Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with halflife

A new lease on Half Life

cmoj — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:48:26 -0800

I just finished Half Life 2 Episode 2. Now what? I wouldn't consider myself a first-person shooter type. Only a couple have really gotten me. I used to play Battlefield 2 a lot, but that kind of game is less attractive now because I don't dedicate anywhere near as much time to computer games any more. I liked it because it wasn't so bad about being the kind of game you had to play a whole lot to be good at, but it still had that quality.

Half Life 2, though... especially Ep. 2 is majorly impressive to me. I'm also the type to skip all of the cut-scenes in a game, but the story and characters engaged me to a degree that only the best movies and books manage. I mean, if people let me, I'll talk about this game like it's an academic piece of art, which I consider it to be.

On top of that, I love the game-play itself. I can't think of other games that reward creativity in combat so well. Battlefield was very good at this, but Half Life is better. I guess that feature comes down to the grav-gun and physics-based damage. Oh, and the car. The way you're guided through levels is amazing too. I don't know if there are multiple paths through the story, but several times I felt like I was exploring an irrelevant path, or being subversive to the level design, but wasn't.

So now what do I play? I understand episode 3 isn't coming out til '10 now?! I've been playing HL via Cider on a relatively new MacBook Pro that ran HL at 1080 resolution with no problems (except for some Cider glitchiness). I have been considering an xBox 360, but I dunno... I don't think I play enough video games to justify that.

I should probably Boot Camp windows, huh?

I see one very similar question with good answers, but I'm in a somewhat different boat than the other guy.

I can't play Bioshock (sniff), so what should I play?

jbickers — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:57:29 -0800

Half-Life 2 rocks my world. What should I play next? Note: my PC cannot handle much more than Half-Life 2. I'm new to the FPS genre, and it appears that I've started with one of the absolute gems. My computer cannot run Bioshock, the game I most want to play next, and I can't bring myself to buy a new computer or an Xbox for one game.

So ... are there any other immersive/storytelling games of a similar caliber to HL2, that don't require much more processing horsepower? It doesn't have to be FPS, but I'd like it to be as amazing as possible. Open-source is great, if possible. (Also, I own a PS2, so if there's anything there that is similarly world-class, I'd love to hear about that, too.)

Is a somewhat practical rebar crossbow possible?

cellphone — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 23:10:37 -0800

A crossbow that fires rebar. AND: Superheating the rebar. First:

In Half-Life 2, my favorite weapon happens to be what looks like a homemade crossbow that fires rebars heated by a lantern battery. Obviously this is pretty farfetched, but would a crossbow that fires the smallest rebar (Imperial #3 at .376) be all that farfetched?
Bolts weighing 10.5 grains per inch are mentioned on this page. This comes out to .0015 pounds per inch, with the rebar being .031333... pounds per inch.

The rebars in the game are longer than six inches by far, but for the purposes of this question assume that the crossbow would be firing six inch rebar.

Secondly:

I'm guessing a lantern battery isn't enough power to heat up rebar enough that it glows (as it does in the game). My knowledge of electricity is somewhat limited, so I must ask: How much Wattage/Amperage/Voltage would it take to heat up some rebar to that point? Assume six inches again.

Has anyone found a definitive fix for the Half-life 2 "memory could not be read" error?

damnthesehumanhands — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 13:51:11 -0800

Has anyone found a definitive fix for the Half-life 2 "memory could not be read" error?

Why aren't other developers following Valve's Steam model?

Pretty_Generic — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 07:46:15 -0800

If Valve's Steam means that games developers can do away with publisher, distributor and retailer overheads... um... why isn't everyone doing it, or similar things?