your forward movement for no obvious physical reason, but there are lots of places that look like they’re passable until you’re very close, at which point it’s clear that the slope is too steep or the gap is too wide or whatever.

It reminds me of a landscaping technique sometimes called a “ha-ha”. A ha-ha is essentially an inconspicuous ditch or drop-off with a retaining wall. The idea is that it gives you a seemingly-continuous view from your manor window of verdant pastures unmarred by fences, but still keeps the cattle off your croquet lawn.

But, although the player’s view in Half-Life 2 is the illusory continuity seen from the manor house, you’re not on the high ground. The ha-ha is there to limit you. Thus, the level designers of Half-Life 2 treat the players like cattle.

I’m fortunate enough to be one of the few people who bought the Orange Box without paying for anything twice. I’d played the original Half-Life, and I knew I wanted to try the sequel, but in 2004, when it was released, my home system was behind the technology curve and probably incapable of displaying the game in all its glory. (Even on my current system, the game doesn’t recommend all the highest graphics settings.) So I resolved to wait for it to be anthologized, and was rewarded for that decision with Portal.

The first and most obvious thing about Half-Life 2 is that it’s graphically impressive — far more so than Portal, which used the same engine. I’m probably more easily impressed by graphics than usual right now, given the quality of the 3D graphics in the last game I played, but that’s not all there is to it. Half-Life 2 puts a lot of effort into strutting its stuff. The first room, for example, has a huge holographic TV: a fuzzily translucent texture-mapped object that uses another realtime 3D scene as its texture. It seems to me like this stuff is somewhat front-loaded, with the biggest visual thrills coming at the very beginning, when you’re just walking along and looking at the scenery because you don’t have a gun yet. As with the first Half-Life, this segment of the game lasts a surprisingly long time, but once you can shoot at monsters, the game seems to settle down into mostly tunnels. But it can’t all be tunnels, can it? There are those immense tripod robots; they wouldn’t fit in tunnels. I’ve caught just the merest glimpse of one of those as it lumbered past a barricaded alley, and that glimpse was breathtaking, even though I had seen pictures of it before. So it’s not just the advanced technology that’s impressive: there’s good cinematography showing it off, which is especially impressive when you consider that the player is in control of the camera. But the player, by and large, looks where the designer wants the player to look. As in an adventure game, it’s all about manipulating the player, and rewarding the player for being manipulated.

I’m a couple of chapters in now, and the gameplay has been mostly standard FPS fare with scattered puzzles, but with some twists. There’s a kind of flying robot that flashes a bright light at you, blinding you for a few seconds if you were facing it, which gives the player a motivation to aim away from the enemy sometimes. There’s the exploding barrels, which aren’t new in themselves (they’ve been a mainstay since Doom), but the degree to which the enemies use them as a weapon against you is.

Anyway, I’m quite delighted with the gleefully grim tone of the work. The original Half-Life, with its ironic juxtaposition of alien carnage with things like workplace safety posters, had a strong vibe of comfortable simplicity running headlong into its inadequacy against the horrors of the world, like a 1950’s film on surviving a nuclear attack. (The title itself seems to have been chosen for this connotation. It has nothing to do with the game’s content.) HL2 turns that up a notch, giving us a smiling, genial politico beaming proudly as he welcomes you to his full-blown dystopia and explains why the planet-wide field suppressing human reproduction is actually a good thing.

OK, enough smart-aleckry. I really did want to try Portal (Activision, 1986), and I could easily make another post or two about its content, but let’s talk about Portal (Valve, 2007). It’s a real gamer’s game, impossible to do in any other medium. I’m going to skip over the basics here, because they seem to have become an unavoidable part of geek culture just now. Something Awful and xkcd have riffed on the game, and “The cake is a lie” has become almost as oft-quoted a catchphrase as the intro to Zero Wing was a few years back.

