f13.net

Looks like only 25% of you (http://www.steampowered.com/stats/ep1/).

Am I reading this right, the game takes 4 hours to complete?

Yeah it is very short.  Took me about five to six hours.  Probably could do it in four hours if I didn't wall-hump/explore.

5ish hours for me, and I played through again on commentary mode.

Weird statistics on completion though. It was worth the money IMO.

Hell, even I finished it and I had just finished HL2 the month before.  Short but very entertaining game.  It was well worth the $20. 

I finished it. About 4.5 hours. I too enjoyed it thoroughly.

Hey guys, I just finished Half Life 2.

FYI, Alyx keeps her pants on in EP1.

This doesn't sound worth buying, thx.

You guys are going to bring ruin upon us all.

If by ruin, you mean a sweet ass, then maybe. SiN showed what Valve technology can do for asses. I can only imagine the glorious behind on Alyx.

No I meant those people who are happy to cough up $20 for 4 to 5 hours of video game entertainment. If that trend keeps up we will eventually be paying movie ticket style prices for all our video game entertainment.

To be perfectly honest, I'd rather pay $20 for 4-5 hours of solid entertainment over $50 for 40-80 hours of meh entertainment (SQUARE, I'M LOOKING AT YOU). God of War was possibly the best $50 I've ever spent on gaming and it was 8 hours long. SiN was totally worth it for $20 and RE4 was worth it for $90 (I bought it twice AND I'll buy the PC version) for 10 hours of entertainment.

Not if you mod it.

What he said.
I have money but no spare time, so whenever I spend an hour on a game, it better be good.
That's why I come to places like this and talk about MMOGs, but don't actually play them. They waste my time.

Somebody call the ESRB!

Look, I am 37.  I work as an attorney.  I have a wife and two boys, 5 and 3.  I have a house, mortgage, big yard and more chores than I can list.  I read 3 to 4 different newspapers per day online.  I read 4 websites daily.  I am supposed to be exercising somewhere in the middle of all of this. 

When I sit down to play a game, I want enjoyment.  I don't do grinds.  I grind IRL.  I don't play new games unless they are sequels to games that I loved, Civ4, HL2Ep1, etc.  I wait for the game site hype to die off.  I watch for opinions from posters on f13 who like the same games that I do.  Then and only then, I buy the games that are quality regardless of age or cost.  I don't have the time to finish epic games without ignoring other important tasks.  I don't get to sit and play for 6-8 hour sessions.  I have eliminated MMO's for that reason.  If I can't login and play for 45 minutes and quit, I don't play.

HL2:EP1 is exactly what I want.    A quality product that delivers as promised for a small cost. 

Old gamers unite!!! 

(We would have a rally but we cant sync our schedules.)

I'm very time-bound, too, but I take another course; I like the long epic games. That way I don't have to keep spending money on these little 5-hour jobbies. I'm still only level 13 in Oblivion and barely into the game. I've shut one gate to gain support for Bruma and I'm up to Swordsman in the Fighter's Guild. Between that and a couple strategy games, I'm set for the year without spending another dime.

My approach is a combination of Nazrat's and Sky's... probably because I only have the one boy, but I have most of the rest of it.  Here it is, 2318 local time, and I finally get up here to my PC for some "me time".  I'll probably pass the fuck out from exhaustion before 0100.  Why am I reading F13 now?  Going to try to get TS working.

Out of curiosity, what is the cutoff age between old/young?  I'll be 27 in a couple months, and I don't want that "old" tag sneaking up on me.

btw, i'm re-installing HL2 right now to give EP1 a whirl.  Figured I'd give it a month or two to see if the reviews were positive.

You'll know when it happens.

When you are one of the guys who can talk more intelligently in the home ownership thread than any of the hundreds of portable gaming threads, you are old. 

When you spend more time researching a game before buying it than you do playing it, you are old. 

My the spirit of Foxworthy bless this thread!

You might be old.... if you can injure yourself by dancing.   (Jury's still out on whether it's a groin pull or a sports hernia, but either way, ow.)

Were you trying to imitate your avatar?

Even more embarassing than that.  I was Morris dancing.   :oops:

W T F.

My constant refusal to dance has hurt me in other places.

Most men are simply not meant to dance.


At least while anything close to resembling sober.

