Half-Life 2, Part 4: STUPID CHOPPER, YOU GO SQUISH NOW

[camwyn]

When last we left our hero, Gordon had a helicopter battle to look forward to. And when I say 'look forward to' I mean it in the same way that you or I would look forward to a doctor explaining exactly what he or she meant by "I've never seen one of those before in my life". The man's been out of stasis for what, three hours now, maybe, and he's been chased and shot at and hit and talked to and chased and shot at and shot and chased more and attacked by I don't even know how many helicopters, and now he's in a great big open swampy area, in an airboat, with minimal cover and with no available exits unless he figures out a way to make the airboat go up a 75-degree slope and somehow hide in very tall grass. His player is equally dreading the fight, because the first twenty-seven times I started on this battle, I was using the Xbox 360 controller. You know. The one where I can't begin to count the number of times I got Gordon stuck in reverse because I'm clumsy and heavy with my thumbs? Yeah, that one. That poor boy was doomed to go through at least two Time Lords' worth of regenerations before the helicopter was through with him, no matter HOW kickass the gun the Vortigaunt gave him was. (And it was pretty kickass. Since, y'know, it came off another of the same model of helicopter and all.)

Cover in the area consisted of some vertical rocks, and, um... well, there was a smooshed sort of trailer off to one side. It had supply crates in it. I don't know if you can get the boat in there normally, but I'm me, so any hopes my Gordon might ever have had of hiding in the trailer and firing on the chopper from shelter were immediately dashed. There are times when I have difficulty using the Xbox controller to get Gordon through a door. On foot. Hell, I had trouble getting him into the trailer on foot to get those crates with his crowbar! I did manage to find a patch of tall grass that seemed to give the chopper trouble with seeing me, but the issue there was that I couldn't really fire on the chopper, either. Don't know if it was coded that way or if I was just aiming really badly or what. Driving around the open water like a mad thing didn't help much, either; first there were the splodeybarrels, and then the blasted helicopter started dropping mines. Eventually I brought Gordon out and tried parking him behind one of the rocks for the fight. This tactic worked really well for Cedric Popkin, after all. Slight problem: Popkin was an experienced machinegunner shooting at a man who was already being pursued by another aerial combatant. Gordon? Not so much.

I still don't know how I managed to kill that damn thing the first time, but Sherri and Danii will vouch for this much: the first time I shot the helicopter down?

IT LANDED ON GORDON'S HEAD.

Srsly. The Combine helicopter was belching clouds of smoke as it came back for one more pass, and the airboat's ammo had regenerated to around 60 or so, so I opened fire on it. It burst into flames, started losing altitude, and WOOMCH. Gordon has a brand new home on the bottom of the swamp.

Having the "Revenge!!" accomplishment pop up on screen right then did not make things any better.

I wound up having to reload the game from significantly further back than I would've liked. The Xbox's autosave had kicked in the instant the chopper died- which meant that my restore point was basically the instant Gordon did the math and realized he was going to die a horrible helicoptery death no matter what he did. When I finally killed that thing I saved again, over the Xbox's autosave. No accidental squishery here, nope.

By this time, my piloting skills had resulted in Gordon using up virtually every single healing item for miles. I scrounged up one or two more and then headed for the next area- more specifically, for an Easter egg that I'd heard about. I'd found Wikipedia entries on the All-Knowing Vortigaunt, and I was very, very curious to find out what he had to say. The entries mentioned that you could get the same info by talking to other Vorts long enough, but honestly? Both the other Vortigaunts that Gordon had encountered as of them were alongside humans who would start asking why Gordon didn't get a move on. All-Knowing Vort was the only one where I wouldn't feel guilty for disrupting the gameflow by hanging around long enough to chat.

Problem: Gordon's health was at 48 and his suit charge was at, like, 33. And the Vort was supposedly in a cave on the opposite side of a lot of toxic waste...

