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I watched "Galaxy Quest" with Danii a few days ago. There's a section involving a chase through the ship and things that go SMASH SMASH SQUISH SPLAT SMASH a lot. The Sigourney Weaver character spends most of that part of the movie screaming about 'why do we even HAVE that on the ship' and 'this was a badly written episode' and threatening to kill the writer with fire.
Somewhere in the Half-Life universe there is a team of architects and engineers who've earned the same level of ire from Gordon Freeman, and they were responsible for designing the waste processing section of Black Mesa.
Oh, sure, the incident with DEAR LACK OF GOD IT'S A SEA MONSTER eating a scientist was impressive, but let's face it. I'm a Lovecraft fan. Being solemnly informed by a terrified scientist that 'they say it was hauled out of the Challenger Deep' is the fastest way to set off my RL warning signals vis-a-vis a monster. Adding anything about how you don't think it was ever in Earth's oceans before last week just sharpens it. Upon seeing that it was a reasonably rationally shaped sea monster with ordinary teeth and limbs and stuff it became a matter of 'peg it with the crossbow' and that was that. I was relieved at that point. It's like Stephen King says- yes, the door has opened to reveal a GIGANTIC TWENTY FOOT TALL SPIDER coming for you, but hey! At least it's not a hundred foot tall spider! I can deal with a hostile alien fish thing.
Playing hoppity-skip across rising and falling mashers of toxic waste (it's not radioactive, it's just toxic waste, so you start taking damage right away instead of waiting for it to get through your suit)? That's another story. Very much another story. That was a lot of AUGH AUGH AUGH because I suck at the aiming and the jumping. And there was the bit with the conveyor belts! Not only do you have to do the jumping and the not falling (you get knocked down in health far enough that you drain the health dispenser on the ground entirely), but then you have to place the satchel charge right to blow up both the lasers without the first laser's blowback hurting you... geh. Just lovely.
I got through that, though. That was something. It was what came next...
Finding the xenobiology labs was the first genuinely creepy moment of the game, for me. I mean, yeah, the AUGH SLICETY TENTACLES OF DEATH moment in the silo was a scare- but it was a scare of the 'you want me to do what?' variety. I have a habit of creeping up the ladders in this game a keypress or two at a time if I can't see where they open to, so the first thing I saw of the next room was a sliver of a waiting Houndeye. I poked up a little more and saw there were a bunch of them, so I threw my only explosive left in their general direction, slid down the ladder fast as I could, and set it off. Once the chunks stopped flying I went back up the ladder again...
And saw the dog carriers. One for every recognizable set of Houndeye remains.
They knew. They knew. They'd been studying these things long enough to know about the monsters. They knew.
I mean, yeah, I'd read enough Wikistuff to know that the IC reason for the guns being on the hazard course was just in case the monsters broke out, employees should be able to deal with them, even if they didn't know that monsters were on hand that COULD break out. But I'd pushed that out of my mind. The sight of the dog kennels in the room full of dead houndeyes creeped me the hell out. (Especially since I'd sort of jokingly wondered if you could tame one and keep it as a pet, since they were kind of cute in a disturbing way.) The room with the headcrab cage in it? Just made it worse. And then there was the grunt in the tank... but dear Lord, I don't think I've ever been more creeped out by the implications of a perfectly mundane object in a video game. Well played, Valve, well played.
Anyway, I managed to get through that section (I like the snarks, they're kind of entertaining) and up to the surface. Right now, the game is saved at a point where I'm apparently supposed to have Gordon slide down a concrete pipe and NO NO NO NO NO tends to take over the mental dialogue at that point, as, well, there's cliffs involved, long drops, and phrases like 'major fracture detected'. My whole experience with cliffs in RL is confined to climbing Granddad Bluff in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and to a mountain path in Denali National Park that at one point dwindled down to a section only marginally larger than my own feet. I made a point of not looking away from the ground in front of me when I did that. I'm not acrophobic, but I'm also not good enough at mind-body coordination to keep my course accurate if I'm also looking at several hundred feet of DOWN. I'll try getting Gordon down the pipe later. I tried several times last night and I think he just fell- I'm not sure how to slow down his sliding so he doesn't get knocked down to 20% health when he lands.
