Session 4: Half-life let's play

I thought it would be a good idea to play Half-Life 2 on my lunch breaks at work. Only, I don’t know anything about Half-Life 2 and I don’t want to learn. So, join me in this text-only let’s play of Half-Life 2 for the PS3. Visualizations are provided by a Rogue AI.

Session 4: In which I donkey the kong.

I am alone both in the game and in my room. Nobody is here. It is a rarity that I can have the volume on. Behind me is a loading screen demon. Ahead of me is an empty corridor. I turn the volume up. I walk Gordon around the next corner.

My roommate came in, and although she didn’t say anything, it was clear she was embarrassed for me. The silence of my room is shattered with 1000 decibels of gunfire and shouting. I remember why I always play with the volume down, even when alone.

“I didn’t know there was going to be shooting,” I mumble.

“In a videogame?” She asks me pointedly.

“I didn’t want there to be shooting?” I reply.

“Ok,” she says in her way that acknowledges my stupid but doesn’t take any of it on.

I walk around in the game a bit more. I’m not feeling it. “Sorry ,Gordo,” I say. “I’m not feeling it today.”

I walk around one last corner and come up on a hallway where a jackboot tries to roll a flaming barrel at me. I laugh, I leap, and as I do, I ask the Jackboot if he knows my pal Donkey Kong. Then I trip over the flaming barrel, it explodes, and both Donkey Kong and I die. Fade to red. Loading screen. Back just outside the corner with the rolling barrel guy.

Annoyed, I take out my crowbar and run up to the barrel throwing Jackboot and trying to beat the barrel up. Explosion. Fade to Red. Loading screen. Back just outside the corner with the rolling barrel guy.

Annoyed, I switch from my crowbar to my firearm and run up to the barrel-rolling guy while shooting. The barrel explodes slightly earlier than before. Fade to Red. Loading screen. Back just outside the corner with the rolling barrel guy.

I decided that I didn’t need to deal with that guy and didn’t want to go up on his stupid barrel-rolling trip anyway. So I sprint past before he can roll the barrel at me, hide and crouch behind a wall, and wait for the barrel to move past.

But it never does.

I remember what kind of game I am playing and decided to forget about that guy and see what else is going on down the train tunnel. Then I come to one of the blue forcefields that are-- allegedly -- there to keep the trainyard secure but are there to keep the player from walking too far off the map and breaking the game.

I remember what kind of game I am playing and decided to go back and face the rolling barrel guy. Explosion. Fade to Red. Loading screen. Back just outside the corner with the rolling barrel guy.

This time, I decide to creep up to the guy and see if I can make the barrel explode before he rolls it. It doesn’t make sense if you’re playing Donkey Kong, sure. It would make a lot of sense if it were Donkey Kong. If Mario had just shot that ape dead once and for all, think about how much differently Diddy Kong racing would have been.

The sniping works. And the barrel explodes not only the barrel-rolling guy (who, I guess in this timeline, is a barrel about to roll but ultimately died before he had a chance to live guy) but also his friend, who I didn’t know about, explodes his secret, barrel too.

And there is a health charge up at the top of the barrel ramp-- which is nice because I am bad at not getting shot-- which, it turns out, seems to be a big part of this game. I quicksave at the top of the barrel ramp and spend some time experimenting with exploding barrels, learning what they can and cannot do. Explosion. Fade to Red. Loading screen. Top of the ramp.

Eventually, I decide it’s time to run and gun, and that’s when it clicks. That’s what this game is. You run and gun your way down a map and hope you can see where you’re allowed to go and that when you get there, you’ll remember how to crouch. After some running and gunning, I end up at the end of a hallway where my only choice is to jump into a pool of yellow water fields with crates, which I do. At the end of the river of yellow water is a ladder I can attach myself to and crawl out of the water and up into a place where it looks safe to take a minute.

That’s enough for today, I decide. I’m not sure I want to continue to play this game. It’s okay, but it is _not_ a modern game, and It’s not the kind of game I love to play.

Today, we get our pants on.

I thought it would be a good idea to play Half-Life 2 on my lunch breaks at work. Only, I don’t know anything about Half-Life 2 and I don’t want to learn. So, join me in this text-only let’s play of Half-Life 2 for the PS3. Visualizations are provided by a Rogue AI.

