It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
Bink video. Whatever happened to that, anyway? To this day, the only time I’ve ever seen it used was for the promotional videos that came out at E3 2003, about a year before the game was released. It was a series of tech-demos and gameplay footage, but holy shit had we ever seen anything like it before? Hell no. There were a handful of them all focused on a different aspect or level from the game, and I must have watched them a hundred times each.
They showed off detailed NPC facial animations, amazing textures, lighting and water effects, plus several exciting gunfights with enemy soldiers, but everyone knew what the star attraction was: THE PHYSICS! No other game had simulated this level of physical interaction before. You could trigger traps of giant metal girders that would swing and hit enemies, shoot individual chunks of wood out of planks, and it would splinter and fall apart, and you could pick up grenades and throw them back at your enemies using the iconic gravity gun. When these snippets of footage dropped, anticipation for the game skyrocketed, and I remember the next few months dragging by as I waited, and waited, and waited, frothing at the mouth for the game to come out. Oh, the innocence of youth, believing that one year was a long time to wait for a sequel…
Back to those physics for a second, the gravity gun is as iconic for gaming as the lightsaber is for movies. It’s a versatile weapon and manipulation tool which gives the player an unprecedented freedom to interact with the environment. So, naturally, HL2’s levels are littered with objects to pick up and throw around. The physics were so fun to play with that mods sprang up giving you the tools to really mess with things. Garry’s Mod was by far the most successful, allowing you to pose ragdolls, create unique dioramas using all of the in-game objects or just spawn a bunch of zombies and combine soldiers in a field and watch them duke it out. The mod was very fun by itself, but I’m mostly grateful that it gave Chris Livingston the tools to create the hilarious antics of Gordon Frohman.
I feel like it’s not a stretch to say that Half Life 2 also featured the best AI companion of its time in the form of Alyx Vance. The whole roster of supporting characters were great, but Alyx was pretty special, not for Merle Dandridge’s excellent performance or for her character’s dynamic animation, both of which deserve heaps of praise, but for the fact that she created a robotic “pet” Dog.
As I’ve mentioned before, I love dogs. And Dog is just glorious. Every time he shows up, it causes you to cheer out loud. He’s a destructive loose cannon but somehow still lovable. Valve are the masters of the scripted sequence, and all of Dog’s moments happen in-game right in front of you. Many other games have since replicated this style of immersive storytelling, but Half Life 2 set the example to live up to.
Half Life 2 was the first proper game released on Steam way back in 2004. (Side note: Counter Strike: Condition Zero was technically first, but nobody remembers it.) HL2 actually required Steam, and at the time, PC gamers weren’t all ready for the idea of needing to make an account and install some random bit of extra software just to play their new game. Digital downloads were brand new, and most gamers still had to buy their games on physical discs with boxes from an actual shop on the high street. Steam felt like an unnecessary bit of bloatware.
Fast forward twenty-odd years, and Steam is widely hailed as the best digital provider of PC games on the market. Its seasonal sales are legendary, and it has by far the widest selection of indie titles thanks to its open-door policy of letting every basement developer and his dog under the sun sell their game on its platform. There’s a whole lot of guff amongst the good, but there’s no denying that there is no PC gaming without Steam these days.
This site wouldn’t exist without Half Life 2. It’s the game that brought Paul and myself, the creators of Bang Click Reload, together as workmates and eventually best mates. We were both involved in the Flash animation scene back in 2008, posting our cartoons to sites like Newgrounds. I was working at a marketing agency, and one day my boss told me to review some CVs for a potential new recruit. Paul’s bio mentioned his Flash animations and I followed the trail and found several of his toons on Newgrounds, including this one about Gordon Freeman. I didn’t bother looking at anyone else’s CV, and told my boss that we’d found our guy. Paul was hired within the week, and my productivity never recovered from the plummet it took once we were sat next to each other at the office.
The game therefore holds a pretty unique place in my heart for not only being one of my absolute favourite games of all time, but it will always be the reason I met my best mate. Thanks for raising the bar so high, Mr Freeman.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Format: PC
Year: 2000
It may look clunky as hell thanks to the original Unreal engine, but Deus Ex was a pioneer in videogames because it gave the player so many choices to make. It resulted in one of the deepest gaming experiences of the time, because it went to great effort to show the consequences of those choices. The story was spread across many ‘hub’ levels, giving you total freedom to approach your objectives whichever way you wanted, aided by an RPG style upgrade tree that you invested in as you played. Wanna finish it without killing a single soul? That is entirely possible. Prefer to tool up with a rocket launcher and just murder your way to the end? Nothing could stop you. Your NPC allies would respond differently back in the Unatco base, depending on what you did out in the field. This level of responsiveness was unparalleled for a long time, to the point that even if you walked into the ladies toilets, your boss would scold you for it during the mission debrief later on. It was many little moments like that which made the game so memorable for me.
It’s safe to say that Fumito Ueda’s third game was one of my most anticipated titles of the previous generation. Announced in 2009, I eagerly watched every gameplay trailer and read up every snippet of information I could. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remain two of my most beloved games, and I found the idea of another game by the same studio a mouth-watering temptation. A multitude of delays and long periods of silence from both Sony and the developers led many to believe it would never see the light of day, not to mention the troubling news that Ueda himself had left the project due to creative differences with Sony. The game lingered in development hell for several years and its fate was uncertain. Ueda and his team remained with the project as consultants and the game eventually had a release date set for December 2016. My excitement rekindled and I wondered how it could ever live upto 7 years of anticipation. So, was it worth the wait?
I’ve got an enormous backlog to catch up with, so my gaming time has been pretty varied lately as I jump from one thing to another. I’m squeezing every spare moment I can in between work, life, and fatherhood duties, and enjoying some side-scrolling platform action, blasting zombies in one of the best remakes around, and scaling a literal mountain.
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