Half-Life 2, Part 5: RAVENHOLDM. U SUDNT COME HERE.

[camwyn]

When last we saw our hero, Gordon was on his way to Ravenholm, sans Jedi MasterAlyx or nine-foot-tall combat droidD0g. He did, however, have the Gravity Gun, which makes up for a lot of that. In fact, it is possible to play through the entire Ravenholm stage of the game using only the gravity gun, although my attempt at doing so last night failed, possibly because I used the crowbar once to bash open a box. I'm not likely to make the attempt again, since it's kind of painfully arbitrary; when I want that kind of arbitrary game self-limitation, I'll fire up NetHack and play a vegetarian armorless monk.

Anyway. Ravenholm is an old mining town that made the Combine very, very unhappy over something unspecified. Various forms of supplemental material say they gave the human Resistance too much support, but no details ever arise. I have this vague image of the people of Ravenholm calling a town meeting and sending a Complaints Choir to meet the latest train outside the mines. The specifics of what they did aren't important. The specifics of what the COMBINE did are another story. Remember those rockets full of headcrabs coming out of the sky back before Gordon got the airboat? Ravenholm is what happens when somewhere in the Citadel a Combine Overwatch military commander snarfs ninety-four chocolate covered coffee beans in a row and then brings his hand anywhere within an inch of the Launch buttom. THOOM THOOM THOOM THOOM THOOM ensues. The town got hit by so many headcrab rockets that now every single person except two are headcrab zombies, and one of the two survivors we only know exists because there's a point in the level where you hear a woman scream.

It would have been nice if Alyx had mentioned this back when she told Gordon they don't go to Ravenholm any more.

Your first sign of trouble when you pop out of the tunnel into Ravenholm is not the headcrab rocket to your left. Neither is it the fact that sometime between your gravgun lessons and now, it's gotten dark and the full moon's climbed most of the way up the sky. At least, not if you're me. If you're me the first sign of trouble is the fact that up ahead, there's half a person hanging from a tree. And it's not the half you'd normally see hanging from trees, either.

At this point I have to note that a significant chunk of my play-through in Ravenholm was influenced by a fanwork. A fanfic writer named Squirrelking wrote two fics called "Half life: Full Life Consequences" and "Half Life: Full-life Consequences 2: What Has Tobe Done". They're both at the Pit of Voles if you really want to read them. They read like the author is a twelve-year-old with rabies, but some brilliant soul took them both and made Youtube vids of them using a Half-Life 2 mod. Go and watch at least the first one- it's here. I had to put this note in because honestly, when I caught sight of the dangling hemicorporectomy victim, my instinctive response was to shout "AND THE PANTS WERE DEAD!!!".

You'll understand once you've seen the vid.

Anyway, yes, Ravenholm is where you discover that the ever-thoughtful HL 2 programming team not only made it possible for you to have to deal with a headcrab zombie that only operates a torso, but added the other half of the body into the visual equation. Thankfully, headcrab zombies require an actual skull to attach to, because the idea of a headcrab zombie that consisted of a pelvis and a pair of legs is kind of disturbing. You just get the dead half-a-person instead… and shortly after seeing the one dangling from the tree (the rope was around the person's waist; I'm assuming they were bisected after being hung up, since just hanging a pair of legs up is probably more easily done by roping the ankles) you find out exactly how you go about getting half a person in Ravenholm. One of the nearby buildings still has its lights on, and apparently it was once inhabited by a demented lumberjack who was into spare part redundancy and scuba diving, because the first room contains:

- Two tables
- A bunch of rotary power saw blades
- No actual saw anywhere that you can determine
- GAH HALF A DEAD GUY STUCK TO THE WALL- well at least he's not a zombie- wait, is that half-dude propped up on the saw blade? Seriously, the saw blade is stuck in the wall and the dead guy's on top of it like he's being presented at a dinner table
- About eight oxygen canisters neatly arranged on the wall that DOESN'T have the dead guy stuck to it
- Several cans of paint
- I mentioned the half a dead guy, right? Because, yech.

