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| Jhoh "Creexul" Cable 8/29/2005 |
Jhoh: Some third party decided to continue the work of the old "A Team" (warning: they are not the actual A Team from the TV show) who made the original Action Half-Life, a lackluster, buggy original Half-Life mod that floundered due to the fact that other mods were more fun or interesting. The more successful mods have taken off and changed, while AHL has basically stayed the same in various stages of bugginess and unplayability. There was an entire year where the game did not feature working spawn points, and the "A Team" refused to fix it immediately and refused to take responsibility for it. That pretty much indicates what kind of mod this is, and thousands of potential gamers have come to the same conclusion. Because the team who made this are fucking losers, and the people who attempt to perpetuate this mod are fucking losers too. Action Half-Life is the scientology of video games.
Graphics: 0
Jhoh: This brand spankin' (HEH) new version of Action Half-Life features a new stylish splash screen. It's in black and white. Aside from that it's basically the exact same as most Half-Life 1 modifications. Maybe a little rougher around the edges though, especially considering this mod is over 4 years old. But let's face it, even for a third party Half-Life 1 mod made by "enthusiasts" in their free time, the graphics are terrible. You have to fuck up pretty bad when Half-Life 1 still outdoes your graphics and effects even 8 years later.
Fussbett provides this example!
Sound: 0
Jhoh: Quake 2 quality. Nowhere near as satisfying as even the core Half-Life 1 sound effects. It's here that it becomes clear this mod was a waste of time to conceive of. I think some of the sound effects were reused from Quake 2, in fact. After a year they couldn't even remodulate some Half-Life 1 sound effects to improve this?
Weapons: 0
Jhoh: Same as they ever were. A couple akimbo combinations, a sawed-off shotgun that for some reason can't hit anything even at point blank range, some interchangable rapid fire weapons, and a laughably unnecessary amount of sniper rifles (two, but even at one a sniper rifle would be unnecessary without the mapping to back it up). Just plain stupid. All the weapons have the same effect, to attempt to point them in the general area of an enemy and then fire. A couple weapons are stronger than the others. Any other differences are negligible.
mark: In AQ2, the M4 was a popular gun and most people expected to see it in AHL. The A-team, however, decided that it was totally unbalanced and refused to put it into AHL. Maybe it was, I don't know, but one might be curious as to why it was unbalancable -- I suspect the usual martian-logic of mod makers would have been a complaint about realism. But wait, AHL is a game were people fire a Colt 45 with each hand (with amazing accuracy) and a game where the reload animation for the glocks is throwing them away and where bleeding from a shot to the throat takes about 5 seconds to bind. Well, no, they'd reply, we're talking about Movie Realism, a term so meaningless and illogical I am shocked that it was possible for a computer to accept it as input. Anyway, because movie realism is 1000% realistic except when it isn't, it was impossible to balance the M4 and it wasn't included. Okay, fine, whatever. When a new AQ2 fan would show up on the forums he would usually say something long the lines of "What happened to the M4? I loved that gun!" forty or so members of the forum would scream "NOOOOB! NO SKILL M4 USER!!" until they decided never to play AHL again and just stuck to CS. Then one day the M4 was included in a AHL release and suddenly people couldn't stop talking about how awesome and fun it was.
Using the hand cannon, sometimes referred to as an innacurate sawed-off shotgun because that's what it is, means almost certain death.
Maps: 0
Jhoh: Really good for Quake 2. They are mainly floors with the occasional elevation. Became dated during one of the early Day of Defeat betas, years ago. I guess all the good mappers are working on, say, good mods. I remember some of the older maps in this game were quaint and had areas to hide or dive out of, or areas you could try to rush in with teammates. It looks like they've abandoned that for plain deathmatch, and not even good deathmatch.
mark: There are a lot of things wrong with this scene but I'll just mention the tower that is connected to by what appears to be a folding ramp. I suppose this make the tower wheelchair accessible, which is always a plus in a gun fight, but it doesn't help the tower's major problem, which is that it is too short to see over the wall and too boxed in to view the courtyard.
Also, nice use of the prefab sandbag embankments which date back to Halflife 1: The Actual Game. I guess those'll be useful if the compound floods.
Revived whining ass bitch AHL news post from a few years ago: Oops, Valve did it again
The latest HL patch (1104) made AHL unplayable due to introduction of the new 'lets all spawn at the same spot' feature. Please rest assured that we're working on finding a solution as soon as possible. We don't know yet if this bug is a feature and therefore was implemented on purpose (in which case we will release a bugfix) or if its broken multiple spawnpoint code or something to that effect, where we all would have to wait for Valve to release a bugfix.