Update 3: In which we get confused by a cul-du-sac of trains and jackboots.

I wish there were more horses in Half-Life 2.

I had a helper in my lunch space today who is familiar with Half-Life 2. He likes to help me by giving me advice, but he’s not very good at letting me figure things out on my own. He likes twitch games and has a great deal of knowledge about games in general. He has minimal patience for my desire to try to break the game or pick up garbage and throw it. So the result is that I feel like I made some progress today. 

The game picks back up where I left off -- that’s how saving works -- and the guys in the room (in the game) are yelling at me to put on my suit.  

“See! They keep yelling at me to put on my pants,” I say to my helper. 

He corrects me: “Suit.” 

I correct him: “Pants.” 

He corrects me: “Suit.” 

This is how our relationship works. 

I show him how I can pick up things and throw them. He is unimpressed. I showed him how I could put something in the teleporter. He is unimpressed. I go around the room looking for new things to put in the teleporter. 

“Are you ever going to get your suit?” he asks. 

“You sound like those guys in the game.” I reply. 

“That’s because you’re not listening to them, he says, and then adding emphasis, “or me.”

I realize I do not know how to put on the suit, but it’s put on me upon approaching. With my case comes some rudimentary UI, including a health bar and an icon that indicates when I am squatting. “Crouching,” he corrects me. Eventually, I learned that I have to charge my armor, or I don’t have any and that the armor doesn’t prevent harm but does reduce it. 

If I was this horse instead of Gordon Freeman, I would no longer have any troubles.

I am informed that I should get into the teleporter. Everybody is going to evacuate from the city, and the teleporter will get us out safely. Alyx goes first, and after some fiddling with the plugs, I assume in a brilliant moment of in-game teaching about how to do upcoming puzzles, I manage to teleport Alyx off into the TV where her dad lives. 

However, when I get into the teleporter -- which, I must say, puts a bit of a sting on the first hour of the game, wherein I am tasked to walk around in a city to find this location -- why not just teleport me into the room with the suit? Why the subterfuge? Is it because I needed to learn to pick up and throw garbage? How to ‘attach’ myself to ladders? Inspect the burned-out mattresses on the apartment buildings’ floors all around me. -- it doesn’t matter. I step into the teleporter, and without fail, I’m subjected to a story bit.

This story bit is about how I’m teleporting the wrong way or something. They don’t explain it. I appear in a building, then in a barn, then back in the teleporter, and I guess I get teleported to the fence outside the window behind the teleporter? I’m not sure, but my buddy is there, and once I’m on the ground, my buddy throws me a crowbar. 

Now I can crowbar things. So I start crowbarring the fences. Nothing. I crowbar the walls. Nothing. I crowbar some garbage. Nothing. Eventually, I find some wood planks blocking a hallway, and because I’m crowbarring, I take out three of the four planks. I hope over the last one and head down the new hallway.

“Why didn’t you take out the last plank?” my helper asks. 

“I wanted to leave a survivor,” I retort. “I need them to tell my legend. To make the other boards learn to fear me.”

“I don’t think they care,” my helper says. 

We shall see, I think but don’t say. 

Gordon was supposed to be on the train, not in the train.

I end up in a cul-de-sac made of trains and people with guns shooting at me. Here’s a pro tip I picked up. If the trains have a ramp, you can go in them. Very few trains have a ramp, so you don’t get to go in many of them. Gordon is a soft jumper. Seriously-- he needs some of those crazy ass spring shoes that the girl from Portal wears-- but I digress. 

It took me longer than It should have to figure out that to progress, I needed to ignore the fact that I was getting shot at, even though the cautious, stealth player in me wanted to sneak around and not get shot; this game is not about that.  

If I were to write the walkthrough here, I’d write this.

1. Wander around the trainyard, wishing you could kill some of those guys shooting at you. 

2. Kill any camera things that come and try to take your picture. They power up your armor; it turns out. 

3. Wonder why they would put guys trying to kill you outside your ability to hit them with the melee weapon they gave you.

