The top Nintendo game placing at number 14 and the top DS game at 69 - I thought PA was supposed to be full of Nintendo fanboys? When did the PC crowd take over?
I could tell you when. On a different forum's "this forum only" list, Mario Galaxy came in 1st and Phoenix Wright 3 came in 11th.
I still can't believe batman arkham asylum got so far up the list. It was solid enough sure but was it exceptional? Was it really one of the 25 best games made in the last 10 years?
No accounting for taste I guess.
I think there are a lot of new games that got higher on the list than they deserved for being so fresh in people's memories. I think if you ran this exact same poll in 2015, some of those games wouldn't rank as high.
WoW is a very good game for what it's meant to be. It does everything a MMO should do, and it does it right. The critical acclaim and incomparable financial success are testaments to that fact.
Whether YOU like that kind of game at all is another issue, and completely subjective.
I mean, I can't stand serious sports games, but I still admit that PES and FIFA 10 are great games in their genre. My personal preferences have nothing to do with how accomplished and successful a game is.
Whether or not WoW is objectively a good game is irrelevant, as thats not an objective issue. Many people have good reasons to hate MMOs.
On the other hand, statements that the combat is slow, dull, or involves no skill are false and show a lack of much experience in the game. The number of abilities, and key abilities that are heavily used, increases as level increases.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
edited January 2010
Hmm...I may finally end up getting the Orange Box.
I mean it has both Half-Life 2 and Portal, which I never played. Though I can only get the 360 version(why I don't care much for TF2 since I hear it sucks on the 360 and doesn't get much support).
In my humblest of opinions, HL2 hasn't aged well. Or maybe it was boring to begin with.
Portal is well worth your time and money though.
seconded.
got the Orange box and with all the HL2 hype I was like ok time to play some top tier shit that I've been ignorant of...... holy hell it really is a bland boring ass game so far, probably 4-5 hours into it and gave up. I'm sure there is something there I'm missing, but that shit is drab.
Portal is amazing though. But I love movies like Cube so it really gave me a setting like that to play in something I already enjoy.
And I don't think I've seen any 1-star reviews of The Bible
Not many actual writers will rave about the literary quality of Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a book for the masses. While that may be great, it does not mean it contains any quality outside of being entertaining. This is the same reason why you will never see Harry Potter or (most definitely not, ugh) Twilight in a class room. Its literary merit is little to nil.
Thus, using something's popularity to say that it is undeniably good is a fallacious argument.
In my humblest of opinions, HL2 hasn't aged well. Or maybe it was boring to begin with.
Portal is well worth your time and money though.
I disagree!
I still regularly play through it, admittedly usually with SMOD to make things more interesting. I think it has a very unique setting and tone, even for FPS', and is one of the best-designed games of all time. The same goes for episodes 1 and 2, which have been somewhat overshadowed by Valve's other games lately.
But, as this poll clearly shows, this is not exactly an unpopular opinion :P
I still can't believe batman arkham asylum got so far up the list. It was solid enough sure but was it exceptional? Was it really one of the 25 best games made in the last 10 years?
Big thanks to everyone who made this possible. It is definitely an interesting project.
The results, however, make it clear why our founding fathers made the US into a Democratic Republic - and not a Democracy. People should never be given direct power over decisions.
They will invariably vote themselves more money until the country is bankrupt, and they will invariably vote for a bunch of shitty games.
I'll leave "Top games of XX" lists for the professionals.
It's a good list but I think that the voting system inherently favors games that either haven't had sequels so far this decade or were inferior to the original property.
I am a huge fan of the HL games and am happy that it won, it doesn't seem fair that content that basically represents HL3 gets to be included along with it, while several franchises who have successfully iterated in the last ten years get punished.
Actually, I am surprised that WoW didn't do even better. I think some voters might have selected Warcraft III by mistake.
I still can't believe batman arkham asylum got so far up the list. It was solid enough sure but was it exceptional? Was it really one of the 25 best games made in the last 10 years?
No accounting for taste I guess.
Yes
Yes it was
I dunno if it was, but I will point out that newer games are fresher on people's minds.
Then again, maybe that's balanced by nostalgia for older games.
Whether or not WoW is objectively a good game is irrelevant, as thats not an objective issue. Many people have good reasons to hate MMOs.
