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| hl 2 vs h2 KUMITE CAGE MATCH by Harry Crews, Motherfucker 01/12/2005, 3:27pm PST | ||||
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| Any editing suggestions appreciated. Anyone want to do screenshots/captions?
A rant. Killo ergo sum, as Descartes might have said if he spent more time playing Quake and less being the philosophical equivalent of a Big Mac with fries. As we all know, it's a great time to be alive if crawling down ducts and shooting big guns is your bag. What Freud might say about the psychosexual implications of taking a shotgun down holes and shooting scuttling toothed vaginas with it is uncertain. 'Ich bin ein pervy kancervictimen' perhaps. Probably, though, he'd just be wishing he was still alive so he could play Halflife 2 and Halo 2. I haven't finished the former and only reached the end of Halo 2 last night, although I got both shortly after they came out; I've been playing them both on 'hard' difficulty. To one of my awesome and cybernetically augmented skillset this seemed the only possible route, particularly since both games are a touch on the easy side. Halflife 2 even defaults to a ' hold my hand and let me know to close my eyes at the scary bits' level of hardness, tch ptah. Anyway I was concerned there weren't enough comparisons of the two games on the Internet, so I've decided to throw my guts into the ring. We'll let the Mexicans clean it up, it's what they're paid for. Starting with the sound, because it's the blind man's television. The sound in Halflife 2 is visceral and perfectly judged, its music restrained, spooky or rocking as required. The first Halo had brilliant sound too, every thunk, boom and kachunk fitting perfectly into place like a spiked collar round the neck of a paunchy homosexual. The music was ace, cranking up and shifting down in intensity at the drop of a hat. Of course there were no hats in Halo 1, whereas there are in Halo 2. This might explain why the sound is also a bit poo. The voices are muted, the gunfire less rocking, the music more generic. There are still many moments of glorious insanity, but I'm not doing this to be reasonable, so Halo 2 loses this one. It also has Steve Vai in it, so it sort of double loses if that's possible. The graphics on both are much flashier than their respective originals, as they should be giving how much I spent chipping my Xbox and modding my video card. Both Halo 2 and Halflife 2 have done sterling work in holding on to the good parts of their predecessors, including the latter's relative low-speccedness and the former's fluidity and lack of loading screens. A side effect of Halo 2's seamlessness is that you'll see people in cutscenes start out crudely textured then quickly self-assemble into 21st century bump-mapped pretend people with wrinkles and warts and stuff. It's odd, clumsy and not entirely successful, but doesn't affect play. Nor, really, do the graphics. They're darn pretty though. The Halflife 2 jump is more noticeable since the original came out so long ago, but both are impressive. Halflife 2 wins because Halo 2 has a definite feeling of more of the same. Still good, pretty, fun, but we have been here before. Halflife 2 by contrast is the most gritty and coherent realisation of a realistic near future, with a slight surfeit of ducts and sewers, I've yet seen in my imaginary career as an alien-hunter/mercenary/armed sociopath. There are greasy pools of water in which bob discarded plastic bottles, whose bobbing is disturbed by the downdraft of the alien insect-o-copter as it gravitates past overhead. I've never seen that before. That segues me nicely into the physics model which I'd argue, were any fool wack enough to diss my dope styles, is integrally linked to the graphics in that both go towards creating a believable environment. Halo 2 has pseudo physics, whereby bodies, vehicles and crates fly around but everything else is static, apart from the occasional window. Halflife 2 has a completely realised environment in which the physics act as a minigame all of its own. It has delightful little puzzles, toys really, like the bit where you drop a rusty Lada on to a group of staggering zombies (and who hasn't wanted to do that?) or pick up a shipping container with a magnetic crane and fling it over a river onto a gun post. Also you're constantly being surprised and delighted by some little quirk like taking cover behind a filing cabinet and having the subsequent sniper fire knock it over onto you, or throwing cans of paint at zombies to create gruesome, shambling party-zombies, or finding a floating body in a cellar and shooting it a little to see it jiggle around. The last one works