Half-Life 2 is WORTHLESS TRASH - Ponstory Games -

[Gutes Zeug]

The guy that is on a journey to kill the video game industry takes on Half-Life 2

 

[Nanook Rubs It]

Shit take. Half-Life 2 is easily one of the best Single Player Shooter games and brought a lot of new things to the genre. Gotta grind that edge on something though.

 

[Near]

It's become like an instinct for me to not click something with a thumbnail this shitty. It's the most half-assed attempt at provocation

 

[Tad Loaf]

The writing style reminds me a bit of Mumkey Jones. The voice makes it too painful to get more than a few minutes into it though.

 

[Dom Cruise]

We have a gaming forum, ya know.

Also this is flat out bullshit.

 

[L50LasPak]

Another guy already did this and did it much better:

Its sort of bad mic quality but this dude makes some good points that HL2 is just not as good as the first and he's also absolutely correct about the way TF2 Source Engine updates have destroyed the game's lighting effects and the janky way it handles sound loading.

By the way, I found this particular video several years ago after trying to replay Half-Life 2 after years of not touching it and I finally got annoyed enough to punch in "Half Life 2 Sucks" which is how I discovered this channel altogether. Sometimes ask and you shall recieve.

Stuff like the Source SDK and Garrysmod have been used to create things that will always be close to my heart, but my enjoyment of HL2 has plummeted over the years. I'd much rather play the original.

Also if you pay attention during Ross Scott's Freeman's Mind 2 vids he levels some of the same criticisms at it.

 

[mr.moon1488]

I think it's just bait. There are certain games that if you say anything against people will chimp out. What always blows my mind about this kind of thing though is that the hardtards seem to always get a pass when they do this. If someone made a review ripping Half Life for it "not being hard enough, having too much hand holding, or being too simplistic," people would ignore it.

 

[Pukebucket]

Predictive text for Jim Sterling's upcoming "Review the Reviewer" video in response to this video:
Anyone reviewing a 10+ year old game and calling it bad without going at least somewhat into the history of the game and why it was considered incredible at the time of it's release isn't a game reviewer, but a parasite suckling at the pockmarked undercarriage of controversy for money. There are plenty of healthy criticisms to be made of HL2 and Valve games in general, but without them taking into account how other games were at the time even this halfassed troll-critique sounds like nothing more than someone being mad on the internet that other people like old things.

You don't even have to like the game as it is now, but calling Half Life 2 garbage simply because it's dated is like calling Pong dogshit just because it didn't have 3D rendering. Nowadays Pong doesn't have enough entertainment value to keep a goldfish occupied, but back in the 70s it was groundbreaking.

 

[L50LasPak]

I'll try to make my final arguement here but two other people who are much more resourceful than me have managed to make this point in their videos and much better so I'll be quick and say: HL1 is better. Orders of magnitude better.

Picture me as a little 12-year-old autist who got HL2 on the Xbox (the original) and played it over and over again for at least a good solid year or three. Then, some relative finds a mysterious disk labeled "Half Life" at a resale shop and gifts it to me.

This disk was Half Life: Day One. If you're not aware, this thing is a kinda-sorta rare thing that was only included in packages with graphics cards and stuff. It's not solid gold (I think you can still buy it off Ebay for like $20), but the number of times I played just those first three levels is absolutely countless. It was so attractive that even other people in my house wanted to play it. And this was just a demo, and not even the actual demo! So of course, I had to get the full game. And then the expansions. And then I started downloading mods.

I was never a pro Counterstrike player or anything and TF1 is a fucking grenade juggling match, but I played HL1 over and over and over for years. I did get The Orange Box later once I had a PC that didn't suck and I did replay all the games a few times (including Lost Coast) but it just... wasn't the same anymore. Like some kind of spell had been broken.

 

[Shitassdeaddude]

Either way Black Mesa is best.

 

[L50LasPak]

Oh shit, I almost forgot, id Software claims to have invented the Gravity Gun first. It was implemented later as the Grabber in the expansion pack to Doom 3, but the Grabber was just used as a developer tool to move bullshit around and arrange stuff in levels and nobody on the team realized it could be an important gameplay mechanic. I have no idea if it actually predates the original Physgun of the HL2 Beta though.

Truth is it probably doesn't predate the Physgun which in itself I think was a developer tool designed for the exact same purpose, as it was eventually re-used for and improved upon in Garrysmod. I've since lost the article though, its not linked on the Doom Wiki anymore. If someone has it let me know and I'll edit my post.

 

[Dom Cruise]

All I know is Half-Life 2 was fucking jaw dropping in it's day, has there ever been a game that seemed like such a quantum leap since? Just the character's faces alone was "fucking "

But to be fair, it'll be a decade next month since I last played it, I can't say for sure how it holds up today, maybe it's not as impressive as it was, but I feel confident in saying I'll probably still like it if I do replay it.