That doesn't make WoW a bad MMO, though. It's one of the best MMO ever made, and a lot of people really like MMOs, therefore it's highly ranked, as it should be.
If one happens to hate MMOs, well, though luck. That's the irrelevant issue.
Overall, a pretty good list. Just one or two issues...
1. I'm fairly sure that Wind Waker could be scientifically proven to be worse than both MM and TP. Hell, and PH and MC and OOS/A and probably those Phillips CDI games as well. God I hate that thing!
2. Half Life 2 is the best game of the decade without a doubt - as long as no one else published anything, at all.
(Warning - if you like Half-Life 2, don't read the following. If you do, remember it's all my opinion, and therefore you don't have to take offence.)
It's a hugely over-rated corridor shooter that not only fails to stand up to it's predecessor but also to other games of the same era. On a graphical level it falls down to Far Cry, on a story-telling level it's barely up there with SSX Tricky (I don't consider not explaining anything to the player a clever story - i call it laziness), and on a technical level it massively advanced the field of...what, exactly? Facial animation? Maybe, but it's not a world ahead of Max Payne 2, released the year before. Physics? Absolutely not - I have yet to discover any single thing that Valve did to improve Havok before they put it in Source - so far i've not see it do anything that Havok can't.
And then along come the episodes - episode one, which should you have forgotten, has a climactic battle smaller and more poorly designed than one of the battles of little importance in the middle of Half Life 2 itself - and episode 2, which whilst better decided what Half Life really needed was a shittly executed "open battlefield" map. Which it didn't.
Now, to give it it's dues, despite what i'm saying I actually think its a fun game. It has good implementation of physics, nice scripting (if a little obvious) and when you don't have any allies the A.I. is quite good (otherwise it's just standing in front of your rockets). The level design is varied and interesting and it's got a fairly accomplished ending that was completely ruined by Episode 1. Probably a 6 or a 7/10 for me.
So please, could someone tell me what i missed? Cos i feel like i've missed out on something huge and that there's a great example of exceptional storytelling or physics manipulation that makes it the best game of the decade? 5 years later i still don't understand the fuss.
Rant over.
(P.S. I've gone to the trouble to do this as you guys might actually be intelligent enough to tell me why my argument is flawed. My real-life friends have so far failed to say anything except "yeah but it's got the G Man in it")
Overall, a pretty good list. Just one or two issues...
1. I'm fairly sure that Wind Waker could be scientifically proven to be worse than both MM and TP. Hell, and PH and MC and OOS/A and probably those Phillips CDI games as well. God I hate that thing!
2. Half Life 2 is the best game of the decade without a doubt - as long as no one else published anything, at all.
(Warning - if you like Half-Life 2, don't read the following. If you do, remember it's all my opinion, and therefore you don't have to take offence.)
It's a hugely over-rated corridor shooter that not only fails to stand up to it's predecessor but also to other games of the same era. On a graphical level it falls down to Far Cry, on a story-telling level it's barely up there with SSX Tricky (I don't consider not explaining anything to the player a clever story - i call it laziness), and on a technical level it massively advanced the field of...what, exactly? Facial animation? Maybe, but it's not a world ahead of Max Payne 2, released the year before. Physics? Absolutely not - I have yet to discover any single thing that Valve did to improve Havok before they put it in Source - so far i've not see it do anything that Havok can't.
And then along come the episodes - episode one, which should you have forgotten, has a climactic battle smaller and more poorly designed than one of the battles of little importance in the middle of Half Life 2 itself - and episode 2, which whilst better decided what Half Life really needed was a shittly executed "open battlefield" map. Which it didn't.
Now, to give it it's dues, despite what i'm saying I actually think its a fun game. It has good implementation of physics, nice scripting (if a little obvious) and when you don't have any allies the A.I. is quite good (otherwise it's just standing in front of your rockets). The level design is varied and interesting and it's got a fairly accomplished ending that was completely ruined by Episode 1. Probably a 6 or a 7/10 for me.
So please, could someone tell me what i missed? Cos i feel like i've missed out on something huge and that there's a great example of exceptional storytelling or physics manipulation that makes it the best game of the decade? 5 years later i still don't understand the fuss.
