CS:GO is out?

This is what i love about Nintendo. They are always trying something new and unique with their games. They are not affraid of changing their games, unlike most developers around, who will keep milking the same concept over and over again.

Loot at Mario franchise. Every new game feels different. Look at how Sunshine brought that FLUD gimmick and made good use of it. I fucking loved the water mechanic in that game. And to be honest, i think it was artistically the most beautiful Mario game i have seen. It was in no way a straight copy of the 64 version. It didnt even take place in a castle, but in an island. Now look at Galaxy. It was again totally different from Sunshine and brought new gameplay elements. Of course Galaxy 2 was a straight sequel to Galaxy, so it didnt innovate as much, but it still didnt milk the series. Oh, and theres Super Mario 3D Land.

Same goes for Zelda. Every new Zelda iteration brings something new and unique. Majora's Mask had the masks thing, Windwaker took place in a vast ocean and had sailing (not to mention the unique cell-shaded style), Spirit Tracks had the train, Twilight Princess had the wolf form.

Same goes for Metroid. A lot of people (myself included) were very skeptical when they turned it into an FPS on Prime series. But Retro Studios did an amazing job.

Two Words:

Mario Kart

Oh gods, Mario Kart.. I kinda want to like them, but the game cheats SO badly as to make any sense of victory feel like it was based purely on luck.

Well yeah mainly because of that damn Blue Turtle shell, stupidest item ever it actually punishes you for doing good, for the longest time the only way to avoid it is to try and let someone else get in first place when it get's launched.

I just couldnt get his criticism towards Half Life. It looked like he criticized the mechanics of linear games and just used Half Life as an example. It doesnt look like an analysis of Half Life itself. Yeah, he is right, Half Life IS a linear game, with many scripted events, but, we knew that already, didnt we? It isnt like Valve ever advertised the game as being open world, having complicated game changing decisions or multiple endings.

When you buy Half Life you know exactly what you will get, a linear, but very well done FPS.

There are linear and there are open games. I dont think linear games are bad. They are just different to open-world games. Different styles. Half Life never tried to be Mass Effect or something like that. But the guy in the video just keep saying "hey, Half Life is bad because linear games are bad". I mean, seriously? It would be like saying "Half Life is bad because i dont like FPSes.

It just was not a good analysis, in my opinion. All the negative aspects he finds in Half Life can be seen in every other linear game out there. I would agree with him if he was talking about the weaknesses of linear games.

He addresses that specific point in another article.

In his words: "The problem isn’t that Half-Life 2 makes you play from Point A straight on through to Point B. The problem is the game takes so much joy in focusing on Point A and Point B that the journey between them – the game part of the game – loses focus, and is replaced not by a powerful and moving story but an escapist power fantasy that circlejerks the player and offers no narrative closure."



PS. Also, he never said Half-Life was bad. Quite the opposite -- he said that Half-Life was very good at what it does and it's miles ahead of its competitors. Overrated does not mean something is bad. It means that it gets undeserved credit to some extent.

PPS. Also also, overrated is a very subjective term. One man's overrated is another man's underrated. There are probably fans of Half-Life that think it does not get enough praise.

Any Blizzard game except Starcraft.

Half Life 1&2.

Baldur's Gate.

Again, i dont agree with him. His points make no sense at all, at least in my opinion.

"So no, it’s not the linearity in Half-Life 2 that bothers me. It’s the fact that the gameplay exists mostly to shuffle you between chunks of non-interactive content."
Again, same applies to every linear game. There are gameplay sessions (sometimes very long) before you get new content (be it new areas, more story, new weapons, new enemies). There are gameplay sections between storytelling chunks in every linear game i have played.

After that, he says "And worse, that content isn’t even very good." Now, is that guy serious? I can understand the criticism towards Half Life story, but the "non-interactive content" is pretty damn good. Scripted scenes are really well done, it is possible to see that a lof of attention was given to little details.

"If we’re being brutally honest, Half-Life is little more than a B-movie in terms of its plot. Worse, it’s a B-movie whose plot hasn’t even reached anything approaching resolution yet, after 13 years, two primary games, two episodic expansions, two traditional expansion packs, and a spinoff series that itself now has two games."
Fair enough, it is not the best plot in a game. Still one of the best for an FPS, in my opinion. And i dont think that Valve's main focus would be on story. He names a few games that he thinks are good examples of linearity, such as Mirrors Edge, Meat Boy and Doom 2, and i dont really remember any of these games having a great story either. So, whats his point in directing this exclusively to Half Life?

"Linearity affords focus, but in this case – focus on what exactly?"
I will answer that, focus on high quality varied enough gameplay. And Half Life certainly delivers it.

"Half-Life 2′s linearity exists to funnel you from scripted event to scripted event. These events are almost never meaningful plot related events"
Again, Half Life never had a focus on story.

Now, lets look at his statement about Doom 2, which he considers to be a well done example of linearity.
"The player slowly acquires new weapons and encounters new enemies, familiarizes themselves with both, then proceeds to deal with increasingly complicated permutations of monsters and ammunition types." Later on, he concludes "DOOM II uses linearity to give the overall game a sense of intentional progression"
Same happens in Half Life, but he seems to completely ignore that. Half Life has the same sense of progression, unless i have played a different game by the same name. You start off with a damn crowbar fighting headcrabs, then you get better weapons and meet stronger enemies, like zombies, vortigaunts, soldiers, those big aliens i dont recall the name, and more. Exacftly the same way Doom 2 does, so why is this one better than Half Life in his opinion? He just doesnt explain it. Again, it doesnt make ANY sense. The game he is bashing is doing exactly the same thing as the game he praises.

