Half-Life 2: Episode Two
developed by Valve (Bellevue, WA)
first published October 10, 2007 by Valve, for Windows:
as part of “The Orange Box,” $49.99; by itself (online only), $29.95
[website]
~2.9 GB
Played to completion in 6 hours, 1/11/15–1/13/15.
[Video of a complete 4-hour playthrough in four parts: 1, 2, 3, 4. Once again, please disregard the subtitles.]
[trailer 1, trailer 2]
The fourth of the five games purchased 11/28/10 in “The Orange Box” for $7.50.
This very collection, incidentally, is how the game was first released in 2007, offering three new games and two old for $50, a brilliant bit of marketing that basically ushered in the “bundle” era. At the heart of this idea was the fact that for the first 6 months after release, the three new games (unrelated to one another) were not available separately, except on Steam. I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of why this is an inspired sales tactic; suffice it to say that it introduced the idea that, at least in the video game market, suddenly dropping the price so shockingly far below the perceived value that any customer aware of the deal simply must buy turns out to be profitable in the long run — and, if you can bundle the right games together, potentially even in the short run.
In other words, “The Orange Box” is indirectly responsible for me having 197 games.
(Actually, I’m afraid it’s 198 now. On Christmas Day, GOG made the ancient 1980 RPG-by-a-high-school-student Akalabeth available for free, so of course I was compelled to add it to my account. I couldn’t help myself! It showed up in my feed and said “free!” I don’t think I’ll be able to bear actually playing that one through to completion, but we’ll just have to see when I get there, which won’t be any time soon.)
Half-Life 2: Episode Two is the subject.
I’ve gotten so accustomed to these games that I was able to slide through this final one with no friction at all. That’s the mark of a terrific achievement on the part of the developers; it stands as the ultimate compliment to the game’s flow, which I keep saying is the main objective. But, seen another way, it means that my aesthetic experience is diminishing: no friction means no truly new meanings, just refinement and redelivery of the old.
Of course, the developers are pretty explicit about their intent in that respect: these last two games, though they do represent incremental deepening of technical and dramatic resources, fall under the category of expansions/extensions of the original Half-Life 2. They are, exactly as advertised, “episodes”: a serialized format.
Serial formats have a different mode of consumption from standalone works. Like I said last time, at their best they’re like a room we keep returning to, in which different things are always happening, but the space stays the same.
This of course is only a metaphor, but it’s a resonant one, at least for me; my feelings about space are deeply meaning-making, at least as much so as my feelings about narrative. In reflecting on the ways I perceive my own life as meaningful, those seem to be the two main ones: in terms of a story that I’m living, and in terms of spaces past, present, and imagined.
Meanwhile, another running idea in my comments here is that what video games give us above all is imagined spaces, that they’re the real meat of the experience. Which means that in a serialized video game there’s a peculiar juxtaposition: of the imagined spaces of the game and the imagined metaphorical space that the game series as a whole represents. The game both as a series of rooms and as “a room.”
That might sound like pretentious sophistry but it’s something I really experience in the playing, as a kind of new tension in answering the basic questions “where am I? who am I? and what am I doing?” When I was playing the original Half-Life a few weeks ago, I was first of all me in my apartment at a computer pressing keys, and second of all me-slash-Gordon-Freeman in some dark scary elevator shaft deep underground, trying to figure out where to go next. Whereas now that I’ve become an old hand at Half-Life and Half-Life has become an old hand at itself, there is a third zone, between those two, in which I am neither the real me nor Gordon-Freeman-me, but rather “Half-Life-receiving me,” and the place I am is “in the Half-Life zone.” This is a very real and distinct space that I feel my body to be in, a genuine psychological state of being, the existence of which accounts for most of “fan culture.”
