I've been an avid gamer across all genres and platforms since the mid-nineties, so I thought it was pretty odd I'd be so out of the loop on such an apparently awesome franchise when I found I'd hardly so much as heard of Half-Life until Half-Life 2 was coming out.
So when I saw the Orange Box for 360 selling very cheaply, I decided so much content in one box had to be worth it. Mainly because I had heard so much about Portal, but that's beside the point.
So, naturally I had the blast of all blasts with Portal, which I played after beating Half-Life 2. Over the course of about a month and a half, I eventually played through all the content on the disk, including a pretty appreciable stint on Team Fortress 2.
Then, after making sure I'd gotten about as much fun as I was going to get out of Portal, I traded it in. Half-Life 2 and the two 'episodes' that came with it were, to me, a case study in how to make the most forgettable game of all time. Nothing was really wrong with it, but nothing was really good about it either. The story was trite and generic, but gave a fine excuse to shoot things.
When the gunplay came, though, it was the age-old frustration of all the guns losing all their power and accuracy once you get them and all the enemies knowing exactly where you are no matter how long you've been out of their line of sight. After trying to use cover and play to my weapons' strengths for the first fraction for the game, and getting mauled repeatedly this way, I, solely out of anger, rushed into a group of five enemies and blasted them all in their faces with the shotgun. I took next to no damage doing this, and just rushing in mindlessly, barrels blazing, served me all too well through the rest of the game, which represents a pretty hefty step backwards for FPS gameplay. I mean, the genre's conventions aren't exactly taking quantum leaps every few months, but this is representative of the Duke Nukem school of FPS design, for crying out loud.
People fall over themselves adulating the game for its use of realistic facial expressions and 'industry-leading' (meaning 'not ear-splitting') voice acting, but all of this goes down the shitter because the characters' only purpose is to cheerlead for the only competent man on Earth, who I defy you to prove isn't the marine from Doom. Besides that, the writing doesn't really make all that much difference in a game that has essentially no beginning and no end from a narrative standpoint; the game exists for the same reason as most second entries in trilogies: to connect the first entry to the third.
The game attempts to compensate for the shortcomings of all its most basic elements by the inclusion of what fans call stirring setpieces and what an outside observer will call shameless gimmicks, which will invariably consist of introducing a marginally-interesting gameplay element that will freshen the experience for a good two or three minutes and then torture you with its presence for the remainder of the ordeal for which you're stuck with it, eg, the gravity gun, vehicle sections, and ant minions, which require no elaboration beyond pointing out that they existed.
Another set piece are the striders, whose purpose is to make the game very noisy until you find an indestructible three-foot wide sheet of corrugated tin with a magic box of rockets behind it, after which the phrase 'rinse and reuse' takes on grating new meaning as you fire a rocket, duck behind magic tin, and repeat, then repeat that process if they introduce more striders to stretch gameplay.
And, of course, there are the elementary-school see-saw puzzles that totally justify Gordan Freemon's career as a quantum physicist whose previous job experience consisted of fetching coffee for the rest of the guys at CERN and dooming the world to an alien holocaust. These puzzles really have no meaning other than to show off physics technology that, due to the glacial pace of Valve's development cycles (Episode Three: A shocking conclusion your grandchildren will love!), had lost all their novelty years ago, and to break the flow of gameplay while you collect bricks or barrels or whatever they're using for the one at hand.
And then there's the popular and mystifying belief that the Half-Life games are super-super scary, which is something I would never have guessed if the entirety of the Internet hadn't, at that time, been functioning as sort of a support group for people traumatized by the games. I can see a lot of things that definitely could have been sort of scary if they had been handled much more skillfully, and if the game itself had more immersion than checkers. The game does essentially everything it can manage to remind you you're playing a video game, whether it's breaking flow, abusing its gimmicks, or just plain old bland sameness reminding you of every other game you've ever played. I can say, however, that Ravenholm really did make me scream.... when I got through the whole boring, aggravating level using only the gravity gun and the game didn't give me my achievement for it. Must be the famous master-craftsmanship Valve is so universally loved for.
So, eventually I finish this serviceable-at-best title and the accompanying media and gear myself up for a release I had been looking forward to for months: Left 4 Dead. I got my hands on my preorder the day it came out, and man what an amazing night that was. And then I traded it in a week later, furious that you can legally sell a stripped-down Counter-Strike mod for the price of a full game, even if you OWN the rights to Counter-Strike. Please make special note that at that time, not only did I not realize that Valve made both of these games, I didn't really even know what Valve was, so don't think for a second I was just discriminating by developer... which would be pretty damn hard to do since I'd never played anything else by Valve.
There really isn't a lot to say about Left 4 Dead or Team Fortress 2, because there really isn't much of anything to them. Take some well-balanced gameplay and provide a handful of settings to exercise it in. The problem with Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead is that they both rely on a ridiculous fallacy, this being that if something is fun once, it will remain fun indefinitely.
Do me a favor: go jump on your bed. If you'd hit your ceiling doing this, drag your bed into your yard or your sidewalk and jump on it there. Think of the manual labor as a metaphor for the work you have to do to make sixty dollars. Is it fun? How long does it remain fun? Well your answer is irrelevant. Jump on that bed for three hours a day. For six months. At what point had you pretty much destroyed the bed? Was it before or after you decided you hated yourself for wasting more than 550 hours of your life to oblige a stranger on the Internet?
The one defense for this model of gameplay, and for any multiplayer experience in general, is that its quality is derived not necessarily from its particular makeup but from the people that you play it with, and that your playing it with people you like makes for a consistently fun experience. But- and this has been pointed out by a lot of people, including a certain Escapist celebrity- that this is true not only of games but of absolutely anything at all in the history of forever, including but not limited to bowel cancer and better, more fulfilling games.
Hell, do you have your old N64? Do you have your old copy of Goldeneye? Bust that bad boy out and play some splitscreen with four of your best buds. And then lie to me through your Dew-rotted teeth that beating the asshole that tried playing as Oddjob with tied-off socks weighted with soap wasn't the best time you've had since you finished your bed-jumping experiment.
So, naturally, once I was done dismissing these games, whose publisher and popularity I was still entirely and blissfully unfamiliar with, as good but not particularly memorable, an appropriate moment arose to voice my not-negative yet not-worshipful opinion of Half-Life 2, which I did in a way that was about as charitable as I could make it without lying about how much I enjoyed it.
I haven't seen that kind of screeching backlash since I tried to explain to a group of nuns why Jesus had to have had at least a mustache from birth (I don't believe this anymore; turns out it was all just the cold medicine talking). Naturally, once I realized that the success of Valve is owed not to making consistently-superb games but to making FPS series for people who believe FPS'es are for mindless fratboy sheeple, and started to become aware of how Valve is operated entirely by work-shy, self-indulgent, auteur jackasses who abuse that support to spend the kind of money and time that usually gets blown on aircraft carriers on games that, in honest actuality, fail to stand out even in a genre famous for its failure to innovate, (*loooong breath*) people's horrified reactions to the unthinkable Gaming Blasphemy that Valve's products are good has never failed to be, to me, as hilarious as it is pathetic.
To me, Valve is like the Yngwie Malmsteen of game developers: buy it for what it's worth, and sell it for what it thinks it's worth, and you won't have to work another day of your life.
