Dominik Diamonds Are Forever: The Orange Box, Part 2: Half Life 2

It’s easy to see why someone would be scared of the dark. You don’t know what’s in it for one. A lot of movies and video games are set in dark and dreary places, with the goal to give you the willies. However, it takes something special to make you scared in broad daylight and Half Life 2 is a game that does this with relish.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I’d only briefly played the first Half Life and I’d found it too difficult and a little bit too unsettling, so I didn’t get very far in it. However, recently I’d purchased the curiously titled “Orange Box”, which is a disc with 3 games on it. Half Life 2 is one of those games. I started playing it not sure what to expect and within 15 minutes I found myself running across a roof in broad daylight being fired at by a helicopter without so much as a sandwich to defend myself with.

Half Life 2 wastes no time in scaring the fudge out of you, that’s for sure. The game starts up with a haunting and frankly disturbing video where a man encourages you to “wake up and smell the ashes”. You then find yourself walking through a dystopian train station while armoured guards smack you with a baton just to pass the time. After negotiating the train station and the adjourning square outside, I found myself in an apartment block, which was in the midst of a raid from the Gestapo. I then had to hot foot it to the roof while being chased by enough members of the law to inadequately police a 1980’s football match and promptly fell to the pavement below to be met with a sickening symphony of cracking bone and splitting sinews.

“How come every Half Life game seemingly involves me falling to my death in the first 5 minutes” I wondered aloud. After a couple more head first dives to the inviting concrete below, I managed to blunder my way into another building to be rescued by the resistance.

And that’s how Half Life 2 starts. I’ll repeat, that’s how the bloody thing STARTS!!!

Half Life 2 is a first person shooter set in a world where everything has gone to crap. Weird monsters constantly attack you and when the monsters relent for a few moments, super powered super cops attack you instead. In fact, one of my bigger criticisms of the game would be how most of the enemies you fight are so ruddy strong. At first you’re armed with just a crowbar but eventually you can pick up a pistol and a machine gun to help you with your villain killing ways. However, the guns are so ineffectual sometimes you could be confused with mistaking the bullets they contain for being made out of cotton wool.

At one point I was ambushed by an angry cop at a train station. Being no more than 3 foot away from him, and armed with my pistol, I not unwisely pointed the gun right at his head and promptly unleashed some lead on him. 3 bullets later and he was starting to show signs of fatigue, 5 bullets later and he looked a bit peaky, 17 bullets later and he finally fell to floor dead. I exaggerate of course, but seriously, this cop seemed to have a skull made out of Plexiglas.

Another complaint I’d have is that on more than one occasion I found my character stuck on the scenery. At one point I actually had to restart the game as my character got hopelessly stuck on a corner, like a fly would get caught in a spiders web. I tried crouching, jumping and even tried shooting at the wall in futile hope that it would release me from its iron grip, but alas, it would not.

So that’s where you would deduct points from Half Life 2. That being said, those gripes would be minor on my part. The game is an atmospheric masterpiece. I found myself getting wrapped up in the action on more than one occasion. Sometimes a helicopter will come by looking for you. I leapt behind a crate and felt my heart start pounding as I snuck a glance round the side to see if the copter had left.

The game has a really nifty physics engine as well. Sometimes you will be called upon to stack crates on top of a see-saw so that you can access other areas of the game. It works quite well and I had a lot of fun trying to work out what I was supposed to do, without getting too frustrated.

Overall, the moody atmosphere and interesting puzzles make Half Life 2 a great game. Even with the slew of First Person Shooters that have found their way onto consoles, I would still say that Half Life 2 is one of the best you can get.

I’d like to discuss the story a bit but I honestly had no bloody idea what was going on and the game doesn’t really sit down and explain to you. That being said, the gameplay is good enough that I didn’t really care, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

I’ll give it 8 out of 10

Buy it

Coming next, Part 3 of the Orange Box Review, Portal!

Dominik Diamonds are Forever - The Orange Box, Part 1: Introduction

The Orange Box – Part One: Introduction

I’ve never been much of a PC Gamer. I still have tragic flashbacks to my youth when I used to attempt to play Actua Soccer 2 on my Windows 95 Packard Bell, which had a whole 16 MB (Count em!) of memory and a graphics card that would have barely challenged a ZX Spectrum.

I’ve just never really taken the time to properly invest in the sort of PC you actually need to play games with any reasonable joy. I did have “The Movies” on my old Windows XP PC as well as FIFA 07 and they ran reasonably well but they were also hardly games that required a lot of graphical power and processing speed.

As a result of my PC woes, I’ve been pretty much exclusively a console gamer through the years and thus I wasn’t a member of the cherished “PC First Person Shooter Appreciation Club” of the late 90’s and early 00’s. I did play Deus EX but that was on the PS2. My review of that is wildly simple, It's bloody good but I could never be bothered to finish it.

I briefly played the original Half Life on the PS2 and found it to be a strange and unnerving experience. From what I recall, it involved walking around some sort of super-secret science lab and the game wouldn’t let me do anything until I pushed a tray, possibly containing deserts and assorted liqueurs, into some energy thing, which promptly caused everything to hit the bloody fan and the entire world went to crap.

I then spent the better part of 15 minutes walking around with a crowbar, not knowing what the hell to do, before falling down an elevator shaft to my death. This being the days before you could hop on You Tube and watch a video walkthrough, I instead opted to switch the PS2 off and slink away with my tail firmly betwixt my legs.

