Traqie

9th March 2020

Hey,

I hope everyone is doing well during the pandemic, I was fine for a while, it’s sad but my life didn’t changed much after the lockdown lol. I only miss going to gym and taking my dog on a long walks to local park, it’s closed now and neither me nor my dog enjoy walking around the neighborhood for a long time. The peak here is supposed to happen somewhere in may, which is gonna put a lot of stress on a lot of folk here and our government just keeps coming up with new restrictions and rules while at the same time trying to push for presidential elections to happen because our current president has a high approval rating and polls highly, I guess somehow people think this moron is handling the pandemic well even tho he has little to do with that.

Anyway despite the lockdown it was still a slow month for me when it comes to games.

  • Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45

    46.5 hours playtime

    44 of 44 achievements

  • I did 100% in this and it wasn’t fun. Someone at Tripwire thought it would be a great idea if achievements only counted when there are 16 or more players on the server. Sixteen. And bots don’t count, but a fellow achievement hunter managed to gather a group so we could all do it. If you don’t care about achievements, don’t bother starting it, delete it, this game is dead. And if you do care but have 0% or don’t want to look for 15 other people delete it as well. I did it because 15 years ago or so I did one achievement and this game was already counting into my completion percent on steam.

  • The Void

    3.6 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • I started it before Black Mesa came out of EA. Weird game, but I’ll try to finish it. It’s an FPS without shooting part and it has some crazy character design when it comes to “male demigods” lol. Very abstract, hopefuly it’ll make more sense to me.

    And I also completed these two gems:

    Half-Life 2

    Hotline Miami

    8/10
    14.4 hours
    35 of 35 achievements

    04 - M O O N – Crystals
    10 - Perturbator - Miami Disco
    17 - El Huervo - Turf Main
    19 - Perturbator - Electric Dreams

    Another one of these, that one could name indie “classic”. It’s 7 years old and I remember hearing a lot of praises for it when it came out in 2013. For those few that don’t know what this game is, it’s fast paced and skill based (although with some randomness, more on that later), top down, pixel art and a very brutal shooter/slasher.

    Game usually goes like this – you start a level, pick rubber animal mask that gives you some kind of buff (the starting out being the only exception, it does nothing) and your goal is to brutally murder everyone. You have good melee weapon variety as well as firearms. Melee weapons include knife’s, baseball bats, golf club, machete, fire axe, a pot and so on. Firearms arms are less varied – revolver, silenced pistol, uzi/scorpion, mp5, assault rifle and a couple of shotguns – pump and double barreled. The one complain is that it’s really hard to tell apart uzi from scorpion once you pick it up. I don’t even remember picking scorpion ever but I had to since I got an achievement for killing with every gun. If MP-5 was smaller in this game I probably wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from uzi either. But if you don’t like guns of any kind you can always use your fists. Though you can only knock someone on ground with them and have to finish them off by banging their head on the floor.


    And oh yeah, this game is very brutal and graphic, even if it’s all pixel art. Each enemy leaves a big pool of blood, you can crack their skulls open with various melee weapons or turn their heads into tiny pieces with a close shotgun blast. If you knock someone on the ground, you can finish them with any melee weapon. Sit on them and crush their head with a sledgehammer, cut their throat open with a knife or crack open their skull with few, swift crowbar hits. There also dogs that you have to kill, even if you wear a mask that makes them friendly.

    Camera is placed right above you and you can see through walls, but your view is not big enough to see the whole level. You can move camera independently if you press shift and look further, you can also lock on target to for example quickly jump from around a corner and shoot somebody but I never used it to be honest. The game also recommends controller when you launch it but it is playable with K+M, I did every level on “A+” for achievement like that. And AFAIK there is no S ranking in this game, so this was the highest possible.

    The game rewards recklessness and speed, the faster and more dangerous your approach, the better your combo will get. There’s a very short time after one kill to rack up a combo and killing with melee weapons nets you more points than firearms. The enemies are also very fast, their aim is pretty good mostly and they swarm you if they either spot you or hear your gun. Though that doesn’t always happen, here comes the randomness. Because you will often die in this game, it’s normal you will replay the same level many times just to beat it. I would often see enemies in the same spot either reacting to my gunshot or not. Sometimes every enemy on the level hears it and rushes to you. Sometimes only the guy in the next room will hear it, sometimes he won’t but two guys at the end of the level will and they will rush you instead. The weapons they get is also random, although from what I noticed the type of weapon they get is always the same. So for example one guy in this room always gets melee weapon and the other two a gun.