in real life, too. So Halflife 2 wins, though Halo 2 doesn't care - Halo 2 is about combat and flying bodies are the cherries on the cake, while in Halflife 2 you'd probably have to say physics based gameplay is the icing as well. Which brings me to the Halflife 2 Gravity Gun. Damn that's fun. It only works because of the physics model described above, but it's a total hoot. The first time you realise that you can grab a circular saw blade and use the Gun to slice a zombie literally-in-fucking-half you'll be giggling like a paedophile in daycare, you sick fuck. It's a bit too clumsy to use much in regular combat, for this fumble fingered virtua-warrior anyway, but this is also a clear win for Halflife 2. Though as Halo 2 had no Gravity Gun nor any intention to include one, this is sort of like a limbless man declaring himself winner of the Can't Run a Step Cup. Both games have linear and slightly disappointing stories, but I'm going to give Halo 2 points for narrative drive and Halflife 2 points for style. Halflife 2 has the marvellous Dr Breen ranting away on enormous screens in the first thirty minutes about how Earth's new alien overlords have shut down our reproductive ability for our own good, which strikes me as a snarky dig; most of its players won't have too many problems imagineering themselves into this new world-without-sex. Halo 2 has lots of great scenes, and much gigglesome tactical tomfoolery. Against this is the confusing two-pronged narrative toasting-fork of a story in which the characters exposit very quietly like they're sitting in a drawing room taking tea, rather than in some kind of futuristic kids' playground with shotguns and plasma swords instead of swings. The Internet advises me there is an interesting backstory, but they said that about the Matrix. Again, tch ptah. And that brings me to the end scene of Halo 2. Which, though commendably exciting in the buildup, is disappointing with a capital GAY. It is a letdown of "nice beach holiday on phuket" proportions. I've given them the benefit of the doubt and decided they simply ran out of time, because tacking a dull, pointless and un-fun boss battle on a game series which has distinguished itself by its lack of all of these elements is worthy of the most baroquely overwritten synonym for "bad" you care to develop. I understand Halflife 2 has an anticlimactic dribble of a final scene as well, but not having seen it I'm free to decide that it can't be that bad and award it the ending trophy on points. Of course it's the play that matters, and they've both got that down smooth as an Irishman's drinking arm on payday. Dynamic, fluid, brutal, exciting, it's all there. So despite the whinging caveats I feel obligated to provide, you really can't go wrong. Except in one aspect, which is why I'm going to give the overall victory to Halo 2: Steam. Say it low, slow, and with plenty of hoick in your gob for the requisite foetid bubbling sound. Let's be perfectly clear about this - Steam is a pain in the ass of barbed-wire dildo proportions. And we aren't talking that genteel fits-in-your-purse size, neither. No, we are referring to 'The Black Intruder', an artificial shlong of such mammoth proportions that it blocks out the sun. Of course, it's only a fucking video game, right? Who cares, right? The answer, as you well know if you've read this far, is: 'I do'. Halflife 2 is a piece of consumer entertainment. Its only purpose is to be fun. What other item of consumer entertainment do you have to plead with in order to get the right to use it? To nursemaid for hours while it ambles around the net, downloading this and that? To be hostage to for your fix of fictional firefights? I understand it's better with broadband. And that, once you've put in the requisite eight hours of pissing around, it all works quite smoothly. It's also better, apparently, if you didn't bother with the box/cd and slurped it straight off the net. It'll get better with time. I know all this stuff. But, quite frankly, fuck it. Vigorously and painfully. I don't care. The thing that annoys me most is that I know that this is the wave of the future. Publishing companies are watching through their D&G specs, tapping their jazz-fur bedecked chins and nodding thoughtfully, the fuckers. "People like being 'visited' by the Black Intruder? They will pay for the privilege? Exxxxxxcellent." The future starts here and we are the only ones who can stop it. Luckily, our wits are keen, our skills honed and our trigger fingers locked into firing position by OOS induced tendonitis. Pass the flamethrower and crack some health and ammo out of those crates - it's time to get serious. |
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