Rant over.
(P.S. I've gone to the trouble to do this as you guys might actually be intelligent enough to tell me why my argument is flawed. My real-life friends have so far failed to say anything except "yeah but it's got the G Man in it")
You were too busy nitpicking over "X did this before!" that you missed a fun game sorry
Like damn sure I can knock it for a lot of things if I compare it to other games, but nothing you mentioned (in comparison to other games) were bad. The gravity gun took the physics from being some kind of gimmick thing to actually fun and applicable, the story was good and only continued to get better with the episodes, and the graphics weren't Far Cry but damn son they were good.
Dissemble any great game into its individual parts and it looks bad, look at the whole package though and it is simply a great game.
Someone explain the Half-Life 2 story to me, please.
I really want to see if this can be expounded upon further other than "Guy is waken up from cryogenic sleep by mysterious employer to stop the leader of a totalitarian society."
EDIT: This is not sarcasm, I really want to know about this supposedly great plot. Because I played through the entirety of it and wasn't told shit, I had no motivation to do anything whatsoever.
You were too busy nitpicking over "X did this before!" that you missed a fun game sorry
Like damn sure I can knock it for a lot of things if I compare it to other games, but nothing you mentioned (in comparison to other games) were bad. The gravity gun took the physics from being some kind of gimmick thing to actually fun and applicable, the story was good and only continued to get better with the episodes, and the graphics weren't Far Cry but damn son they were good.
Dissemble any great game into its individual parts and it looks bad, look at the whole package though and it is simply a great game.
Fair enough. I think I was looking for basically a remake of Half Life and when i didn't get that I wasn't so happy. If you feel like picking a game apart for me, my game of the year that year was Metal Arms - Glitch in the System
Someone explain the Half-Life 2 story to me, please.
I really want to see if this can be expounded upon further other than "Guy is waken up from cryogenic sleep by mysterious employer to stop the leader of a totalitarian society."
Well, any game can be reduced like that. "A hero must gather allies to defeat an evil overlord" describes like 85% of all RPGs. If you really don't know, I can give you the basics of Half-Life 2.
After the events of Half-Life, where Gordon defeated the Nihilanth and was recruited by the G-Man for mysterious purposes, the Combine used the newly-opened portals to invade Earth. They defeated all of Earth's armies in 7 hours, and the former administrator of Black Mesa was able to negotiate a surrender, and became the overseer of Earth. The Combine then pulled out most of their forces and left behind an occupation force mostly composed of humans altered by combine technology (all the soldiers/police you fight). City 17 isn't the only combine stronghold (obviously) but it is their Earth headquarters. The G-Man lets you loose in City 17 with no explanation of what you're supposed to do or what happened or anything, because he's all mysterious and whatnot. Luckily, before you can be arrested and killed, you get rescued by Barny, who in turn tells you how to find the nearby human resistance base. Along the way you find out from other pedestrians that the Combine is preventing humans from procreating, and treats them like animals. You get a sense of what happened from the graffiti and then a more complete picture of what's going on from Dr. Kleiner at the Resistance base.
I could go on, but this is all stuff you can get from the first hour of the game. There's a lot of story if you're willing to look!
Someone explain the Half-Life 2 story to me, please.
I really want to see if this can be expounded upon further other than "Guy is waken up from cryogenic sleep by mysterious employer to stop the leader of a totalitarian society."
Well, any game can be reduced like that. "A hero must gather allies to defeat an evil overlord" describes like 85% of all RPGs. If you really don't know, I can give you the basics of Half-Life 2.
After the events of Half-Life, where Gordon defeated the Nihilanth and was recruited by the G-Man for mysterious purposes, the Combine used the newly-opened portals to invade Earth. They defeated all of Earth's armies in 7 hours, and the former administrator of Black Mesa was able to negotiate a surrender, and became the overseer of Earth. The Combine then pulled out most of their forces and left behind an occupation force mostly composed of humans altered by combine technology (all the soldiers/police you fight). City 17 isn't the only combine stronghold (obviously) but it is their Earth headquarters. The G-Man lets you loose in City 17 with no explanation of what you're supposed to do or what happened or anything, because he's all mysterious and whatnot. Luckily, before you can be arrested and killed, you get rescued by Barny, who in turn tells you how to find the nearby human resistance base. Along the way you find out from other pedestrians that the Combine is preventing humans from procreating, and treats them like animals. You get a sense of what happened from the graffiti and then a more complete picture of what's going on from Dr. Kleiner at the Resistance base.