Let me tell you, there is nothing supposed about it. To get to the All-Knowing Vortigaunt you have to fetch a barrel and jump up on it and clamber into a drainage pipe and then offer up a prayer to Our Lady of Blessed Acceleration (Pedestrian Division). At least, you do if you're me. I think I spent more effort trying to sprint down that tunnel than I did trying to kill the helicopter, and by the time Gordon finally reached the Vortigaunt, he had two (2) health points left. Luckily there are enough health packs and suit batteries around to make up for this and get you out alive again. Of course, even so, the question becomes 'is it worth it'. I guess for some people, unlocking the 'vorticough' achievement is important... but honestly, I think for story purposes, meeting with that Vortigaunt in that cave may have been one of the most important things to happen to my Gordon all game.

No, seriously. Yes, when the Vortigaunt starts talking, you feel like you're listening to Rafiki- he's that vague, that odd in his speech patterns. But then you listen to what he's actually saying and you realize that he is dead serious. This isn't someone talking who has inflated ideas about what you and your crowbar and your big orange butt can do based on stories from some Black Mesa survivor. This is a creature who knows what you did, and what it means, and still absolutely and totally believes everything he's saying to you. He's not talking to the shadow and thought that the humans love; he's talking to Gordon. And when a being in the Vortigaunt's position does that, my Gordon, at least, has to listen- whether he believes it himself or not.

This is as much of the Vortigaunt's speech as I was able to get. It's delivered one line at a time in the game, hence the weird paragraphing.

We remember the Freeman. We are coterminous.
There is no distance between us. No false veil of time or space may intervene.
We see you still in Black Mesa. Clearly we see you in the Nihilanth's chamber.
We bear witness to the bright eternity of the Nihilanth's demise. You leap, you fall, we see you flash beyond the barriers.
For a brief time you joined with us. You are one. Between the worlds.
Communion of the vortessence. And that other: a deeper mystery. No deeper than the void itself.
We cannot forget those whose cords you cut. Forgiveness is not ours to bestow.
Unity of purpose, the shattering of common shackles, a single road we tread.
Your song we sing and shall sing for eternity. No matter the consequences of this struggle.
You have brought us grief and jubilation beyond measure.
We are there still, in observance of your final stroke.
While our own lay scattered at your feet, you severed the vortal cord that bound the Nihilanth to life, and to us.
That sharp spur of hope has not dulled to this day. For once the lesser master lay defeated, we knew the greater must also fall in time.
With you beside us, a talisman of victory, the day of freedom draws nigh.
Your bright face obscures your darker mask.
We call you sib, although your mind and meaning are a mystery to us.
Far distant eyes look out through yours.
Something secret steers us both. We shall not name it.
We have endured these chafing bonds for eons, yet a single moment of further servitude seems intolerable!
How often have we slipped our yoke, only to find it choking us again.
Let this war end in either total victory or our extinction. No further compromise shall we allow.
We take our stand beside you, here, upon this miserable rock.
What seems to you a sacrifice is merely, to us, an oscillation. We do not fear the interval of darkness.
We are a tapestry woven of vortessence. It is the same for you if only you would see it.
How many are there in you? Whose hopes and dreams do you encompass?
Could you but see the eyes inside your own, the minds in your mind, you would see how much we share.
We are you, Freeman. And you are us.

A little overwhelming, and more than a little weird, and the kind of thing that would get dismissed out of hand as crazy rantings coming from a human- but if my Gordon wasn't in a severely altered state of consciousness by that point, then I'm a blue-nosed gopher. Gordon didn't have to believe, I figure. He just had to listen. The words would be important to the character later, even if they never made a difference in resolving any of the game puzzles.

Eventually, of course, I had to sprint back across the poison and get back into the game. Imagine my surprise to find out how easily the Combine waiting in the barn could be cut down- and how many supplies were waiting there. Gordon was in fine, fine shape when he finally got the escape gate open and skittered out of there... even if my driving skills were sufficiently crummy that his attempt to go up the wooden rampy thing resulted in him driving the boat into the metal barrier above the opening and flipping over backwards.

At least there weren't any witnesses.