If you go to some Comic Con dressed up as Half-Life, you are not certainly not living the dream of being Gordon Freeman — you know very well that you’re a geek in a costume, standing in front of the Toronto Congress Centre. The dream you are living is of being Half-Life-receiving-man and being in the Half-Life zone, and the premise of Comic Con is that all such dreams are equal.
I have spent my whole life being ambivalent about whether I am a nerd or not, and though the roots of that ambivalence are currently undergoing renovation, nonetheless the habit lives on, and it hones in on exactly this middle self, the one that is neither real nor fully imagined, the one that steps away from the physical world to play a role but then steps back to categorize and name and claim that act of role-playing. This is the zone of nerdiness, or at least this is the zone where my anxiety about nerdiness applies.
When I was in middle school I thought Monty Python was funny but I was wary about expressing that, because I really didn’t like the way the other people who liked Monty Python talked about it and quoted it: always with the same rushed/overeager cadence in their voices as if they were bragging defensively, or sending up rescue flares. It seemed desperate, coded, not what it claimed to be. “What does Monty Python itself have to do with this widespread urge to make awkward noises about it?” was more or less the way I formulated the question to myself at the time. It’s a very complicated question and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it has taken me 25 years to answer it. I think I have, now. In one way or another, every entry on this site is about that answer. Given how much I repeat myself here, I will in this instance have the restraint to leave it as a problem for the reader.
My point for the moment is only meant to be this: when I find myself shifting into that space of brand-cued audience-ness that precedes and subsumes all specific content, where I am neither in myself nor in the game world, my old worries about nerdy disconnection flare up. “What does the content of the game itself have to do with this thing I’m doing in playing it?” Maybe not enough, anymore. “So then what am I doing? Where am I?”
Even though that worry may be needless — it is — it’s still a sign that it’s time for me to be done here, and having finished this one, I am.
The collaborative-NPC ideas from the previous episode are here expanded, with a whole sequence where your companion is not Alyx but a Vortigaunt, a sort of a Yoda/shaman character who makes all his utterances in “wise” intonation. To my mind, this makes for a far more natural companion relationship than Alyx. Since he’s a philosopher, he can talk above the mere interpersonal “hey pal” level, which is where my anxieties about Alyx would get caught. Everything the Vortigaunt said, I was able to take or leave as I liked, and most of it I liked. Instead of relating to the problematic nonentity “Gordon Freeman,” he relates to the player. How pleasant, to be related to!
“What next in the parade of constant obstacles?” he asks wistfully at one point, clearly referring to the form of the game as a whole. This makes him my friend, because this is what I’m asking too. Whereas Alyx’s warmth and affection was always specifically for Gordon and I felt awkward about overhearing it. Can you imagine the look on her face when she finds out that her best friend is actually just a hollow avatar for a game-playing dude? She’ll be traumatized, to say the least. The Vortigaunt, on the other hand, probably already knows it. Back in Half-Life 2, there’s a secret room containing a Vortigaunt who just spouts wisdom, and one of the mystical things he says is: “Something secret steers us both. We shall not name it.” I’m pretty sure he’s referring to me, the player. Or at least to Half-Life 2.
The special ironic/claustrophobic rightness of the original 1998 Half-Life just isn’t coming back, so setting that aside and accepting the new “everything bagel” approach: this last episode is probably the tightest, slickest single thing they’ve done. It has a dense succession of strongly varied environments, challenges, surprises, and hardly any fat left on the bone. The crazy packing problem they’ve been working on (Pixar + Alien + shoot-em-up + rollercoaster) is being solved to greater and greater degrees of precision.
Actually, come to think of it, they do return to several scenario elements that hadn’t been in play since the original Half-Life. Maybe some of that special claustrophobia can come back after all. I felt it particularly in a sequence in a missile silo, toward the end of the game.
Watching gameplay videos on Youtube — of this game I just hours ago was playing myself — drives home just how spectacularly lavish this thing is, both in terms of its visuals and its enveloping embrace as an interactive experience. “Wow, just look at this thing!” I think. “Was it really this amazing when I was playing it? How was I not marveling the whole time?” Good question! No friction, is the answer. It works too well to marvel!