    [Clip] How your average Hotline Miami level plays like after you start getting grip on the game

    The music is a highlight of this game, most of music is from different artists and it wasn’t commissioned for this game, there’s some reggae in more chill moments of the game and electronic, synthwave and club music during combat levels. I honestly didn’t know most of these artists except Perturbartor. It fits the game great.

    The story is a little vague and there are 3 endings, one perhaps the “true” ending requires you to find a password to a computer. But it’s not the focus of the game and at one point devs break the 4th wall and just tell you it’s a game (and maybe they also say “fuck the story, gameplay is what is more important” but that’s just my interpretation). If you haven’t yet, give this game a try! If you don’t care about achievements you can finish this one in 5-8 hours.

    Half-Life 2

    Black Mesa

    +9/10
    43.4 hours
    50 of 50 achievements

    Xen 02 – Internal Conflict
    Xen 13 – Ascension
    Earth 12 – Forget About Freeman
    Earth 27 – Surface Tension 3

    Absolutely amazing recreation of the original. It tries to make an OG Half-life more modern while also trying to stay faithful to the original and I think it succeeded for the most part. There are some level design changes or specific encounters where it is a small downgrade from original, but I could count these on just one hand.

    I remember majority of levels but throughout the whole game I was positively surprised in almost every corner. Old and familiar levels were recreated with much more detail while retaining the layout and paths. And some were drastically changed but most of that happened in levels that either had no combat or very little of it. Thankfully they kept most pieces where combat happens the same, and the few that got changed (or added completely new) are better for most part 😊 Xen has received the biggest changes and it’s what we’ve been waiting for since the free mod release in 2012 which lacked these last levels. Xen is now much, much bigger and longer. And much, much better. You can pretty much forget what you remember from original Xen. Most of areas have been scrapped or redesigned to the point where they don’t look like the OG Xen, it’s also more varied. There parts with strange fauna where most of Xen wildlife resides like hound eye’s and bullsquids, it’s where Black Mesa set it’s Xen HQ to study the area until it was overtaken, Gonarch Lair is not a 5 minute fight anymore but a tough boss fight that only ends with you wounding Gonarch, a long chase after her until she starts chasing you again and ends with a final stand where this banger plays in the background. Build up to final boss is so amazing, it felt like Xen forces start throwing everything at you to stop you. Final boss got a great redesign and is now a multi-phase battle. And the whole Xen is so beautiful now, especially the first part with its lush environment and cosmic sky above you. Overall there’s a lot more exploring too and solving puzzles. Platforming is still here but not as much and now you have something called “landing jets” which completely negate falling damage and it was a frustrating part of OG Xen, you could easily kill yourself there. No more in this remake…well unless you fall into the void ;p



    Human AI has been improved from what I can tell. It used combine soldier AI in free mod from what I can tell which was dumber than human grunts AI in OG Half-life, combine soldiers would just stand like dummies or rush straight into your face and occasionally throw a grenade, but here on improved AI, soldiers try to flank you, suppress fire on your last position and throw grenades more often, even more than in original but since they are an actual physical objects you can pick up and throw back it’s not a big issue.

    Gunplay is great for a source engine game. The one thing that in my opinion was a downgrade in HL2 from HL were guns. Thankfully the guns feel, sound and shoot more like those in original than a reskin of those from Half-life 2. I can only wish shotgun in HL2 felt so powerful and impactful like the one in Black Mesa. MP-5 feels quite powerful for a SMG and has nice and controllable recoil, Gluon gun feels more like a devastating Ghostbuster gun and has its own special moment in Interloper level, something similar to how gravity gun got a power up in HL2 Citadel near the end. .357 is exactly the same like in HL2 from what I can tell, which is the only gun that didn’t need any changes, so that’s good they left it as it was, but you can use iron sights now with it. Glock doesn’t feel like a toy gun (looking at you, HL2 pistol). Each weapon has a special pick up animation when you get it for first time.