From here it was just a little bit of driving to a lambda on the wall that I almost missed the point of- I was looking for supply crates and didn't find any. I'd forgotten, by that point, that this was supposed to be where I'd meet up with Eli Vance again. Fortunately I remembered to check further into the shadows, and I found the door. Which, of course, promptly slammed shut behind Gordon, who promptly started having Black Mesa flashbacks and looking for Marines. No such luck, just a woman in a turtleneck who seemed to recognize him. That'd be Dr. Mossman, the suck-up. Seriously, she spends the next several minutes alternating between doing Basil Exposition's job and chattering excitedly about how incredible Dr. Kleiner and Eli are, and how she envies you working with them, and she's looking forward to finally working with you, and it'll be a lot more like Black Mesa with you there to help-

Show of hands! How many of y'all just had about twenty different kinds of alarm bell go off?

Yeah. She also mentioned something about how they could use more people with 'your training'. Which, um. Gordon was a pretty standard theoretical physicist, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, compared to the general population he might've been a genius, but compared to other theoretical physicists I always imagined him as about average. No Hawking or Feynman, you know? His 'training' consisted of a standard doctorate and some extra time at Innsbruck. If she meant his training for, like, Resistance work, she's got an even bigger round of guffaws coming. Gordon's combat training consisted of twenty-seven hours of How Not To Die. When she gets you to Eli Vance, Eli notes that MIT graduates are few and far between these days, so I assume she meant his academic training... still, it just seemed a little suck-uppy to me. Then again, the next line out of Eli's mouth was that they'd soon have Gordon out of his HEV suit and back into a lab coat where he belonged. I'm pretty sure that at that particular moment, Gordon had an even bigger "Um.... you didn't want to say that" reaction than he did to "it'll be more like Black Mesa now that you're here". I know I did.

You get to look around the office here. It's neat. If you stop and stare at anything for any length of time (like the wall full of news clippings that say EARTH SURRENDERS and so on), Eli comes over and talks a little about what you're looking at. This is where you find out that Dr. Breen negotiated Earth's surrender at the end of the Seven Hours War with the Combine and got the administratorship of Earth in return. You know, just in case you were thinking of buying Breen a puppy or something. I wish there were more time to look around Black Mesa East; on the elevator ride down with Dr. Suck-Up, you could see people playing chess, Vortigaunts working in the kitchen (in chef's hats, even!), and humans and Vorts training together at some kind of a target range. I would've liked to see more of that, but you have to content yourself with what's in the lab.

Eventually Alyx shows up and Eli embarrasses her by saying 'there's nothing Gordon can't handle, with the possible exception of you'. Again, this is Benson talking. It's kind of an interesting experience. Dr. Suck-Up arrives shortly thereafter, and there's an argument that ends in Eli shuffling Gordon and Alyx out into the scrapyard for TRAINING IN THE USE OF THE FORCE.

Okay, it's where you get the zero point field energy manipulator, aka the gravity gun, but damn, man! You point it at faraway things and concentrate hard, and they wobble and slowly inch towards you and then WHOOMP fly up to stop in front of you. And you concentrate some more and either drop them or hurl them great distances. And if there's something in front of you that's not organic and not bolted down, you can fire BZORP! orange energy strikes at it and it goes flying. And if someone throws something at you, you hold your hand out (okay, with the gravity gun in it) and you can stop it in midair and then chuck it or drop it. It's the Force, totally, even if your instructor is an attractive woman with a nine-foot-tall droid named Dog rather than a little green Muppet or an English geezer with a de-limbificator he uses in public.

Unfortunately, you don't get much time for training with it before the Empire shows up to disrupt things. The Combine sweeps start passing overhead, and you have to get the heck out of Dodge, so Alyx and Dog and Gordon all run inside, and then there is Trouble, and Gordon winds up having to go down the Foreboding Tunnel of Forebodingness that I forgot to mention earlier-

... okay, Firefox spellcheck, YOU FAIL FOREVER. Teleportation is a word. Forebodingness is not.

