>I struggle to come up with another single player game that blew me away like HL2

The original? I thought the first person story telling mode of HL1 was really mind blowing.

Exactly, so many first of its kind moments in HL1. The first time you saw a scripted sequence, like wtf am I playing, this is amazing.

HL2 was more refined, and the art style did help elevate the story telling.

The gravity gun in hl2 was absolutely mind-blowing

Every game up until then had been full of 100% static assets and suddenly you could just pick up and throw anything with realistic physics

The mix of good open landscape and good indoor maps were also quite impressive for the time if I remember correctly.

There was also that crossbow that shoots red hot rebar, let’s you pin things (and enemies) to walls. I had so much fun with that

Not quite static. Hitman and Red Faction comes to mind, years before Half-Life 2. Still, it was groundbreaking.

Red Faction's destructible maps lend themselves to a lot of creative gameplay, but the (late) game was far to linear. The engine made a lot possible, but to explore using explosives you had to exploit item duplication glitches or cheats. In the end it felt like an engine demo posing as a complete game.

I remember throwing toilets at each other in HL2 at LAN parties. Such a magical experience.

HL2 on Steam had an achievement called "flushed" if you killed a combine with a gravity gun toilet.

I was about 15, HL2 was my first "real" video game that I bought with money, the xbox did not exist in my country and I've never heard of game achievements before. In the second last act of the game, in the push towards the citadel through waves and waves of combine, I was low on ammo, and stresses out. I picked up my gravity gun and started lobbing junk to the enemies to get away from them. I picked up a toilet and chucked it into a whole pile of combine. As I paused to have a brief chuckle about the absurdity, Steam chimed with that achievement.

It was as if GabeN Himself looked over my shoulder and went "heh, nice" when I did it. Truly magical and a gaming highlight for me.

For me it was the trash blowing around on the ground when you step off of the train. I immediately picked up the trash and started throwing it around myself. My mind was blown.

That said I still prefer HL1 overall. Its more high impact and brutal. There's nothing in HL2 that's quite like accidentally blowing away a black mesa scientist and having gore spray everywhere. HL1 is just viscerally more violent, and also I dislike how NPCs in HL2 have basically deified Gordon and constantly suck him off. In HL1 the security guards are bros but the scientists treat you with annoyance. I get the whole subplot of freed vortegants turning you into a heroic figure, but I think that's just a thin plot excuse for Valve's decision to make the player feel like a special person. Also all of the "girlfriend simulator" stuff is cringe that aged poorly.

> I get the whole subplot of freed vortegants turning you into a heroic figure

That's not really it at all, it's the G-man's machinations that turn him into a "heroic figure". If anything he's more comparable to Paul Atreides. The Vorteguants just temporarily release him from the G-man's grasp in HL2:E1, but that barely lasts to the next episode.

He's a pawn of whatever game the G-Man is playing, and was unleashed as sort of an unwitying agent of chaos on Breen and the Combine ("the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world").

> Also all of the "girlfriend simulator" stuff is cringe that aged poorly

Huh?

I'm talking about HL2, not the episodes. I don't judge HL1 by what was written into HL2 years later, nor do I judge HL2 by what was written into the episodes or Alyx years later. Not least because it's common knowledge that the writers have been following the "Lost" philosophy of writing, making up shit as they go, creating mysteries they themselves don't know the answer to, punting that down the road to their future selves.

In Half Life 1 you start with a dogshit reputation and insofar as you gain any reputation with the NPCs its because you've progressed through the game to earn it. The scientists treat you like base labor in the beginning, then come to see you as useful, as a fighter, after you prove it. The soldiers start without knowing who you are, but after you tear your way through their ranks they start hating you by name.

In Half Life 2, all the NPCs you meet act like you're already a famous hero and there's really no indication in the game that this comes from g-man propaganda rather the vortegants and/or the black mesa scientists. In HL2 both the vorts and the scientists make a point of saying they owe Gordon a lot. The natural read on this, given the context of the first two games and not any later retcons, is that the scientists or vorts have basically deified you. Mossman talks about how she wishes she could have worked with you at Black Mesa as though you were not just a war hero but also a legendary scientist. What scientific achievements did Gordon have at Black Mesa? He pushed samples around and showed up late for work. What kind of stories were the other scientists telling her about you? Also Alyx starts hitting on you right away.

Whatever the plot justifications for it, clearly there was a commercial motivation of pandering to the player. It aged poorly.

I don't think I ever felt as if Alyx was hitting on Gordon when I played the game. Fangirling, sure, but that's it. I can fully imagine Gordon's legend building up over time, however justified it might be. It didn't feel like pandering, just that you're amongst a bunch of very desperate people who've built up a myth around what happened in Black Mesa to help them keep going.