Jsoh: It was the A Team's idea to have all the players spawn in the same fucking motherfucking COORDINATE. The AHL "developers" could have done one of two things to instantly fix their mod and at the very least gave it a chance to survive the fucking juggernaut of Counter Strike DOD and Svencoop servers.
One, maybe try and recode the spawn system so lump spawning actually worked again. I don't like this idea because it was a gay concept in the first place. TWO, infinitly more logical which is why they did it with the very next release about a year and a half later, SEVERAL SPAWN POINTS SPACED OUT AROUND THE AREA. duh.
Gameplay: 0
"It functions on Steam" is the most you can say about this game. You run around shooting. There is a dive button, but it's basically like a "move faster and come to a sudden stop lower to the floor" button. What function this would have in the game is limited since using it to avoid fire is pointless due to the netcode not being properly optimized. The web of this mod's problems and bugs affects unrelated parts of the game. In the end, this would've been fitting multiplayer for Chemical Existence. Since The Specialists has come out it's become the sort of "official/unofficial" competition for AHL. Unfortunately that hasn't inspired anyone to try changing AHL to one up The Specialists in any way, which shows on Steam's user statistics since The Specialists is just about the biggest HL1 mod currently. This is without even mentioning more modern games like say Battlefield 2, but to compare Action Half-Life with Battlefield 2 would be unfair. Unfair, but helpful.
Fags: 10!
If you go into the game, the first thing you'll probably see is an AHL fan WHO'S BEEN THERE SINCE THE BEGINNING MAN be in an argument about how The Specialists, a somewhat similar yet infinitely more successful deathmatch mod, sucks, is for newbs, and requires no skill because you just "spam" and that is for skilless newbs. These people will apparently play Action Half-Life after we've all moved on to Team Fortress 2 or whatever crazy multiplayer games the future brings. The people who populate AHL's fanbase believe they are of some kind of refined class of gamer who appreciates the finer points of gaming, and of fine quality action feeeeeeelms. I noticed one player brag that first person shooting requires good hand-eye coordination, and that is why he was so good at games that he competed in game playing competitions and even won money (OOOOOOOO), and he made sure to throw in that The Specialists did not require the same level of skill as Action Half-Life. I'm surprised he didn't mention he was doing all this to achieve a state of clear, but I guess bragging to about 3 total strangers at 3 in the morning was good enough for him or for any typical AHL fan seeing as most of them have had this kind of behavior since the mod began. As he was yapping I was lining an enemy up in my crosshairs and firing, to no effect because the aiming offset is completely random, even for the sawedoff shotgun. Don't believe the giant wall decal that implies you peppered a 5 square foot area, I guess. Why that would ever be in a game I have no clue, but it's retarded. I think I already said this, but the people who made this mode can't code for shit, and never could. Again, it pales in comparison to something like Battlefield 2, where I can actually hit what I aim at.
Jsoh: I remember the first time we ever really played AHL was after Valve released the new powerful netcode to make mp actually playable for people like us on our dial up shitty connection way back then. The "A Team" immediatly whined about how valve ruined their sacred program and that someday somehow, they were going to slowly/painfully murder everyone who worked at valve and anyone who didn't hate valve as much as they did. SO in the meantime, they allowed their mod to rot with incredibly simple easy to solve bugs.
a person named "a fag":You could blame the A-Team for not making spawns like everybody else (that would have been boring IMO).
Rafiki: That needs to go in the review. That quote right there. It is amazing. See, it's not that AHL sucks or the development team are mongoloids, it's that they were pushing the boundaries of innovation with the way they used the info_playerstart entity in Worldcraft.
Another fag, this one named "sky":Well, what can one say. There are four obvious things that is certain about you, my dear friend:
1. You haven't grown pubes yet
2. You suck at AHL
3. You are a fucking moron
4. You are a fucking disgrace to true gamers if ditching games just cause of their age and looks.
Actually, I'll add a fifth:
5: You are a fucking moron
Self Destruction: 10!
mark: There was one great period of time when the server couldn't stay up for more than about 20 minutes (I think it crashed at most after one map change). They were mystified and just told people to restart the servers continually. This was the exact moment that AHL died -- after a week or so, the about 50 servers shrunk to about 12. 12 mostly empty servers, as everyone was tired of getting booted minutes after they started play. I'm not sure when they eventually fixed that bug, but I think it might have taken a couple months, or so.
Overall: You might as well play this mod's supposed "competition," The Specialists. It might not take any skill, but it's way more fun.
Comments about this review? Post in the designated Action Half-Life forum!
 Jhoh "Creexul" Cable
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