I could go on, but this is all stuff you can get from the first hour of the game. There's a lot of story if you're willing to look!
That's crazy!
I got none of that.
I got off a train, there were some guys there. One of them pulled me off to the side. It was Barney. I met up with some resistance members, found my way with Alyx to the science lab.
From then on it was just action sequence to next action sequence.
Someone explain the Half-Life 2 story to me, please.
I really want to see if this can be expounded upon further other than "Guy is waken up from cryogenic sleep by mysterious employer to stop the leader of a totalitarian society."
Well, any game can be reduced like that. "A hero must gather allies to defeat an evil overlord" describes like 85% of all RPGs. If you really don't know, I can give you the basics of Half-Life 2.
After the events of Half-Life, where Gordon defeated the Nihilanth and was recruited by the G-Man for mysterious purposes, the Combine used the newly-opened portals to invade Earth. They defeated all of Earth's armies in 7 hours, and the former administrator of Black Mesa was able to negotiate a surrender, and became the overseer of Earth. The Combine then pulled out most of their forces and left behind an occupation force mostly composed of humans altered by combine technology (all the soldiers/police you fight). City 17 isn't the only combine stronghold (obviously) but it is their Earth headquarters. The G-Man lets you loose in City 17 with no explanation of what you're supposed to do or what happened or anything, because he's all mysterious and whatnot. Luckily, before you can be arrested and killed, you get rescued by Barny, who in turn tells you how to find the nearby human resistance base. Along the way you find out from other pedestrians that the Combine is preventing humans from procreating, and treats them like animals. You get a sense of what happened from the graffiti and then a more complete picture of what's going on from Dr. Kleiner at the Resistance base.
I could go on, but this is all stuff you can get from the first hour of the game. There's a lot of story if you're willing to look!
That's crazy!
I got none of that.
I got off a train, there were some guys there. One of them pulled me off to the side. It was Barney. I met up with some resistance members, found my way with Alyx to the science lab.
From then on it was just action sequence to next action sequence.
Someone explain the Half-Life 2 story to me, please.
I really want to see if this can be expounded upon further other than "Guy is waken up from cryogenic sleep by mysterious employer to stop the leader of a totalitarian society."
I may be a bit rusty on details but here is what I got purely from the game itself
You're frozen in a slow warp sleep by the gman at the end of half-life for your combat abilities essentially.
When the half-life 2 time comes around (about 10 years later), you are awoken by the Gman, who essentially controls you now, because your services are needed. (Exactly why you are woken up is not entirely unknown. It is implied that the resistance purchased your freedom, Breen at the end says 'Did you know your services were available to the highest bidder' so your some kind of super mercenary)
From the time you meet up with kleiner in his lab and test the teleporter there, till about the time you're in Ravenholm, you're on the run from the combine who are trying to hunt you down (made aware of your presence when you accidentally teleport into Breen's office). Eli, the head of the resistance, is captured in the attack on Black Mesa East (one of the resistance bases outside the city). So you go to Nova Prospket, the prison's he's in, to rescue him. When you reach the prison, after all the fighting you discover one of the resistance scientists, Mossman, is a spy. She teleports herself and Eli to the citadel, the combine's base of operations, to hand him over to Breen.
You and Alyx use the same teleport, but something screws up, and you're put into a slow warp which drops you off in Kleiner's lab one week later. Gordon's presumed death in Nova Prospket has riled up the entire resistance, who see you has a sort of messianic figure after your actions in the original half-life. This rising up leads to the assault on the citadel, the confrontation with Breen, and then Gman stopping time at the end of the game because essentially you've done what you were sent to do. Of course, with the first episode, a third faction, the Vortigaunts, separate you from the Gman's control at the start. The events of episode 1 and 2 are the attempts to close the combine portal to their dimension so they can't send word back for reinforcements.
