Forum Overview :: Half-Life II ??? :: Lambda Locator is the worst achievement in Half-Life 2.

[quote name="Dream Cast"]Like WAY too many first-person shooters, Half-Life 2 thinks it has what it takes to be a collect 'em up. The Lambda Locator achievement asks players to find every hidden supply cache marked with a <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/scotts/bulgarians/lambda.html">lambda</a> symbol. There are 45 in total, but the game doesn't tell you this; nor does it tell you when you've found all there are in a given location, or when you're about to cross a point of no return and lose access to preceding locations. The only way to be sure you've found them all is to scour every square metre of each area before the game can funnel you to the next one. This has the consequence of making you feel as if you're constantly swimming against the current, always resisting the temptation to get swept up in the game's narrative. You're made painfully aware of both the artificial linearity of the locations and the lack of genuine urgency in the situations. What's just as bad are the knock-on effects to other systems. While the airboat's gamepad controls might (might) be functional enough for speeding down a canal, low-speed manoeuvring around level geometry will immediately expose the problem with mapping forward and reverse to the same analogue stick used for steering. A problem only compounded by the lack of expected deadzone between dead slow ahead port (swinging the bow to port) and dead slow astern port (swinging the bow to starboard, while simultaneously REVERSING THE CAMERA, making the player seasick in real life). And what about the squad controls? Where is "please go stand in the next room while I search every nook and cranny of this one"? Leading the rebellion through a tenement building while combing for lambda caches gives a chilling glimpse into a dystopian future where dogs aren't afraid of vacuum cleaners, instead they're constantly underfoot like they think you're playing with them. Lambda Locator is a textbook example of how to spotlight every weakness and exacerbate every flaw a game has with a single optional objective. And for what? Did anyone really turn around and say, gee, I woulda never been satisfied with the value I got from my copy of The Orange Box if they hadn't tacked on those extra hours of meaningless collectable hunting? Point me to that person so I can give them a hug, because they need it. And save the collectable achievements for actual collect 'em ups.[/quote]