Gordon’s actions in HL1 is why there’s even a resistance, I think Gordon’s legendary status isn't from Gman propaganda but more from the resistance itself needing/wanting an icon/martyr/founder. It’s an interesting contrast from the first game where you’re a nobody and expectations are at rock bottom for you, versus in HL2+ everyone expects you to be a messiah, but the odds are so stacked against you it’s hard to see how you can live up to the expectation.

I always felt embarrassed by the attention in HL2, more than ego-stroked. It’s awkward in-game but intentionally so, in my mind. Like with that Mossman line, Gordon is a nobody scientifically and famous for other reasons so that line says more about Mossman’s vanity and ego than anything about Gordon.

>The first time you saw a scripted sequence, like wtf am I playing, this is amazing.

Ye. It is hard to remember how stale games used to be with "story parts" and "game play parts".

Small things like "two scientist runs towards you. One is eaten by head crab zombie unless you save him really fast" -- all these kind of small scripted events added so much. And fluently playing the whole mess up experiment and then try to escape overarching story.

HL1 was huge too. I was disappointed with how short HL2 is in comparison.

I think everyone was, and they never did deliver on their episodic content promise. Valve pivoted from a game developer to a publisher / self-publishing platform at that time which made it and its owner a multi-billion company and over time revived the PC gaming market.

They could have done it for almost free too. Just placeholder levels with story fragments, let the community create the maps, scripts and art to fill the void.

The first time you see the tentacle in Half Life 1 has stuck with me for decades.

Black Mesa is a great way to re-experience HL1 too.

I picked it up the other day and honestly I'm disappointed, I was expecting modern-day graphics but it's barely on par with HL2.

I think that is harsch on a fan mod?

It's easily "higher resolution" than HL2, but some things just aren't very well done. Some of the sound effects are weak and enemy behavior is less fun to play against across the board.

I sadly was too young to truly appreciate hl1 (or maybe was forbidden to pay it not sure) - for me the first game that blew me away was Dungeon Keeper and HoMM3 - I still play them from time to time…

Agree. I recently played HL2 again with the new commentary (added because of the 20th anniversary) and it really shows why the level design is so good: a lot of play testing and iterative design. They really did the work. Now I'm playing the Halo franchise and the difference in how boring and uninspired the levels are is really striking.

Mm. Halo 3 felt really open and expansive the first time I played it. Second time, I tried to explore outside the normal path and rapidly discovered that it was a very well disguised rails shooter.

But I've also gone back further than that in Bungie's back catalogue, having recently been playing Marathon 2 and Marathon ∞ (winner of the MacFormat(?) magazine award for "largest version number increase between successive releases") on Steam, and… well, 2 has still-interesting levels, but Infinity's levels are a spatially confusing mess.

> Now I'm playing the Halo franchise and the difference in how boring and uninspired the levels are is really striking.

Relevant PA: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/11/28/the-rest-of-th...

Halo: ODST is the one for me with the best storytelling and ambiance.

Absolutely agree. I just replayed all the Half Life series with my kids and they love it. It's a game that's just so well done and I think it held well after all these years.

> I struggle to come up with another single player game that blew me away like HL2

I feel the same, but incidentally one of the ones that blew my away like HL2 was Dishonored.

Prey was really good too, if not quite up to the level of HL and Dishonored.

Dishonored, Prey, Deus Ex. Relics of a lost era: I don't know if we'll ever see big budget "immersive sims" like them again.

I'd recommend Death Stranding and Control.

Control, while fun, was too much of an action game for me.

I can understand that. I'm no good at action games, but it was great playing on easy! Well worth it.

I never played it, gotta try it out soon!

HL2 is one of the top 5 most influential games. I think Duke Nukem 3D was one (first good multiplayer), Witcher 3 is another (one of the most immersive, story driven), the Elder Scrolls series and I am finding it very difficult to name the 5th, but HL series was great for its time.

Dark souls for sure now

I loved HL2 so much. Not at the 1st place in my list because, well, the Mass Effect story line brings that one to another level, but HL2 for the time was unbeatable. I wonder why they didn't continue the franchise with a proper HL3; the entire world of gamers was (and probably still is) begging for it.

when i played HL2 in 2006 or whatever, i had no idea that there would never be anything like that again. we all thought that HL2 was just the beginning... but it was the opposite. i think that we all assumed that the game was made great by its technology. but the more i think about it, the more i realize that it was the people, the sensibilities of those people and that time, and the character of valve at that time, everything besides the technology, that made HL2 so good. and that also explains why it has never been reproduced. if i were going to be sent to another planet in another galaxy to seed another colony of humanity... and i could only bring 2 video games for that entire branch of humanity to know and appreciate... it would be HL2 and MGS2.

half life alyx with the Jeff level