"The problem isn’t that Half-Life 2 makes you play from Point A straight on through to Point B. The problem is the game takes so much joy in focusing on Point A and Point B that the journey between them – the game part of the game – loses focus, and is replaced not by a powerful and moving story but an escapist power fantasy that circlejerks the player and offers no narrative closure."
Wait, what? How does Half Life lose focus? It does focus, on gameplay.

"Half-Life 2, on the other hand, is sort of a mishmash of various types of shooting, level design puzzles, environmental platforming, vehicle sections, physics puzzles, dark survival horror, and gimmicky gravity gun manipulation. There’s no systemic cohesiveness."
How in earth is that a bad thing? It keeps gameplay varied and fresh enough to keep players interested till beating the game. I can only see it as being a great thing about Half Life 2 design. The game just never feels boring because it keeps throwing new things at you.

Yeah i know that, but the points he uses to try to convince us that Half Life is overrated just do not make any sense.

I like the blue turtle shells. There's nothing more boring than a racing game in which you get an early lead and then spend the rest of the race just driving around the track in 1st with nothing even resembling a challenge in sight. It's good that Nintendo found a way around the problem without resorting to rubber banding like most racing games do.

Super Mario Kart is the best one, it's almost entirely based on skill. Double Dash was great too. The Wii one is just ridiculous..

Yes, but in Half-Life the gameplay mostly does not serve to add meaning to the story or move it forward, it's filler. It's very entertaining and very well constructed filler, yes, but it does not serve anything else but to keep the player occupied. You're basically a kid with a gun.

By content, he means the story, not the setpieces.

Here, the point is that the plot of Half-Life basically stands still. It doesn't go anywhere. It's not tied to linearity. He brings out those examples to show that linearity is not the culprit. That it's not linearity itself that bothers him.

The variation keeps the game from having a consistent theme. It does not serve to tell a story, it's there just for the sake for giving the player something to do while he's being led to the next setpiece.

And that's arguably the weakest point of Half-Life. There's no real payoff.

Half-Life's linearity does not serve to make the player more familiar with the level or learn tactics to deal with more difficult enemies. It's to show you the next cool thing. Half-Life's sense of progression does not come from the linearity. His point is that linearity is not a bad thing, but an useful tool.

The gameplay distracts from rather than adds to the story. A lot of Half-Life is: "And now for something completely different!"

It isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Half-Life is very good at what it does. It's a fun well done game, but not much else. That's his entire point.

Ok, tell me one linear game that doesnt work like this. Gameplay in Half Life is not a filler, it is what the game is all about. It doesnt seem like the gameplay in Doom 2 (a game he mentioned as being a good example of linearity) adds any "meaning to story or move it forward". The points he makes can be applied to the same games he mentions being good examples. So, no, it does not make sense.


It is not like there are many linear FPSes out there with better story. Still, story was never the aspect that made Half Life a good game. Im pretty sure you will not see anyone saying "hey Half Life is a great game because of its great story".

I repeat what i have said so many times, Half Life's plot was never its strong point. The author of the article just looks like to pretend that everyone praises Half Life for its story. This is not the case. He missed the point. The story is somewhat intriguing, but doesnt evolve beyond that.


The variation keeps the game from being boring. I dont get the consistency issue both you and the author seem to bring up. I think there would be an issue if there were enemies or gameplay sections without any base or explanation, but you always know where things come from. The game makes sense.

I mean, if there were, for example, enemies such as zombies, soldiers, robots, elves, goblins, orcs, or whatever, mixed into the same game without any reason for them to be there, then i would agree about the consistency issue. But this doesnt happen in Half Life. Enemies just dont appear out of nowhere. You are pretty much fighting 2 kinds of enemies: combine forces (CP soldiers, turrets, manhacks) and aliens(headcrabs, zombies, vortigaunts, antlions). Every gameplay section revolves around one of these.

FPSes arent really known for having a great story, are they? Tell me how amazing Doom, Quake, DN3D, Blood, COD, MOH, Killzone, Halo stories are. If the author of the article wanted a great story with many plot twists or whatever, he should probably play an adventure or RPG. Again he takes one common point in the FPS genre itself and applies to Half Life only.

And how is the linearity in the games he mentioned any different to Half Life? There is no difference.
Yet he bitches about Half Life's linearity. Double standards there.

And tell me how Doom's gameplay adds to the story. Shooting monsters do add a lot to the plot, oh wait. The author just wants to compare Half Life to Mass Effect with all these story complaints. Half Life was never praised for its story. Story has 0 influence on the overrated aspect that he wants to make.

Not only it is a well done game, but it has also set a new standard for the FPS genre. It may look just like a well done FPS now, but we didnt have Bioshock at that time, did we?

I thought Total Annihilation was pretty overrated..

Think Oblivion was overrated the so called intelligent ai with about 3 things to say to each other.