    [Clip] Nothing to say only how I wish I could just embed these into post without getting potato quality or injecting half of streamable site with the clip into the post

    Soundtrack is different and sounds nothing like original Kelly Bailey OST. Every track that plays on Xen is excellent and fits really nicely with that they made. The “earth” part on its own is not that bad but I don’t think it always fitted what happened on screen. For example when you are on your way back to control room in rocket engine test pit where green tentacles spawned, this “epic” rock music starts blasting in your ears while you try to slowly sneak up the room like you’re doing something amazing. And instead of industrial and electric music the whole “earth” OST feels more “rock” like if it makes any sense lol, but it is very atmospheric at times.

    This and few other minor annoyances prevent this me to feel like a 10/10 game. Xen could use a lot of optimization in certain levels. Certain small encounters got questionable changes and it felt like they had no idea what they were doing. They also recreated multiplayer from original but I haven’t touched, its probably something you can ignore anyways, in original it was basically a worse version of Quake II/Quake MP.



    Vito

    it’s sad but my life didn’t changed much after the lockdown lol

    Similar experience here. But it’s also something to be glad about. I see some of my friends struggle quite a bit with the lockdown compared to me. I just hope it will get less strict in the summer.

    I read about Red Orchestra in some Discord server, really seems like an awful struggle to get all achievements. I semi-care about achievements and I hate the MP ones. Getting 16 players on board is just…horrendous…

    Traqie

    In here the peak is supposed to happen somewhere in May or June, so at least one full month of this :/ And our government just introduced a new rule - mandatory face cover everytime you leave the house/your property. And I feel there’s gonna be more before we reach the peak.

    As for RO1, it’s probably better idea to just remove the game from account. Red Orchestra 2 still has some players, but it’s very grindy from what I heard and saw 😅 But it does have the stupid 16 player requirement too…

    Adelion

    Ahaha, another one who made his life miserable by carrying a pizza through an alien world. Seems you have been at least faster than me although I don’t know if you played an earlier version.

    I don’t have that many memories of the original Half-Life although I am halfway sure I played it once on the PS2. Black Mesa does a good job and this time I also got the story. Back then I was to youg to really care. Made me interested in Half-Life 2. I might buy it the next time if it is on sale.

    Traqie

    :D I tried to do all three (hat, pizza, gas) in one but got stuck with just one in Xen in this spot. It was impossible to jump back after you landed on the giant leaf, I tried different angles, tried climbing on the root next to the wall and walking across - no luck as it just becomes floating texture halfway, tried jumping from that root across but always hit the ceiling and bounced down into the abyss. So I just manually saved there, did it one by one.

    Half-life 2 is definitely worth playing today, but do mind it’s gonna be worse in terms of gunplay and even graphics, as the Black Mesa uses modified version of CS:GO engine, which is the latest version and Half-life 2 uses the engine of HL2: Episode two (they ported it sometime after the orange box release).

    Adelion

    I’m not to iffed by graphics or gunplay normally. So I don’t think it would be to much of a problem. Am more interested in the story. And aside from some odd ones, Valve’s achievement design is usually good.

    It is the better decision to drop the items early on. The Xen gap however can be bridged by Satchel’s though. For one you can do something similar to a rocket jump although I didn’t learn that one. Alternatively, you can use the Satchels to explode the items to the other side. However, there is a slope so you need like 50 reloads until the items finally stop in a place where they don’t fall into the abyss. Personally, I carried all three items and got them up to the Gargantua chase sequence (and even then I only got lucky at the Gonarch as he bugged out, Gonarch chase is not made for two items anyway). In the forum people made it up to the last section of Interloper. But that is madness.
    Making three carry achievements is just insane. The only one which is good because it adds to the game is the Cyanogen.

    Traqie

    Oooh I completely forgot about satchel charges xd I now remember that I also tried to just throw them across + bunny hopping but I’m not good at it so obviously that failed.
    That’s crazy people made it all the way to Interloper but I probably would have given up at Gonarch Lair or at Gargantua’s cave.