Anyway. Alyx had pointed out a tunnel as going to Ravenholm and said 'we don't go there any more'. So of course that's where you have to go now. Alone. Without the girl with the gun. Without the boat with the gun. Without the nine foot tall combat droid. One more typical moment in the horrible life of Gordon Freeman, I suppose; anyway, I'd heard of Ravenholm as being the Resident Evil tribute level, so that was where I saved the game and went home for the night.

More funny next time. Sorry this one wasn't as entertaining as usual. They can't all be The Trouble With Tribbles.

Comments

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Funny as hell.

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

*reads All-Knowing Vortigaunt dialogue*

...dude. There are more layers to this than I ever imagined. I might have to rethink apping Alyx.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

It may not be The Trouble With Tribbles but I'm still laughing my ass off here.

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

I think you're gonna love Ravenholm.

And go WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!?! and fall off a roof a few times.

Fast Zombies, brr.

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

Also, a bit of digging in YouTube revealed a decent-quality movie of the Vortigaunt's entire monologue. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQLRS5o6vtU)

[slarti.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'd heard about the All-Knowing Vortigaunt, but hadn't gone looking for him when I played. That's pretty freaky.

And augh, god, the helicopter fighting. I don't even know how long I was at that, but it felt like forever. Don't think I ever had it fall on my head, though. :-)

It's almost worth it for the Grav Gun, though. And just in time for Ravenholm, too; if you feel up to it, there's an Achievement for getting through it with just the Grav Gun, but even if you're not, I've got one word that you'll learn about soon re: Grav Gun and Ravenholm... sawblades! :D

[sylveraven.livejournal.com]

Back flip off the duck!

...also. I may or may not have possibly started a hardcore Barney/Gordon fic for a kink challenge... involving the "Silence" kink.

Possibly. *hides*

[camwyn]

I will let Harry Saxon do the talking for me.

[sylveraven.livejournal.com]

You have to admit, though. If you're going to do a kink meme... Silence is just about the perfectest kink you could possibly come up with for Gordon Freeman.

I had naughty thoughts involving the crowbar and one of the object kinks for a while... but the damned thing is both curved and has spikes, so I'm thinking that would be more painful than fun.

[camwyn]

... thank you so much, I can't sit ANYWHERE now without having to shift around uncomfortably.

[sylveraven.livejournal.com]

If there's one thing I'm good at it, it's horrible mental images.

I kind of pride myself on my ability to make people vaguely nauseous with the things that live inside my head.

[camwyn]

You should've been there for my Anthro 102 class, then. Dr. Gaines had a lecture he deployed towards the end of the semester that he called the World-Famous Atwood Gaines Legs-Crossing Lecture. He guaranteed that by the end of the class- or the next day, since sometimes that class ran longer due to questions- EVERY single person would have squirmed around and crossed their legs uncomfortably at least once.

On another note, before going back to HL 2 Ep 1 tonight, I'd like to try for the Zombie Chopper achievement in the main game. Play through Ravenholdm using only the gravgun.

[sylveraven.livejournal.com]

Ooooh... that sounds like fun!

...both the lecture and the Ravenholdm, actually. I didn't get to see very much last time, so I can make up for it tonight.

[aberrantangels]

There are more layers to this than I ever imagined.

The bits that really get me are:

Far distant eyes look out through yours.
Something secret steers us both. We shall not name it.
[...]
How many are there in you? Whose hopes and dreams do you encompass?
Could you but see the eyes inside your own, the minds in your mind, you would see how much we share.

Sounds to me like the AKV is somebody's player character. (-8

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

So the "something secret" that "steers us both" is an X-Box controller?

[camwyn]

As batyatoon put it, "Did it just get all Neverending Story in here?"

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

The Vor speech sounds a lot like the sorts of things I remember from playing the Marathon series.

Most especially:
http://marathon.bungie.org/story/_images/mifinalscreen.gif

[lccorp2.livejournal.com]

If you like the grav gun now, I really wonder what you'll do with the super grav gun at the end of the game.

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

Likewise, but I found him by noclipping back into the lab at the end of Black Mesa East rather than through legitimate means.

[(Anonymous)]

These are really funny! I bet you'll just LOVE Ravenholm! :D