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blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

I warned you dog

I said I'd play Half-Life again

You can't stop me


blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

Playing a modded Black Mesa that restored it really got me to realize this, but GOOD LORD "On a Rail" is too freakin' long. It feels like it's a third of all of Half-Life. I can see why Black Mesa ultimately shortened it because it feels like it should be this tiny minigame section and it just goes and goes

However: having played the restored version for Black Mesa, On a Rail does actually have a lot of really fun ways you can set traps for marines and get a leg up over on them. On a Rail (and to an extent Power Up, the previous chapter) have some of the rare few legit monster closets in Half-Life, where you go through an area once, make it safe, but then you double back around through something or you pass a trigger and new enemies will appear

If you know where those are ahead of time, this is right around when the game is introducing tripmines. So you can drop some mines in key locations and stop a problem before it starts. You'd think that was the intended purpose, but a lot of the most fun ones are far enough apart (time-wise) that if you're an obsessive quicksaver, they're effectively useless.

For example, in Power Up, there's this one central room where soldiers have bunkered up. You have to take an elevator down and drain some water to get the generator back up and running. There's a few places where, if you know where the soldiers are coming from after the generator starts, you can blow most of them up with tripmines as they run in -- but you'd have to know that 5-10 minutes before it happens.

There's another place in On a Rail like this, where you spy two parallel rails and one empty rail car. You're hunting around for a switch that will let your rail car come through this zone, which takes several minutes. When you do come through here later, that empty rail car will have soldiers on it that attempt to match pace with you so they can shoot at you. If you booby trap the empty car early, they explode and you can continue safely.

(Alternatively, you can just skip the switch entirely, because that other rail car is the one you need to progress.)

ANYWAY I played Half-Life for like two hours tonight and a lot of that was On a Rail. AND I DIDN'T EVEN GET TO THE NEXT CHAPTER


blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

You get through "On a Rail" and suddenly the game hits the ground racing at light speed. I burned through four? Five chapters tonight?1 In the time it took me to do all most of On a Rail last night. I saw and did so much four screenshots isn't enough to cover it all. So here's one to grow on, because you know somebody at Valve was super proud of this fighter jet they made out of map brushes:


  1. Let's see... Finished On a Rail, Apprehension, Residue Processing, Questionable Ethics, and started Surface Tension. In the previous post I said "On a Rail" felt like a third of Half-Life? 5 of 18 chapters comes out to a little under 30% of the game.


blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

This is where the game stops messing around. I grew up playing Half-Life on easy mode, and I sometimes talked about how bumping it up to normal turns it into a "completely different game." I don't necessarily feel that way anymore (I've adjusted to harder games these days), but I get some of that feeling back as you get to the perimeter of the Lambda Labs where all the munitions are being kept. Until you get to Xen, this is the hardest the game ever gets. Encounters get a lot easier if you plan ahead and use a bit of stealth.

In one of my previous posts I talked about how you could start using tripmines to set traps for soldiers, but you needed to have a lot of foresight to do it. I feel like Valve kind of realized this problem, and so we get the hornet gun and the snarks, weapons explicitly designed to find soldiers you cannot see yet. Got a blind corner? Fire off a burst of hornets and see if they find a target to home in on. Have a drop and you can't see if anything is waiting for you below? Throw a snark down there and wait for it to sniff out a meal (if it does, drop a couple more down).

The rub -- and something I didn't realize until this playthrough -- is that snarks and hornets do not actually target aliens. Only humans. Drop a snark in front of an Alien Grunt and they'll totally ignore each other. Which, yeah, okay, I suppose that makes sense.

Half-Life, "Lambda Core" -- The last human outpost at Black Mesa, where the darkest secrets are kept.

As I enter the Lambda Core, the question becomes whether I will actually do Xen in this run or not. I've only ever actually done Xen normally once, ever. It's bad. And if you watch the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Documentary, there's some long standing validation when they talk about how some of those Xen maps are "basically first drafts" due to Sierra's release deadline (in other words, even Valve knows they aren't very good). But maybe I'll save that for later.


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in reply to @blazehedgehog's post:

Another excellent game I can't play because some of the monsters are just too scary/disgusting. (I guess watching Alien movies at night as a kid wasn't such a great idea after all.)