And there’s a big lesson right there. Six months ago, if you asked anyone who paid any attention to the game industry what the defining game of the year was going to be, there’s a good chance that they would have said Halo 3. It had the big marketing push, the tie-in products, the article in Wired about their innovative development process. Microsoft positioned it as the Xbox 360’s killer app, and tried to make its launch into as major an event as the release of the final Harry Potter book. And they sold a squillion copies, because obviously everyone with an Xbox 360 had to have it, if only because nothing else of note was being released for the Xbox 360. But once they bought it, it just seemed to sink out of sight. No one talked about it — what was there to talk about? No, the game that people are actually still talking about is one created as an extra for an anthology package. I suppose that the folks at Valve felt that this was a relatively safe place to experiment, as there was essentially no money riding on Portal’s success. In that regard it resembles an indie title, but thanks to its tie to Half-Life, it got a lot of polish and a wide release. The best of both worlds.

One of the most obvious ways this affected the game is that the developers didn’t feel it necessary to pad it out to the length that people expect of a major release. There isn’t a lot of repetition in the puzzles, and when an element is repeated, it’s generally to expose a new twist on the idea. This is generally a good thing, but I did feel that the puzzle elements had some unexplored potential. For example, the game never really takes advantage of the portals’ ability to reorient the player, apart from turning vertical momentum into horizontal momentum. But maybe there are some fan-made levels by now that do this sort of thing. That seems to be what fan levels are for: exploiting every detail.

Since Portal’s memes are in the air and hard to avoid, I knew a fair amount about what to expect going in, including some things, such as the fate of the Weighted Companion Cube, that it would probably have been better not to know in advance. But there were still surprises. I’m going to get a little spoilery, so if you haven’t played the game yet, for goodness sake do so now. If you don’t want to spring for the entire Orange Box, you can get Portal individually via Steam for $20. This may seem like a lot for a game that takes about four hours to finish, but it’s a very high-quality four hours, and no more expensive than going to a cinema and watching two two-hour movies. And the movies wouldn’t even have bonus levels afterward.

Somewhat perversely, I had played the fan-made 2D Flash version before playing the original game. As a result, I was somewhat taken aback by how much tutorial the original has (especially given its length), and the way that it doles out the portal-making capabilities piece by piece. The Flash version gets started a lot faster, and actually does better job, in some ways, of exploring the puzzle potential of the basic concept. But it has a very different nature: it’s just a straightforward series of puzzles, culminating in cake (no lie).

Whereas Portal itself subverts exactly this structure beautifully. You have a set sequence of 19 puzzle-based levels to complete, as you’re reminded by the helpful signs at the beginning of each test area, and the last of those 19 levels is exactly what we’ve come to expect of final levels in puzzle-based games: it’s a kind of a final exam of all the techniques you’ve learned over the course of the game. The thing is, the game is only about half over at that point. Afterward, the narrative goes off the rails. Just the narrative, mind you. The gameplay is just as linear and level-based as ever. But for me, at least, escaping into the guts of the complex provoked a stronger sense of panic than anything else in the game. At one point early in that section, I was convinced that GLaDOS had sent something to chase me, on the basis of a couple of triggered motions and some ambiguity about the source of the sound effects, and I hurried to get someplace that could only be reached by portals. I think I was wrong about that — nothing of the sort happened in the game before or afterward. But it was a plausible development: I had broken the rules, so GLaDOS could break them too.

GLaDOS really steals the show, by the way. She reminds me a lot of SHODAN from the System Shock games, but less gothic and more childish. Somehow, the way she keeps repeating lies that have already been exposed, apparently unable to comprehend that you might not trust her, manages to keep being delightful. And her closing song, “Still Alive”, has managed to replace “Invisible Musical Friend” (the Skullmonkeys bonus room theme) as best videogame song of all time. I honestly don’t know if the game would have been able to find its way into everyone’s hearts without her setting the tone. It would still have the gameplay and the puzzles, of course, and Valve managed a similar sort of sardonic deadpan humor without her in Half-Life, but it’s not really the same.