We can dance if we want to
we can leave your friends behind
because your friends don't dance
and if they don't dance
well they're no friends of mine

Well... getting slightly back on topic here, I finished EP1 this afternoon.  Yeah, a bit on the short side... but probably still worth the $20... ehh... I dunno.  I think $10 would have been a little closer to the mark.  But it doesn't matter what I think, because they just sold a bagillion of them for $20 and will do it for that much or more for EP2.

Spoiler? : I've never been so pissed off at a flashlight in my life, by the way.  That thing is one goddamn worthless piece of horse shit.

You should play Doom 3.

Bleh...  been there, done that. Guess I must have blocked the majority of that crapfest from my memory.

You should play HL2: Ep1, Doom 3 has nothing on it.

Now I'm going to have to, because that sounds like a goddamn dirty lie.

That's true... D3 did have something on HL2... utter lameness.

Without giving too much away, in Doom 3 you could still fight enemies without having your flashlight, because they had all sorts of bright special attacks and glowing eyes.

In HL2: EP1 you can't see enemies without your flashlight, period.  Oh, and you don't get anything fancy like "enviromental lighting", flares are your friend.

D3 and HL2:E1 both make light a limited resource (at least in some parts of the game - in both cases a relatively small fraction of the game actually uses that device).  In D3 the limitation is that you can't have the flashlight equipped at the same time as a gun; in HL2 the limitation is that your flashlight has a finite (but self-recharging) battery.

D3 requires that you get adept at switching quickly between the flashlight and gun (and remembering what you saw with the flashlight so you know where you should be aiming your gun and what hazards you should be alert for), and HL2 requires that you move quickly from safe area to safe area before your flashlight battery needs to recharge (and keeping your ears open so you know if your dark but apparently safe area just got less safe).  In either case, there's potential for a lot of frustration if you're unable or unwilling to work with that limitation. 

Also, if you don't like jumping puzzles with small tolerances for error, you're going to find Super Mario pretty frustrating.

The part of HL2:E1 where it is dark is far superior to the one(?) in Doom 3.  D3 has no imagination and gets boring.  And you don't get smart-ass comments from your sweaty, filthy sidekick about your shitty flashlight in D3.

Just finished it about 4 hours after I bought it. I wish I had waited till it was half price. I really feel cheated.

It was good - but not $20 good.

I originally thought it was worth the $20... but right now I'm playing through the entire Half-Life 2 again, and it really shames EP1 with it's nice long storyline.

I really don't like this little short 4-hour bursts of storyline every 6(?) months or so.  Feels like some CBS miniseries rather than an epic journey.

They should have just saved it all and released it as Half-Life 3, imho.

So i played half-life 2 and accidently skipped the part where I was supposed to get the boat which forced me to do hours upon hours of precise strafe jumping and terrain exploiting (and one particularly hilarious part where I balanced on barrels across a large poison lake) until I got to a point where it was impossible to continue (attach these weapons to your boat...). Then I quit and didn't feel like starting over, is it worth the replay? I find single player games to be boring in general...

Are you kidding ?

Sort of, I assume it is worth replaying because the game was really fun for awhile, I just got turned off by my experience and need some motivation to start over :/

Here's the thing.  Half-Life 2 doesn't actually have a longer storyline; it's just a longer game.  You get 5 seconds of story, 2 hours of fairly repetitive gameplay, 5 more seconds of story, another 2 hours, et cetera.  It's very good as far as repetitive gameplay goes, but TBH I'd had enough of the car/ants thing about a third of the way through it.  Ditto for crossing the bridge.  Ditto for the boat.  Ditto for Ravenholm.  All of those bits were really cool, but they could have been about a third as long and been no less cool.

THAT is what I like about Episode 1.  It's a lean cut of gaming goodness in an industry full of gristleburgers.  The story is CONSTANTLY being furthered as you play the game, and it very seldom feels like you're doing something just because the designers needed the game to play a little longer.  You don't walk out of a 2 hour movie complaining that it was too short and that they should have added 10 more hours of filler so you could get your $5 worth.  Why do we have this obsession with having our games take forever to complete?

Besides which, according to the stats in the OP, most people didn't even make it all the way through that 4 hours.  And multiple people have posted recently saying that they never quite managed to make it through HL2.  Doesn't that indicate that our narrative-driven games should be getting shorter, not longer?