4. Give up and go into the one train car you can go in. 

5. Attach yourself to the ladder and climb the train car’s roof. 

6. Get shot in the head a whole bunch of times. 

7. Interpret getting shot n the head many times as a signal that you’re going the wrong way.

8. Spend a few minutes picking up garbage in the train car, the only place on the map, it seems, that magic snipers can’t hit you. 

9. Throw the lamp out of the train. 

10. Return to the train’s roof and get shot a few more times. 

11. Leisurely look around up there, even though you’re getting shot. 

12. Fall off the train.

13. Go back into the train, look around, back up to the ladder, look around, and fall off the train again. 

14. Walk around the trainyard to see if there is a secret, gun, or something you missed. 

15. Consider walking, trying to time travel back to the start of the game, and talking yourself into doing something else. 

16. Go look up to the top of the one train you can climb, and this time, see the apparent train next door that you can quickly jump over to, which gives you access to a whole section of the map you didn’t see before. 

17. Fall off the train, trying to make the easy jump over. 

18. Go back up the train again, make the easy jump, and land in the new area. 

Hooray! I defeated Gabe Newell’s train puzzle! Down the new hall, a bit is a health charge-up station, a dead guy, two guards, and a lady. I tire iron the guys, and I have a gun now!  

Down the hall is a loading screen, so our time here is done. 

END PART THREE.

“This is not a very good garbage-picking-up game.”

An Update in which I play Half-Life 2 in 30-minute increments. 

I thought it would be fun to log playing the seminal game “Half-Life 2.”  I have never played it, have only a passing familiarity with it through my experience playing the portal games, and have no idea what kind of a game it is. I’m only going to look things up if I get hopelessly stuck, and because I’m playing it on the PlayStation 3, I can’t stream it or take screen captures. So I’ll use AI to generate the supporting artwork for this walkthrough. Oh, and one last thing: I’m playing it on my lunch break, so I only get 30-minute increments, and I get interrupted regularly. 

Update 1

The game starts with a tutorial on how to use the square button. To be fair, it’s probably with doing some kind of mention that you’re going to be mashing on the square for this game since, by this point in the PlayStation existence, even Square-Enix has given up the non-standard locations for the default action button. 

But that aside, we’re treated to some weird agenda and content (“something, something wrong man at the right time”), given a reference to an “insertion point,’ and then forced to walk around in a train car where we literally can’t do anything.

This frustration continued as I stepped out of the train car and was immediately prevented from going anywhere other than where the map wanted me to. Open world, this is not. 

I found a revolving gate puzzling, but I somehow managed to push my first person through the spinning gate and continued walking along an empty hallway, searching for anything to click on. 

A guard, who turned out to be someone who knew me, presented me with non-interesting background information. I learned my name is Gordon. Then I moved some boxes around and fell out a window. I guess I should have paid more attention. 

Standing in a tall three-story courtyard, I tried to figure out what I needed to do next. There were some bricks I could kick around (but not pick up, as near as I could tell), and there was a half-open door, but I could not shove through it. 

I am 20 minutes into this game, and I'm flummoxed by the puzzle of the bricks and the somewhat open door. Turns out, unlike the rotating gate, you have to click on the door to get the loading screen to go. Ahh, Playstation. You got me! 

Eventually, I got to a part of the game where a guard yelled at me to pick up some garbage. Then the game yelled at me to throw things I picked up using a button. So I threw the can. And I missed the garbage. So the guard who yelled at me beat me up. So I went and picked up the can and threw it at the guard. He chased me but stopped after I got too far away. And that’s how I learned how to throw a can.  This started me on a five-minute course of picking up all sorts of garbage and throwing it at the guard. I don't know how to tell what garbage is pickupable and what is not. 

In real life, a freshman girl in the room asked me if there would be any guns in the game. I said I didn’t know. She went back to clicking on her phone. 

At this point, I realized this game was a terrible garbage-picking-up simulator and decided to try to advance the plot. I wandered through halls and corridors until I realized that other doors might be openable. Some of them were not. Some of them were. Not sure how I’m ever going to tell the difference. Eventually, I found enough clickable doors to wander the street. Proud of my stellar door-clicking skills, I crouched by a fountain and saved my game. 

End of the first 30 minutes of gameplay.