What happens from here is a thing of beauty. You start getting headcrab zombies soon. You can, of course, kill them any way you like, but let's be honest. Alyx just gave you the Force in a shiny orange handheld package. Don't you want to use it? Don't you want to find out what it can-

Well, crap, it doesn't seem to work on actual moving adversaries! That's lame. Not that you can really find a neck to Force choke on a headcrab zombie, but Force lightning would've been nice… Ah, but remember, when you pick up an object using the gravity gun, you don't have to put it down nicely. You can throw it really, really hard.

There's a pair of dead pants hanging from a tree outside, and there's half a dead dude stuck to the wall behind you. There are many, many sharp objects behind you. There are zombies in front of you. Think, Gordon, think. . .

One sawblade later, you've got either one zombie and one dead guy in two pieces, or (if you're careful about aiming and lining things up) two dead guys in two pieces. Of course, because God doesn't like you, Gordon Freeman*, the headcrabs are still alive and come after you moments later, but that's okay! Reuse is better than recycling! Reel that sawblade back in and zorp it at the headcrabs. They don't slice in half, alas, but it does kill them. Fun for the whole family! Alternatively, the oxygen tanks work pretty well, too, but they make things very, very disturbing. Sawblades cut the zombies in half and kill them fast. Fire…

The zombies take a while to die from fire. And they scream. It's this horrible warbly moaning cry that sounds twice as anguished as their usual noises. They stagger around on fire, waving their arms, and they just keep making that noise until they finally collapse and die. It's bad enough the first time, but after a little bit it starts to get seriously disquieting hearing what sounds like "AUGH WHY GOD WHY" being pronounced through the body of a chicken-shaped alien parasite by a dude who's on fire. My Gordon wound up killing quite a few zombies even though they were on fire, just to put them out of their misery.

Shortly thereafter comes the Alley With The Thing In It That You Don't Know What It Does. Also the Statement That Sounds Kinda Biblical But It Isn't And You Don't Know Who Says It. The first is basically a case of 'hey, who put half an airplane propeller and an on switch in the middle of an alley?', and the second is 'WHO THE HELL SAID THAT'. Get used to the vaguely ominous pronouncements. They're not directed at you. They're being spoken by the only living man left in Ravenholm who isn't you, even though you can't see him and there's no town-wide PA system. Apparently he enrolled in one mother of a public speaking course a while ago and learned to project his voice in ways that would make David Lynch's Fremen decide he was their new best friend. As far as the half an airplane propeller goes… well, the only way to find out is to flip that on switch. Too bad you can't actually do it with the gravity gun, because it's located BELOW the plane of the propeller's excruciatingly sharp leading edge, and Gordon being 27 years old sometime in the early 21st century, he's probably seen Raiders of the Lost Ark. The only way to turn the thing on is to crouch real low and flip the switch and STAY CROUCHED until the two headcrab zombies coming down the nearby stairs make their presence known.

WHACKITY CHOP SPLAT UGGGH.

Well, that was an educational experience! Step over the dead pants and head into the next building, where you get another chopper in the middle of the floor and a couple of saw blades and some other supplies and AURGH mister if you're going to make speeches like that, WARN a guy first! Seriously, that's kind of AIIIGH WHERE DID THOSE TWO ZOMBIES COME FROM THEY ARE RIGHT NEXT TO MY EAR.

Get used to this. Ravenholm is ALL like this.

You can fight the zombies with guns, like I said. You can fight them with the crowbar or the grenades. You can fight them with improvised weapons. Just don't fight them with paint cans. All those do is splatter them in white and piss them off. You have to hit a zombie about six times with a paint can before he goes down. It's not worth it. Hitting them with furniture, on the other hand, kills them real dead- although if it's a small piece of furniture you may have to hit them with it twice. A full sized armoire (yes,these show up) brings the hurting in a whole new way. And although it's getting ahead of myself to say so, since they don't appear until you make it out of the barn-and-shed area of Ravenholm, radiators? Radiators are love. Yank one of those puppies off the wall with the grav gun and carry it with you, and you can cack pretty much any zombie stupid enough to get in your way. FEAR THE RADIATOR.