 

[Detrogen]

Anyone reviewing a 10+ year old game and calling it bad without going at least somewhat into the history of the game and why it was considered incredible at the time of it's release isn't a game reviewer, but a parasite suckling at the pockmarked undercarriage of controversy for money. There are plenty of healthy criticisms to be made of HL2 and Valve games in general, but without them taking into account how other games were at the time even this halfassed troll-critique sounds like nothing more than someone being mad on the internet that other people like old things.

You don't even have to like the game as it is now, but calling Half Life 2 garbage simply because it's dated is like calling Pong dogshit just because it didn't have 3D rendering. Nowadays Pong doesn't have enough entertainment value to keep a goldfish occupied, but back in the 70s it was groundbreaking.

This reminds me of Yahtzee’s recent recent review of Shenmue III in which he asserted the original game was never impressive. To be fair, Majora’s mask had already accomplished a game world where every NPC had a daily routine, but it upped the scale significantly.

IGN also tried this clickbait shit a while ago when suddenly every manchild writing for their website started asserting “Sonic was never good”. Of course Sonic spergs got up at arms about it and it probably got IGN a ton of clicks and ad revenue. It’s an old trick at this point.

 

[garakfan69]

Something that always bothered me about HL2 is that it got wrong what the first Half-Life is so famous for: the set-pieces/scripted sequences

They were fantastic in HL1 for the most part (I'm gonna ignore the annoying intro sequence). I can still vividly remember walking through the invaded offices while a scientist gets dragged and killed through a vent, another one getting attacked by a headcrab, a zombie bursting through a door, etc.. It was an amazing experience and built the atmosphere really well without taking agency from you.

HL1 almost never stopped your progress and made you watch long scripted cutscenes and listen to NPCs giving you exposition.
HL2 on the other hand did this constantly.
People go on about how they love HL2's story but I resented it because it wasn't worth interrupting the gameplay for.
HL1's story might be simpler (and the end was kinda lame) but it told it mostly through the environment and small pieces here and there. This is how a story should be told in an action game.

I do think HL2 is a good game overall with an amazing amount of polish for even small details but I never thought it was the best FPS ever - even at release.

 

[L50LasPak]

Nowadays Pong doesn't have enough entertainment value to keep a goldfish occupied, but back in the 70s it was groundbreaking.

Not gonna back this one. If you have a few beers and a good buddy over Pong is fucking hilarious because it never quite works the same way say, air hockey does. Granted, most of the entertainment comes from the shit-talk you two will share, but in my opinion Pong holds up. Especially as a party game if other people are in the background to yell things at the players and the screen. The four-player version is complete and utter fucking chaos and also gonna leave people bent over laughing like lunatics.

 

[Scarface1]

Honestly i'm more confused by him ripping off videogamedunkey.
I've seen more effective bait than this.

 

[NumberingYourState]

So is this just the shittier aspect of Ponstory or are they just exceptional worthless trash all around?

 

[crocodilian]

Shit take. Half-Life 2 is easily one of the best Single Player Shooter games and brought a lot of new things to the genre. Gotta grind that edge on something though.

I don't agree. Half-Life 2 felt like Valve's attempt at a full-fledged "cinematic" game driven predominantly by its narrative. The first Half-Life had a story and was based heavily around elaborate set pieces, but the story wasn't shoved in your face constantly with an overarching narrative and named characters. The first game's story could be summarized as "science went too far, escape Black Mesa", whereas the sequel has all these confusing plot threads about a mysterious G-Man, the Orwellian oppression of mankind, the Combine and Gordon Freeman becoming a Christ-like figure. It's a lot to accept considering how straightforward and simple the first game was.

I assume this was done because of Halo (another game with a high-production, narrative-heavy singleplayer campaign) was the prize-winning pig at the time. The development period of Half-Life 2 and significant redesign of the game even coincides with the afterglow of the Halo: Combat Evolved, where I can see Valve's development team deciding it's worth investing a huge budget into a singleplayer adventure (something unthinkable nowadays.) The problem is I feel this takes away from the mystique Half-Life provided, where you are thrown into highly interactive environments with strange, unexplained creatures to fight and possibly-innocent people to save.

Sometimes it's better to leave your audience with a lot of stimuli and little narrative so they come to their own conclusions. Half-Life showed us a top secret, heavily-guarded research base who made hostile contact with demons, aliens or maybe even its own creations. Portal used human beings as guinea pigs for inhumane experiments and then destroyed them once the research was done, all enacted by a mysterious AI. Team Fortress 2 had a single, emotionless voice direct two teams of evenly-matched mercenaries in an environment reminiscent of the Cold War. All of these games were memorable without a writing team shoving pages of the script down your throat.

And to be perfectly honest, I think Half-Life aged better than Half-Life 2. Even the recent remake, Black Mesa, feels more tightly-designed and fun to play.

 

[MrTroll]

HL2 absolutely is inferior to the original. It's so obsessed with set pieces and scripted battles that it feels like CoD for the last third of the game. People overlooked its general shallowness at the time because grafix and physix (same reason Doom 3 wasn't spat upon as it should have been). Going back to play it now, stacking boxes/barrels to solve "puzzles" and fighting striders with bazookas is lame and dull.

 

[Rei is shit]

Episode 2 is dogshit