It turns out that the final levels shed the halloween motif pretty quickly and settle into something more like the knightly stuff I was expecting. Not that this has a very great effect on on the game — the monsters are the same as always, and not even reskinned. But the ultimate goal is the Holy Grail (which helps you get a spaceship somehow), and the final boss is a gray-robed wizard-looking guy, albeit one who’s 80 feet tall according to the stats provided in-game. His schtick is that he summons random assortments of the standard monsters, which makes for a difficult fight until you find out about the cheap trick that lets you take him down with near absolute safety. Something of a letdown, but then, the end boss in Serious Sam: The First Encounter is a really tough act to follow.

Looking back on the whole game, how would I describe it? Oddly medatative. The bulk of the player’s time is spent on chaotic battles in open areas, which is the kind of action that mainly engages the lower brain functions, leaving the player’s thoughts free to wander. Sometimes this means I was thinking about tactics — deciding which weapon to use, whether to seek cover, and so forth — but by the end, I had pretty much got that down. There are only so many permutations the game supports, and by the end, you’ve seen them all several times. I suppose most FPSes deal with this by varying the environment a lot, adding in puzzles and platformer sections if necessary. But Sam, especially toward the end, mainly plays to its strength: chaotic battles in large, open environments.

So, do I want to continue on to Serious Sam 2? Maybe, eventually. There are other FPS games on the Stack, and a distinct possibility that I’ll be sick of them before I get through them all.

I’m about halfway through the final level now, having finished the biggest, most elaborate courtyard battle yet, with close to 500 monsters of every kind. At one point Sam says “Never underestimate the power of stupid things in large numbers.” It could be the game’s motto.

There were basically two pauses in this battle where I needed to advance to the next location trigger before more enemies would spawn. (Presumably trying to just run to the end would activate them all at once.) Naturally I saved at these junctures, but in such a long stretch of peril, just two saves wasn’t nearly enough for me. So I wound up using the quicksave key a lot in the middle of dodging fire. Now, I don’t like doing this. Not only does it split up the action and draw away from the flow, it’s just too risky: fairly often, you wind up quicksaving a split-second before something kills you from behind. But Serious Sam has a nice way around that: instead of just one quicksave slot, it has eight, cycling to the next one on every save. The quickload button always loads the last quicksave, but you can access all eight from the main menu, so occasional bad timing doesn’t hurt so much. I think this is a sign that the designers had mid-fight quicksaving in mind, that they consider it okay. There’s sort of an implicit bargain there: we get authorial permission to engage in behavior that’s considered borderline cheating by many, and in return the designers get our permission to put us through really long unrelieved action sequences.

The third segment of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter takes place around a bunch of castles in eastern Europe. I knew when I got the game that there was a section with European castles, and I expected it to be presented in the usual vaguely-chivalric fantasy vein. But no, this is Eastern Europe¹ , which has a whole different set of tropes. The styling goes dark and gothic, and the background music turns into stereotypical old-fashioned B-movie creepshow stuff. How stereotypical? It’s based on the exact same four-note organ motif as the theme to Buffy.

A funny thing about the music in this game: it’s tied to the intensity of the action. I think each level has three main pieces of background music (excluding special areas with their own music): a sedate and almost ambient one for solitary unmolested exploration, a more uptempo one with more instruments for minor encounters, and one with electric guitars added for pitched battles. The funny thing about this is that the background music actually gives you information. Sometimes your first clue that you’re being attacked is that the music kicked up a gear. Likewise, when you’re finishing a battle, you can tell by the music when you’ve downed the last foe. It reminds me of Jaws (or rather, since I haven’t actually seen Jaws, it reminds me of the jokes about Jaws), how the shark’s presence was always signalled by the soundtrack before you saw it. But usually, in a movie, only the audience is aware of the soundtrack, so there’s no chance that the hero will notice the monster theme and react to it. In my hands, Sam varies his behavior in response to the music all the time.

1. Exactly where in Eastern Europe is unspecified. But he year is given as 1138 AD, which probably means it’s in modern-day Thxylvania or something. [↩]