Well sure, psychos with nukes are scary and there may be an element of the US losing control of their attack dog, but the idea that the Israelis are calling the shots is not really accurate. It cuts dangerously close to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Israel through AIPAC controls the US government, which also conveniently lets the US off the hook for sponsoring them.
I just think it's important to remember that for all their brutality, Israel is not charge, and they are not the military superpower that has dominated much of global politics for the past century. They are a vassal state and they would listen if anyone in power had the will to tell them no, they are far too dependent on US support.
Israel is of strategic importance to project US power in the middle east to secure oil.
That's also the reason they were allowed to continue with their nuclear program.
It's not fear, it's power politics. Western powers actively support them. They are not uniquely evil, they are just what happens when fascism is sponsored and allowed to run unchecked.
Got them working, and was pleasantly surprised to find most of them had flatpak installers! Manual saving is still a pain but the engines running smoothly does make a big difference.
Although the dark forces installer doesn't work with the steam install so you have to copy the game data to the data folder to make it work.
Honestly anything to deal with the horrendous friction and instability of the original would be welcome. Even modded I think I had to stick with 4:3 which even with black bars was still not quite right on my modern system. It would have to be a better experience, even if I have to re-learn manual quicksaves.
And I'll keep saying this: you can't teach a neural network to understand context without creating a generalised context engine, another word for which is AGI.
Yeah, I think we more or less agree, and I'm not trying to say it's a bad game or even a bad story, just that there's not a lot I need closure on. I think the only thing that could be done to "ruin" it would be to pile on a bunch of unsatisfying answers to the open questions about the world. I'd definitely play HL3 just to experience more of the world, I just don't care that much about where the story goes and I don't think that's ever been the main draw.
It would be nice to get some explanations of the world that would extend it and allow people to tell more interesting stories within it, but I honestly doubt that those answers exist. It really feels like they're kind of just riffing and they don't have a bigger vision for where it all goes, if I had to guess.
I actually really appreciate someone clarifying the chronology of these games, I've got them all in my steam library and can never remember the order they go in.
Do the OS remakes have any QoL improvements? I tried playing through them recently and had a very hard time with the manual save system since I'm used to autosave points in linear games like that.
I'm working up the courage to try those for the first time, but as very old games now, I'm a little apprehensive about all the friction they're likely to have.
I agree the diegetic storytelling is very well done and that did push the craft of game storytelling forwards, but the actual world itself is a lot of texture with very little substance. Loads of cool ideas, but almost no decisions, like they want the freedom to add anything at any time without ever restricting themselves by saying "here is how this concept actually works", or even "this is who this person is".
We never really meet the aliens or the antagonists, ever. The gman is an alien in a skin-suit, and Breen is just a collaborator. They are both essentially puppets.
Like, what was the nihilanth? We killed it, then... what? I guess the vortigaunts were freed, but how does that tie into the slug beings, the human cyborg slavery, any of it? The vortigaunts could easily explain at least some of the world, What does any of it mean?
I get the idea of being deep in and unable to see the forest for the trees, and that is definitely a style of story that you can do, but it's unsatisfying long term. Eventually you have to get at least a glimpse of the broader picture or nothing has any meaning. The world has no rules, which doesn't make good science fiction.
I say this as someone who regularly replays HL2 because I enjoy the texture so much, I just acknowledge it's very limited.
Can I just ask what people expect from a half life story? Like it's always been pretty thin on the ground, right?
What was the first game? Experiment goes wrong, aliens notice us and invade, we kill a bunch of them, there's the occasional macguffin, travel to their planet, beat the big bad enemy, boom, mysterious gman puts us in the fridge.
The two expansions seem like the same story from another POV, I have no memory of any important events from either one.
Second game, gman drops us mysteriously back like 20 years later. We kill a bunch of enemies, there's some more macguffin, the vortigaunts were enslaved now they're on our side. There's a bit of intrigue, we beat the local bad guy, the vortigaunts save us.
The following two chapters, apart from having to rescue people, I couldn't tell you what even happens. The world is implied to be so big that you are an insignificant player and you could never hope to grasp what's really gping on, and we never get more than glimpses of what's really happening. It seems more like the idea of a world that leaves open the possibility of more or less anything happening and within which to set games, than a coherent story with structure and tension and stakes, beyond "world in peril" or "friend in peril", which is pretty bog standard stuff.
Like sure we might be a bit invested in Alyx & her dad's stories, but I always assumed people were hyped for sequels because the games play well and have an interesting backdrop. What exactly is the special sauce that mark laidlaw brings? Yes the environmental storytelling was novel and well done, but it's always been so vague because they're so committed to never leaving the players POV, and they spend so little time explaining the actual world.
Excrubulent @ Excrubulent @slrpnk.net Posts 8Comments 2,232Joined 2 yr. ago
You don't replace your dish gnome cartridge every 3 years? I was told it was a feature. They get tired.