Anyway tl;dr great game that's aged better than most from its era but still feels old. I respect it and had fun. Will probably be returning to check out the DLCs in the Near Future but I kinda wanna get onto HL2 before HL3 announcement or whatever's going on

Art direction is great and the cliff area in Surface Tension blew my socks off. Crazy stuff for 1998 and I can see how it's so iconic.

The plot and overall vibe was brilliant & there's not really many games to this day with HL1's atmosphere. The sorta grimy science lab gone wrong aesthetic is really unique, and you don't generally think of theoretical physicists as FPS action heroes lol

This is also something I've heard Black Mesa does better. I've gotta play that at some point.

Overall I think my problem with Xen thematically is that it feels really disconnected from the rest of the game. Until then, you're making a trek across the facility with a goal in mind, and once you're in Xen it feels like a lot of disconnected platforms with enemies tbh

Xen as a whole was a great concept executed really poorly, relying a lot on platforming isn't wonderful as platforming felt like the game's weak spot, I think it's just that the game's old and platforming in a FPS was very new territory. I've heard BM Xen is great which would add up

The boss fights sucked and def weren't the focus of the game I feel. Frankly my favorite fight gameplay-wise was the Gonarch and that's not high praise. Nihilanth was cool thematically but the teleportation gimmick felt like a slog and the jump pads were clunky

The assassins & snarks were minor issues bc they only appeared in a few spots, the controllers combined with lack of ammo for long-range weapons made Interloper quite unpleasant. Maybe I just need to git gud but it felt a lot harder than other chapters solely bc of this enemy lol

Enemies were extremely well-balanced. The only ones I actively disliked fighting were the assassins just bc they're a pain to hit, snarks because they have the smallest hitbox ever + deal way too much damage, and controllers bc they deal too much damage & are hard to hit with most weapons

I think Interloper specifically should've had a few more ammo pickups, I get that it's near the end but it felt like a severe difficulty spike to the point of frustration even on Easy

I really liked how ammo shortages forced you to try out different weapons. I do think the lategame after the military retreats was a bit too ammo-scarce though and by the end of Interloper I was severely restricted on weapon choice

To elaborate on this: this is more an organizational thing. I think ST's desert trek + facility run feel like two separate things, as do pre-factory and factory Interloper. On a Rail is too monotonous and goes on for too long, it'd probably feel better in a modern game with more to see

I appreciated the way most of the game feels like a point-to-point trek across an interconnected facility, it really felt like you went somewhere by the end. A few chapters were too long - Surface Tension and Interloper should've been split in two & like half of On a Rail should've been cut

Overall: good game, close to great. Probably the best FPS of all time when it came out, some bits have aged extremely well and some feel a little clunky today. Extremely technically impressive for its era

(if you live in denver btw it's Venalonzo's Tacos, absolutely fucking goated food and can strongly recommend)

these aren’t patterns these are just language features lmao

Lmao and he immediately has to take that respect and squander the fuck out of it with this shit www.newsweek.com/full-list-of...
Gotta love establishment Dems

further proof trump's political ideology is just whoever he talked to last

Yeah lol