Some part of me feels like that’s a waste. I want that dream of finally getting the ultimate toy to be alive as I’m playing with it. I want to eat my cake and have it too — and I mean really have it, big time.
I guess that’s just another form of the agita of discontent-dependency. Under renovation! Watch this space!
At this point, it turns out, the discontent-dependent in me gets plenty to work with. After announcing a three-episode series, setting up a very clear plan for what episode three was going to be about, with plenty of internal foreshadowing and teasing, and then ending episode two with a big old shocker/cliffhanger… Valve just stopped talking about Half-Life. And that was eight years ago.
There is no question that Half-Life 2: Episode Three was very much in development, back in 2007, for an expected 2008 release… and then all these years have passed without official word, and there’s simply no way of knowing what was or is going on behind those closed doors. Some degree of embarrassment, I suspect, and I know all too well how embarrassment can end up doubling or tripling or squaring the lateness that it purports to take a stand against.
Based on the very very few hints that are discernible, I actually speculate that what’s gone on is: somewhere in 2008 or 2009, while the game was suffering delays for various ordinary reasons, Valve’s increasing corporate obsession with social! multiplayer! online! found its way to infecting this project; something like: “You know what would be really cool would be if you could play collaboratively not just with these NPCs but alongside other real-world players! Which we do have the architecture to implement…” “Yes, but how would we create a scripted story-based game like Half-Life as a multiplayer game?” “I don’t know, man, but if we solve that one we’ll have the biggest thing ever.” “Okay, cool, let’s try!” Now cut to a year later: “Guys, it turns out this isn’t working and is messing up our game; we should just go back to what we had before.” “No! Single-player isn’t what we do anymore! Get with the times!” Then unrest in the ranks leading to a new balance of power on the project, necessitating a partial “fresh start.” Then ugliness because there’s no longer any unified point of view, and Valve prides itself on its managerless structure, or at least used to. Also because the ideal of a multiplayer scripted story game is, in fact, an unsquareable circle.
That anyway is what I picture. And/or who knows what else. The upshot is, it’s eight years later and, though Valve is a bigger and more powerful company than it’s ever been (or, as I’m suggesting, very likely because of that), there still ain’t no Half-Life 2: Episode Three, and there may never be, even though we were right in the middle of a damn story. And there ain’t no Half-Life 3 and there may never be, even though the world clamors for it daily: on any given day, do a Google News search for “Half Life 3” and you will find a recent article with no substance. It’s a clickbait perennial.
I will here venture a geek prediction: Yeah, it will come out, eventually.
That’s my prediction!
By 2007 Valve had gotten to the point where it was listing 120-some names alphabetically in the credits, which starts to be silly, though I guess the developer commentary feature sort of makes up for it. In this case, I haven’t listened to all of it yet because, you know, there were some hard parts of the game and I didn’t feel like doing them all again right away. Also, there’s a file in the game directories with transcripts of all the text in the game, so I was able to read all the commentary there. This doesn’t give me access to the occasional visual demonstration they do, and I do like hearing the voices, but I got the gist. It’s very similar stuff to last time. In sum: “After observing our playtesters, we ended up simplifying/being extremely explicit about/giving the player downtime instead of…”
The fifth game in “The Orange Box” is Team Fortress 2. This is a very popular online multiplayer game. Online multiplayer games give me the willies, as I’ve said before. I did consider that maybe I’d dare this one, but then I watched some videos of it on Youtube and got scared off. It looks like a chaos inhabited by teenagers, and I haven’t yet found the part of me that doesn’t mind. That’s the only part of me that should be playing. Like I’ve said, I have nothing to prove.
So, as with Team Fortress Classic, I’m going to set it aside for now out of timidity, and proceed on to the stuff that comes next on my list. Very very different stuff.