The Forgotten Half Life Game?

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I think it's a safe thing to say that Valve has a track record for making the best games ever brought to the PC, or if you don't agree with that, then at least the best examples and best use of the First Person Shooter in gaming as a whole. I myself am a stone's throw away from absolute fanboyism when it comes to Valve, and I like to think for good reason. They're the one developer that takes risks, focuses on satisfaction, has great community PR and is willing to make bold leaps into wildly different concepts rather than just making sequels to it's one-hit wonder. Fans of Bungie, makers of Halo, might try and spin that last one on me by reminding me that Bungie tried an RTS instead of an FPS once. Why yes, you COULD make that argument, if you're a moron. It would also help if said RTS venture didn't suck. Meanwhile, though Bungie is always close with it's fans, they've only barely innovated enough from game to game not to be thrown into the same pile as Madden, and need I remind them they've only ever been known for Halo.

But anyway, yes, Valve is awesome. And all their games are right? Well, we could argue about Half Life Source, but while not at all good as a remake, it'll always be a good game. You've probably gathered there's ANOTHER game I mean, a game I will be sniping at today. If by chance you ever were dumb enough to buy Half Life for the PlayStation 2, you might have tried "Half Life: Decay". If you have, stop reading now, you'll know what I mean already.

If not, let me enlighten you. Decay is another creation by "Gearbox" the fellows charged by Valve to make the two Half Life expansions, Blue Shift and Opposing Force. Aside from being a PS2 port (which sounds weird already, given the last-gen graphics look very funny and humble on the PS2) Decay is the first "technically" Valve game to be designed around co-op gameplay. In the game you and a friend play two HEV suited Black Mesa scientists, Doctors Cross and Green, who incidentally work behind the scenes of Gordon's infamous experiment gone-wrong. Rather than being continuous gameplay, the game instead unlocks short levels as you progress, starting you off in a new setting each time. This is both a feature to allow you and the friend you dragged into this to take a break or set a place to play from later. But the aggravating thing is this feature is also in place for lack of a save option. Yes, instead of saving wherever you like, if one of you dies, you start the level from the beginning. I'm liking this game already, right?

Before I go on, let me talk about playing the port itself. The controls brought to this PS2 version make moving an utter ***** and make shooting even worse. The DualShock has never really been the best FPS controller ever made, but by God, try killing a headcrab and watch the fun begin. My brother and I found ourselves nearly dead from trying to kill headcrabs in the beginning of the game, it's THAT HARD to aim and fire at things that aren't level with you. The game realizes this and has a weak auto-aim feature, but it's all for naught, and for some reason the autotarget even works on your team-mate, in case they really piss you off or something. If you're smart, by the time you're halfway through level two, you'll be ready to ditch this game, because by then you'll realize you're just not having fun.

For this, I heartily recommend the re-port of what OUGHT to have been a PC game to begin with. Some modders willing and devoted enough to waste their time aggressively, thoughtfully brought Decay to it's PC roots. Instantly this solved the aiming problems, and essentially it's no different than any other Half Life 1 based game, except there are a few problems here as well.

If you can find a friend who can or will, you can create a server and play the game Online, however you'd better hope you have at least one mic between you, because being the campaign is designed around two players, you're likely going to have to communicate your intentions, or more, who does what part in a two-player Half Life puzzle. Likely however, like me, you're going to have to play it solo, and that means controlling two players by body-jumping into the other at will. As you might imagine, this means your other player is essentially defenseless, and there's no way of knowing what may or may not be happening while you're away, so you have to find a good hidden nook to prop him safely into while you clear out the enemies until you find another two-man puzzle. The other player does have a sort of "sentry" feature in which they'll aim and fire at an enemy if they see it, but they never seem to fire below the horizon in case it's a short enemy, and every time you body jump, you'll find the bot has conveniently decided to face the wall, and only in the most useless moments will it be able to SEE an enemy and actually do something about it. And even then it's likely behind bulletproof glass and will expend your precious ammo in futility. It also tends to use whatever gun you put in it's hand. I've not tried this yet, but I don't think it'd be hard to assume the stupid botch would keep throwing all your grenades at enemies if you equipped them. Sounds like a quick game-over.

The thankful thing is you cover a small amount of ground per level, meaning you worry less about the annoying fact that you must move each player forward yourself to move ahead, like a pair of sentient disembodied feet. But the real deal-breaker comes from just how much harder the gunfights get the further you go. By level four, you run into Alien grunts, those bee-shooting bastards that take two magnum shots to kill. Now of course, there ARE supposed to be two players' worth of ammo here, and up till now the gunfights have been insultingly easy, but for the love of God, only a few levels later and you encounter HORDES of Controllers. Yes, those little fast-moving, high-damage, flying hadouken-brains.

This is where the two-player argument loses it's footing and plummets into Jagged-Rock Junction. How in the Hell were two players in horizontal split-screen, with controls that made a headcrab encounter harrowing supposed to survive this? Forget you and your bot, you're both pretty much Vortigaunt mulch. And this is on top of Decay's sadistic sense of humor. You know those triggered alien teleports Half Life is known for? Well imagine what someone with a real mean-streak could do with them. I once committed the Cardinal Sin of going into a room and activating a suit charger, when the charger triggered about SEVEN Vortigaunts to spawn in that room right behind me. Unless the Nihilanth discovered the strategic significance of med-kits, batteries and wall-mounted health/suit chargers, this just seemed distinctively ****-ish.

Now, I mentioned the rather weak look a GoldSource port had on a PS2 game, but there WERE a couple overall improvements. Speaking of wall-mounted stuff, those have all undergone improvement for some reason, though not much else has. For instance, Health has a robot arm with a syringe on the end, and the suit charger has a similar arm with a green lighting tuning-fork at the end. The retinal scanners even got a lot better looking with a neat animation, but that's about it.

Otherwise, for a Co-op game, this was pretty weakly designed. It would be one thing if this was the throw-in for a bigger game, but this game was designed with cooperative play in mind. The death system is just ass. One of you dies, it's game-over. Imagine if Left 4 Dead employed that. No, L4D has both an incap-system, and in campaign will bring back your fallen comrades after a certain point. Even damned HALO allowed for respawn if the area was safe, and allowed you to continue at checkpoints.

Perhaps it's not fair to blame Valve for this since it was mostly Gearbox's work, and maybe it's futile to hack at the shins of a game that was released several years ago, but dammit, I think this could have been shown a bit more love. It is Half Life after all.
 
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