No they should just have less grind. Taking across groups of people to the trains at the end of episode 1... That got a bit repetitive..

And that was probably the most repetitive part of the game (that and maybe the subterranean areas), clocking in at a whopping fifteen minutes or so.  Compare to, say, crossing back and forth under the bridge in HL2.  Or the "floor is made of lava" game with the antlions.  Each of those sections was something like an hour of doing the same thing, IIRC.  And the Half-Life games are miles ahead of most games in that respect. 

Hell, how many people here think Diablo was a great game because it gave you weeks and weeks of skeleton-whacking mouse-mashing fun?

I finished HL2, just because I paid so damned much for it. I finished it out of spite. It was a decent shooter but there were some real annoying bits in there (the big bugs comes to mind). Eminently forgettable, Ravenholm was cool, but would've been cooler in Vampire:Bloodlines ;)

How much is there left if I'm on the part where you have to set up the 2 turrents and hold the room for a whiles?

iirc that part is still in Nova Prospekt... so you've got a good few hours left.

Hrm, maybe I'll push through it this week.

Since Sky brought up Bloodlines....I still haven't beat that...I think I just got to Hollywood or something, where you can first get into stripclubs.

That game was so buggy and unfinished that I don't know if I could ever finish it. Teh Hate is not on par wit DX2....but my dislike for the game is not too far removed fromt hat point.

I beat it once and kept getting crashes on my repeat play attempts so I just gave up.

I played through Bloodlines 7 times.  Surprisingly, I think it only crashed out on me twice out of those 7 playthroughs, but that's largely because I installed all the 3rd-party patches that helped avoid the worst buggy bits.

What?  Your new name is going to be Testicle Hammer.

I was trying to come up with an appropriate reponse... I think "What?" is the word I was looking for.  Thank you.

I don't like Lazy Town.

Sucks to be you.    :evil:

I think it's hilarious.

Is it too early to start a "She'll be 18 in x days" countdown?  <---(Green Text for you colorblind people. Just making sure.)

I beat it as Ventrue and was a way into it with a Malk. It crashed a few times, but I don't know many games that haven't. I didn't hit any bugs I can remember, though it was a while ago so that's no guarantee :) I can overlook crashes and bugs for a great game, though (I loved Daggerfall).

The patches (hosted here) are pretty good, too.

Stephanie?  You have wood for Stephanie?  Can't be.  Sportacus has such ripped legs.

Actually I don't find it horribly offensive, but watching it makes me feel like I dipped my brain in powdered sugar.  For a truly horrible, food-launching kids show, try this one (http://www.brum.tv/intro.html).

See the problem is HalfLife doesn't have phat loot. If Gordon had a socketed crowbar and an Angelic Pocket Protector of the Monkey then people would be asking for more grind.

They could copy resident evil to make HL better by making ammo so scarse its like purplez when you get some. I'll take that nickname, I deserved it. It was the first time I really sat down and decided to finish a single player game on the computer :/

I'm just amazed you didn't load from a save game to get the boat back.  I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE to lose the boat - I'd have thought the game would just automatically end at that point and kick you back to your last save, the way it ends if you let a critical NPC die.

What did you do, oh say 10 or 15 years ago, before teh interwebs allowed anything other than single player games?

I suspect he was still in the womb.

That was the ONE time I saved over my game because i thought it didn't matter, I usually keep two copies :/

15 years ago i was 4... I didn't play computer games other than sports games until the internet came out (you can bet your ass that I didn't finish fucking Myst). Until very recently, i've even found single player console games hard to finish unless i'm playing them with someone else, thankfully i've always had a friend who has been willing to switch off playing levels of the games that didn't allow co-op gameplay so I never missed much!

You missed out on some good times...

all the old Sierra games, for a start... Gold Rush... fucking GOLD RUSH!  And so many countless other fanstastic 1P memories....

Of course, this is coming from a person whose very first gaming experiences came from works of art like this (http://www.videogamehouse.net/theattack.html), and this (http://www.videogamehouse.net/chisholmtrail.html) and this (http://www.videogamehouse.net/tombstone.html).

So clearly I am just easily entertained.  :-D

Where's my fucking Geritol?

I think it's in a white house to the east, with a boarded-up door.

Ye cannot get ye Geritol.

Winnar

Is there a mailbox here?

Yes. Johnny Carson has the note in his hand.