Somewhere in the Half-Life universe there is a team of architects and engineers who've earned the same level of ire from Gordon Freeman, and they were responsible for designing the waste processing section of Black Mesa.
Oh, sure, the incident with DEAR LACK OF GOD IT'S A SEA MONSTER eating a scientist was impressive, but let's face it. I'm a Lovecraft fan. Being solemnly informed by a terrified scientist that 'they say it was hauled out of the Challenger Deep' is the fastest way to set off my RL warning signals vis-a-vis a monster. Adding anything about how you don't think it was ever in Earth's oceans before last week just sharpens it. Upon seeing that it was a reasonably rationally shaped sea monster with ordinary teeth and limbs and stuff it became a matter of 'peg it with the crossbow' and that was that. I was relieved at that point. It's like Stephen King says- yes, the door has opened to reveal a GIGANTIC TWENTY FOOT TALL SPIDER coming for you, but hey! At least it's not a hundred foot tall spider! I can deal with a hostile alien fish thing.
Playing hoppity-skip across rising and falling mashers of toxic waste (it's not radioactive, it's just toxic waste, so you start taking damage right away instead of waiting for it to get through your suit)? That's another story. Very much another story. That was a lot of AUGH AUGH AUGH because I suck at the aiming and the jumping. And there was the bit with the conveyor belts! Not only do you have to do the jumping and the not falling (you get knocked down in health far enough that you drain the health dispenser on the ground entirely), but then you have to place the satchel charge right to blow up both the lasers without the first laser's blowback hurting you... geh. Just lovely.
I got through that, though. That was something. It was what came next...
Finding the xenobiology labs was the first genuinely creepy moment of the game, for me. I mean, yeah, the AUGH SLICETY TENTACLES OF DEATH moment in the silo was a scare- but it was a scare of the 'you want me to do what?' variety. I have a habit of creeping up the ladders in this game a keypress or two at a time if I can't see where they open to, so the first thing I saw of the next room was a sliver of a waiting Houndeye. I poked up a little more and saw there were a bunch of them, so I threw my only explosive left in their general direction, slid down the ladder fast as I could, and set it off. Once the chunks stopped flying I went back up the ladder again...
And saw the dog carriers. One for every recognizable set of Houndeye remains.
They knew. They knew. They'd been studying these things long enough to know about the monsters. They knew.
I mean, yeah, I'd read enough Wikistuff to know that the IC reason for the guns being on the hazard course was just in case the monsters broke out, employees should be able to deal with them, even if they didn't know that monsters were on hand that COULD break out. But I'd pushed that out of my mind. The sight of the dog kennels in the room full of dead houndeyes creeped me the hell out. (Especially since I'd sort of jokingly wondered if you could tame one and keep it as a pet, since they were kind of cute in a disturbing way.) The room with the headcrab cage in it? Just made it worse. And then there was the grunt in the tank... but dear Lord, I don't think I've ever been more creeped out by the implications of a perfectly mundane object in a video game. Well played, Valve, well played.
Anyway, I managed to get through that section (I like the snarks, they're kind of entertaining) and up to the surface. Right now, the game is saved at a point where I'm apparently supposed to have Gordon slide down a concrete pipe and NO NO NO NO NO tends to take over the mental dialogue at that point, as, well, there's cliffs involved, long drops, and phrases like 'major fracture detected'. My whole experience with cliffs in RL is confined to climbing Granddad Bluff in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and to a mountain path in Denali National Park that at one point dwindled down to a section only marginally larger than my own feet. I made a point of not looking away from the ground in front of me when I did that. I'm not acrophobic, but I'm also not good enough at mind-body coordination to keep my course accurate if I'm also looking at several hundred feet of DOWN. I'll try getting Gordon down the pipe later. I tried several times last night and I think he just fell- I'm not sure how to slow down his sliding so he doesn't get knocked down to 20% health when he lands.
