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 | |  | Re: Halo 2 vs. Half Life 2 (An example of how not to review) (Score: 0)
by on Saturday, February 26 @ 21:58:22 EST
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/halo2/screens.html?page=233
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/halflife2/screens.html?page=247
Where in the world do you see better environment in Halo 2? (find me a better screen if I picked a bad one)
Until that faithful trailer of HL2 in 2003, I've never seen a game with the (closely) right sun luminosity. Everything else (Far Cry for example) was too shiny, plastic or too dark, without that yellowish sun glow. Neither game has got dynamic lighting which is good since that turns out unrealistic with pitch black spots (ever heard of light reflection, ID soft?) until some game shows everyone how it's done (Stalker, hopefully). I noticed the irk that is flat paper textures on the floor, but it's performance optimization thanks to which HL2's requirements are so low. I'd much rather see flat paper textures on the floor and run at 60FPS rather than see every particle of a grafitti on the wall with 2FPS. Although I certainly wish Valve spent more time making extra items for housing, I'm quite satisfied with what we've got (you could say it gives a feeling of low-living standards in City 17).
The issue entitled "Valve made their own physics engine" doesn't go as far as saying that Valve made it from scratch, but assuming Valve modified Havok 3 (3 according to some article I read) to their liking, although it has flaws. And beyond that, remember games that barely used the Havok license at all like Far Cry which rarely had any physics-based environment to manipulate. Half-Life 2 had the richest manipulatable environment yet. Past first-person shooters only allowed you to pick up(or move) what's useful (XIII) and even games that allowed you to move useless stuff were limited (Devastation).
Gameplay wise, I didn't like Halo due to it's hack n' slash nature under the cover of an "engaging" storyline. If I'll want hack n' slash, I'll go play Painkiller, a work of HnS art where the storyline is a secondary thing. Now, as far as opinions and reviews go, Halo 2 is Halo with new graphics, storyline, but gameplay modified merely with car-jacking, dual-wield and a power-sword (or whatever it's called). I've also heard Halo 2 called inferior in gameplay compared to Halo, but I'll stick with the minimal change theory. Half-Life 2 is more engaging that just hack n' slash due to moments where (avaragely, but never the less) you have to think. Compared to Half-Life 1, less thought as practicly everything can be taken down with brute force (of one sort or another) where HL had it's bosses with special ways to kill them (electrocuting the gargantua using the tram rail :) ). Half-Life 2 is more of a tour of what the world became and a quick way to change it from that to hopefully better with the few puzzles holding you back. In all honesty, I've never finished Halo, I stopped somewhere near the end (when the enemies were pouring in like the undead army in Dominions 2), but I've had enough.
I consider Half-Life 2 a worthy sequel (since it's practicly impossible to make a sequel as great as the prequel impression-wise) with all the changes it needs. Halo was somewhere between avarage and good for me and seeing as Halo 2 simply attempts to go with what works, same rating goes there. If anyone considers this invalid, please, direct me to a professional (magazine preferably) review that states Halo 2 is a giant leap from Halo 1.
One last issue is modability. Half-Life 2 is scripted as heck, but using the engine you could make a completely unscripted game (if you're an AI programming genius). CSS is a sample of what can be done. Halo 2 on the other hand is an X-Box game and while it might be modable in some aspects (which I don't know), it won't be as open as HL2 unless it's ported to the PC.
So far, I've liked your reply to this article the most, OpinionsRule. Civilized, objective and grammaticly correct :). I might be more or less subjective since I'm rating a game by it's reviews and it's prequel (but with logical reason), but I'm not going to be hostile towards anyone because of their opinion.
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