Among all this are other little details and side stuff. Mainly revolving around the Gman, who he is, and what connection he has to all this. Lots of implied stuff that should get wrapped up in Episode 3.
edit: bleh, beaten.
Admittedly, the only real place to catch the details on the 7 hour war and Breen's surrender to the combine are in the partner book Raising the Bar and in little newspaper clippings found throughout the game. Everything else is pretty evident if you listen to character dialogue.
And yeah, the background details of the human's themselves, like no pro-creating and such, can be caught in Breen's monologues that he gives from the viewscreens all over the city.
I think people have a hard time with hl2's story because 1) you don't have cutscenes where an NPC reiterates the most important stuff you immediately after it happens and 2) There's no objectives that you can view that give even a small summary of what's happening
A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order.
A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.
link
So, Half-Life 2 has a fantastic plot and an okay-ish story. In other words, it's not about the goal, it's the journey towards the goal that makes it awesome.
You know what? I wish i'd never brought the damn game up =D
So, Zelda WW? That was a bit shit, right? =D
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
edited January 2010
You'll really have to excuse me for not comprehending exactly what makes the story of Half-Life 2 "poor" in comparison to just about any other action game you care to mention.
I loved the hell out of Wind Waker. A bit slow to start, but once I could freely travel the high seas it was the greatest adventure experience I've ever had in a game.
The top Nintendo game placing at number 14 and the top DS game at 69 - I thought PA was supposed to be full of Nintendo fanboys? When did the PC crowd take over?
It's a good list though. I didn't expect there to be such a slant to PC games but the top 25 is solid.
If the PC crowd really took over, than how did Mass Effect beat both Deus Ex and BG2?
And talking about splinting votes from sequels, what about Return to Castle wolfenstein and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory? They're practically the same game, and I doubt anyone put both of them on their list.
The top Nintendo game placing at number 14 and the top DS game at 69 - I thought PA was supposed to be full of Nintendo fanboys? When did the PC crowd take over?
It's a good list though. I didn't expect there to be such a slant to PC games but the top 25 is solid.
If the PC crowd really took over, than how did Mass Effect beat both Deus Ex and BG2?
And talking about splinting votes from sequels, what about Return to Castle wolfenstein and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory? They're practically the same game, and I doubt anyone put both of them on their list.
I'm trying to remember. Did Enemy Territory start out as the multiplayer for Return to Castle Wolfenstein and then go free?
Posts
I could tell you when. On a different forum's "this forum only" list, Mario Galaxy came in 1st and Phoenix Wright 3 came in 11th.
I think there are a lot of new games that got higher on the list than they deserved for being so fresh in people's memories. I think if you ran this exact same poll in 2015, some of those games wouldn't rank as high.
Whether YOU like that kind of game at all is another issue, and completely subjective.
I mean, I can't stand serious sports games, but I still admit that PES and FIFA 10 are great games in their genre. My personal preferences have nothing to do with how accomplished and successful a game is.
On the other hand, statements that the combat is slow, dull, or involves no skill are false and show a lack of much experience in the game. The number of abilities, and key abilities that are heavily used, increases as level increases.
I mean it has both Half-Life 2 and Portal, which I never played. Though I can only get the 360 version(why I don't care much for TF2 since I hear it sucks on the 360 and doesn't get much support).
Portal is well worth your time and money though.
seconded.
got the Orange box and with all the HL2 hype I was like ok time to play some top tier shit that I've been ignorant of...... holy hell it really is a bland boring ass game so far, probably 4-5 hours into it and gave up. I'm sure there is something there I'm missing, but that shit is drab.
Portal is amazing though. But I love movies like Cube so it really gave me a setting like that to play in something I already enjoy.
Steam
XBOX
Not many actual writers will rave about the literary quality of Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a book for the masses. While that may be great, it does not mean it contains any quality outside of being entertaining. This is the same reason why you will never see Harry Potter or (most definitely not, ugh) Twilight in a class room. Its literary merit is little to nil.
Thus, using something's popularity to say that it is undeniably good is a fallacious argument.
I disagree!
I still regularly play through it, admittedly usually with SMOD to make things more interesting. I think it has a very unique setting and tone, even for FPS', and is one of the best-designed games of all time. The same goes for episodes 1 and 2, which have been somewhat overshadowed by Valve's other games lately.