When Half Life 2 came out on the PC I never played it and I didn’t care to play it when it was released on the X-Box 360 either as a part of the curiously titled “Orange Box”. For those who aren’t aware of said Clementine Holding Device, “The Orange Box” contains 3 games on one disc, these games being “Portal”, “Team Fortress” and “Half Life 2”. TOB was originally released way back in 2007 but I never bothered to check it out.

However, I recently watched the Zero Punctuation review of The Orange Box and it made me want to finally take the plunge and play it. So thus I purchased it and over the next 3 reviews I’ll be reviewing each game on the disc, starting with Half Life 2.

 

I've not got a specific timeline as to when all this will be done and I may do other blog posts in between. All I will say is that you can expect me to finish this review before North New Hampshire Wanderers win the World Soccer Super Bowl Series Challenge Cup (I'm hoping this will manage everyone's expectations to a satisfactory level)

So brace yourselves people, cos Mike’s going to be playing some games, and he’s probably going to do a really bad job at it! Huzzah!

Dominik Diamonds are Forever - FIFA 13

FIFA 13 Review

Before we start here, yes I am aware that this game came out a whole year ago and yes, I know the new FIFA will soon be out making this review pretty much redundant, but may I counter those fine points by saying “NYAH NAH NAH NAH NAAHHHHH!”

For those of you who don’t know, I’m an Everton Fan. Supporting Everton can sometimes be the equivalent of dipping your nether regions in jam and then wandering past a school of wasps at lunchtime. However, in FIFA world, managing Everton can be quite nice, even life affirming. I don’t know why but there’s something viscerally pleasing about buying David Luiz and seeing him run around in Everton’s immediately recognisable Royal Blue.

In fact, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about FIFA is making esoteric transfers from one club to another. Want to see Gianfranco Zola playing for Stevenage Borough? FIFA will do it. Want to see Eric Cantona play for Ipswich? FIFA will do it. Want to see Neil Shipperly calmly put out of his misery with a long range sniper rifle by Martin O’Neil on a grassy knoll? I’m sure FIFA will think of a way of adding it at some point, probably as DLC.

Ultimately, FIFA hasn’t really changed that much over the years. It’s essentially like having a high res Subutteo set that you can edit and play with to your heart’s content. Granted, there are games that let you edit in more detail than FIFA, but it’s always one of the aspects I’ve most enjoyed. It certainly adds life to the game experience. Most of my FIFA games start off grounded in reality as I try and use the real stats and teams, but by the end pretty much all of the teams are beyond warped. I usually load up Everton at some point in the edit mode. I also loaded up Arsenal with a front 3 of Suarez, Rooney and Walcott, only to crash to a 5-4 defeat to Spurs. It was fun though.

FIFA is quite easy for a non-football fan to pick up. Well, any non-football fan who has played a video game before. The defending system is overly difficult but you can switch to “Legacy Defending” which is a lot easier. You essentially just have to press “A” or “X” (Depending on the console you’re using) and the players will run right at the opposing player with the ball. If you’re rubbish at games, like I am, it becomes pretty easy to get to grip with after a game or two.

The in game difficulty mode is something that really winds me up though. There are 5 levels of difficulty on FIFA. The problem is that levels 2 and 3 are so far apart from each other, they might as well be in different solar systems trying to contact each other with two plastic cups and a piece of string. I went from killing teams 10-0 on level 2 to getting beaten handily 2-0 by the computer on level 3. Now I’m all for a challenge when it comes to gaming but, as Lisa Simpson once so eloquently put, I want a challenge I can actually do!

Smashing teams 7-1 every time is ultimately unsatisfying but after having 3 or 4 games on level 3 I would have rather of gone 7 rounds with Mad Max in the Thunder Dome. And I’m a football fan! I can only imagine what non-fans were thinking at that point. They’d probably already switched the console off and were balls deep into a game of Mario Party or Call of Dead Space Splinter Halo: The Bloodening.

That being said, there’s enough challenge here that gamers of most skill sets will be able to find a difficulty level which isn’t the gaming equivalent of shooting paraplegic fish in a very small barrel, which has to be a positive thing. Challenge does add length to a game. Despite my previous paragraph of whining, I do regularly play at level 3 now and it’s gotten to the point where the matches are quite close. The game can still be infuriatingly cheap at times, but so long as I restrict myself to only a few games per session, I can still enjoy a decent challenge without tearing my curtains off the wall and hiding underneath them softly sobbing to myself.

There’s also online play on FIFA, and I hear it’s quite good. Online play has never really been my thing outside of Crackdown and COD 4, but if it’s your thing then FIFA does it well, apparently. I have no idea what on Earth “Ultimate Team” is but I’ve spoken to people who love it so much they want to cook it dinner, mow its lawn and tickle is nipples, so there’s that to think about as well

At the end of the day, it’s FIFA. Graphically some of the players look like mince but that’s to be expected when a game has such a huge database of players. FIFA 13 is a game that has enough about it that it can appeal to both casual football fans and hardcore footy lovers. It does it with a generally slick presentation and it’s possible for pretty much every gamer to find his or her level while playing it.

You can get it now on the cheap, and the edit mode will let you make the transfers that need to be made so it may be worth a pop. I certainly enjoyed it, despite some of the misery it dropped on me at times. At the end of the day, that’s football.

9 out of 10