But, as this poll clearly shows, this is not exactly an unpopular opinion :P
Yes
Yes it was
The results, however, make it clear why our founding fathers made the US into a Democratic Republic - and not a Democracy. People should never be given direct power over decisions.
They will invariably vote themselves more money until the country is bankrupt, and they will invariably vote for a bunch of shitty games.
I'll leave "Top games of XX" lists for the professionals.
I am a huge fan of the HL games and am happy that it won, it doesn't seem fair that content that basically represents HL3 gets to be included along with it, while several franchises who have successfully iterated in the last ten years get punished.
Actually, I am surprised that WoW didn't do even better. I think some voters might have selected Warcraft III by mistake.
I dunno if it was, but I will point out that newer games are fresher on people's minds.
Then again, maybe that's balanced by nostalgia for older games.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
The only game that rivals that (and beats it) is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which is my #1.
That doesn't make WoW a bad MMO, though. It's one of the best MMO ever made, and a lot of people really like MMOs, therefore it's highly ranked, as it should be.
If one happens to hate MMOs, well, though luck. That's the irrelevant issue.
Overall, a pretty good list. Just one or two issues...
1. I'm fairly sure that Wind Waker could be scientifically proven to be worse than both MM and TP. Hell, and PH and MC and OOS/A and probably those Phillips CDI games as well. God I hate that thing!
2. Half Life 2 is the best game of the decade without a doubt - as long as no one else published anything, at all.
(Warning - if you like Half-Life 2, don't read the following. If you do, remember it's all my opinion, and therefore you don't have to take offence.)
It's a hugely over-rated corridor shooter that not only fails to stand up to it's predecessor but also to other games of the same era. On a graphical level it falls down to Far Cry, on a story-telling level it's barely up there with SSX Tricky (I don't consider not explaining anything to the player a clever story - i call it laziness), and on a technical level it massively advanced the field of...what, exactly? Facial animation? Maybe, but it's not a world ahead of Max Payne 2, released the year before. Physics? Absolutely not - I have yet to discover any single thing that Valve did to improve Havok before they put it in Source - so far i've not see it do anything that Havok can't.
And then along come the episodes - episode one, which should you have forgotten, has a climactic battle smaller and more poorly designed than one of the battles of little importance in the middle of Half Life 2 itself - and episode 2, which whilst better decided what Half Life really needed was a shittly executed "open battlefield" map. Which it didn't.
Now, to give it it's dues, despite what i'm saying I actually think its a fun game. It has good implementation of physics, nice scripting (if a little obvious) and when you don't have any allies the A.I. is quite good (otherwise it's just standing in front of your rockets). The level design is varied and interesting and it's got a fairly accomplished ending that was completely ruined by Episode 1. Probably a 6 or a 7/10 for me.
So please, could someone tell me what i missed? Cos i feel like i've missed out on something huge and that there's a great example of exceptional storytelling or physics manipulation that makes it the best game of the decade? 5 years later i still don't understand the fuss.
Rant over.
(P.S. I've gone to the trouble to do this as you guys might actually be intelligent enough to tell me why my argument is flawed. My real-life friends have so far failed to say anything except "yeah but it's got the G Man in it")
Twitter 3DS: 0860 - 3257 - 2516
How did i know someone would do that? :P
(It's a pretty solid argument, to be fair)
You were too busy nitpicking over "X did this before!" that you missed a fun game sorry
Like damn sure I can knock it for a lot of things if I compare it to other games, but nothing you mentioned (in comparison to other games) were bad. The gravity gun took the physics from being some kind of gimmick thing to actually fun and applicable, the story was good and only continued to get better with the episodes, and the graphics weren't Far Cry but damn son they were good.
Dissemble any great game into its individual parts and it looks bad, look at the whole package though and it is simply a great game.
I really want to see if this can be expounded upon further other than "Guy is waken up from cryogenic sleep by mysterious employer to stop the leader of a totalitarian society."
EDIT: This is not sarcasm, I really want to know about this supposedly great plot. Because I played through the entirety of it and wasn't told shit, I had no motivation to do anything whatsoever.
Fair enough. I think I was looking for basically a remake of Half Life and when i didn't get that I wasn't so happy. If you feel like picking a game apart for me, my game of the year that year was Metal Arms - Glitch in the System
(It's feckin' awesome)
Well, any game can be reduced like that. "A hero must gather allies to defeat an evil overlord" describes like 85% of all RPGs. If you really don't know, I can give you the basics of Half-Life 2.
I could go on, but this is all stuff you can get from the first hour of the game. There's a lot of story if you're willing to look!
That's crazy!
I got none of that.
I got off a train, there were some guys there. One of them pulled me off to the side. It was Barney. I met up with some resistance members, found my way with Alyx to the science lab.
From then on it was just action sequence to next action sequence.
Well, you should stop and smell the ashes :P
I may be a bit rusty on details but here is what I got purely from the game itself
You're frozen in a slow warp sleep by the gman at the end of half-life for your combat abilities essentially.
When the half-life 2 time comes around (about 10 years later), you are awoken by the Gman, who essentially controls you now, because your services are needed. (Exactly why you are woken up is not entirely unknown. It is implied that the resistance purchased your freedom, Breen at the end says 'Did you know your services were available to the highest bidder' so your some kind of super mercenary)
From the time you meet up with kleiner in his lab and test the teleporter there, till about the time you're in Ravenholm, you're on the run from the combine who are trying to hunt you down (made aware of your presence when you accidentally teleport into Breen's office). Eli, the head of the resistance, is captured in the attack on Black Mesa East (one of the resistance bases outside the city). So you go to Nova Prospket, the prison's he's in, to rescue him. When you reach the prison, after all the fighting you discover one of the resistance scientists, Mossman, is a spy. She teleports herself and Eli to the citadel, the combine's base of operations, to hand him over to Breen.
You and Alyx use the same teleport, but something screws up, and you're put into a slow warp which drops you off in Kleiner's lab one week later. Gordon's presumed death in Nova Prospket has riled up the entire resistance, who see you has a sort of messianic figure after your actions in the original half-life. This rising up leads to the assault on the citadel, the confrontation with Breen, and then Gman stopping time at the end of the game because essentially you've done what you were sent to do. Of course, with the first episode, a third faction, the Vortigaunts, separate you from the Gman's control at the start. The events of episode 1 and 2 are the attempts to close the combine portal to their dimension so they can't send word back for reinforcements.
Among all this are other little details and side stuff. Mainly revolving around the Gman, who he is, and what connection he has to all this. Lots of implied stuff that should get wrapped up in Episode 3.
edit: bleh, beaten.
Admittedly, the only real place to catch the details on the 7 hour war and Breen's surrender to the combine are in the partner book Raising the Bar and in little newspaper clippings found throughout the game. Everything else is pretty evident if you listen to character dialogue.
And yeah, the background details of the human's themselves, like no pro-creating and such, can be caught in Breen's monologues that he gives from the viewscreens all over the city.
I think people have a hard time with hl2's story because 1) you don't have cutscenes where an NPC reiterates the most important stuff you immediately after it happens and 2) There's no objectives that you can view that give even a small summary of what's happening
I dunno, even in Valve time, 10 years is a pretty long time. We might already be invaded by aliens before that happens.
Yeah but then I'd have to...well, play the game, which is my other problem with it
It's nice to know that not everyone's batshit crazy about what seemed like a non-existent story, though
You guys would ask for your money back because the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't make any sense.
There's a difference between not finding the story, and finding it but thinking it was rubbish.
I'm in the second category.
I love 2001.
Using vaguely cryptic storytelling techniques is bad enough, but when it's cryptically telling a poor story to begin with - that's a problem.
The other problem is that people think that just because the story is vague it MUST be good.
A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order.
A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.
link
So, Half-Life 2 has a fantastic plot and an okay-ish story. In other words, it's not about the goal, it's the journey towards the goal that makes it awesome.
So, Zelda WW? That was a bit shit, right? =D
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If the PC crowd really took over, than how did Mass Effect beat both Deus Ex and BG2?
And talking about splinting votes from sequels, what about Return to Castle wolfenstein and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory? They're practically the same game, and I doubt anyone put both of them on their list.
I'm trying to remember. Did Enemy Territory start out as the multiplayer for Return to Castle Wolfenstein and then go free?