Danii noted last night that my moment of shouting "WHO'S NEXT???" after Gordon brained several zombies with the radiator he was carrying was one of my freakiest Half-Life performances yet. I'm kind of pleased with that. Yes, I know the Evil Dead line was "Who wants some?", but we are talking about a man carrying a radiator here, not Ash.

You eventually meet up with the source of the pseudo-biblical pronouncements, and he's possibly the coolest human NPC in the game. His name's Father Grigori. He's the pastor of the Ravenholm church. He's more than a little unhinged, but you would be too in a town where absolutely everybody else except the mystery screamer (who only screams once, and then only if you happen to walk into the area of the map that triggers it) had been rather horribly converted into a headcrab zombie. He's got a big ol' pump-action gun that the code apparently calls Annabelle, and he's really good with it. He's the one who built the traps in town, including not only the choppers, but also a few areas where gas tanks and igniter switches make it possible to fill alleyways with flame, and a couple of spots where pulling a lever will drop a car on any zombie foolish enough to be in the way. (And then reel the car back up again. Reuse is better than recycling, kids.) Father Grigori's pretty friendly, even if he does have the stereotypical Scary Eastern European Man laugh, and he takes his job of putting down the local zombies seriously (we're talking about someone who'll blow a zombie away and announce, "The grave holds nothing worse for you, my child!"). He even gives you a shotgun and advises you to aim for the head, which is really pretty sound since it not only does triple damage but also takes out the headcrab. The shotgun arrives just in time, too, since there are weird noises nearby and capering shapes on one of the rooftops…

Fun fact: there are now multiple kinds of headcrab zombie. And one of them? Is damned fast. I meant what I said about capering; these things gallop on all fours at speeds very close to your suit's sprint function, and they leap from rooftop to rooftop like they were Venom- not Spiderman, Venom. And the process of being infested with a fast headcrab is even nastier than the usual headcrab zombification. A standard headcrab zombie has clawed hands and a huge gapping mouthlike hole down the middle of the torso, with the ribs looking like teeth. A fast headcrab zombie has no skin. So you've got immensely fast, frantically braying things that LEAP and JUMP and CLIMB GUTTER PIPES OH GOD THEY CAN CLIMB on your tail… they're the single most powerful temptation, in my mind, to diverge from the attempt at an all-gravgun runthrough of Ravenholm. Because damn, having one of those things leap at you makes you reflexively want that shotgun. The only mercy is that their braying noises aren't very anguished sounding, and when they start trying to attack the sound takes on an oddly stammery quality that swiftly becomes reminiscent of an asthmatic pug. A skinless, demented pug on three different kinds of amphetamine, but they're pug noises nonetheless.

There's one other kind of zombie in Ravenholm, but they're at least slower. They got infected by black shiny headcrabs that bite you and stuff you full of neurotoxins that take you down to one health point. Your suit starts pumping you full of antivenom immediately, so you don't die, but you have to be really careful since the poison zombies don't hunt alone and one of the other kinds can kill you while you're recovering. They're not such a problem, since they're slow and make a distinctive snickery chuckley noise that lets you know they're coming, but their headcrabs scream like cats. And they- the poison headcrabs, I mean- take FOREVER to die when you set them on fire, to the point where Gordon can easily find himself under assault by what amounts to a screaming jumping flailing poisonous cat that happens to be on fire. Maybe MULTIPLE screaming jumping flailing poisonous cats on fire. Man, I never thought I'd be nostalgic for plain old homicidal space chickens.

I'm told Ravenholm is the Resident Evil homage level. It's possible. I've never played RE. I just know that it's going on Gordon's list of Ways He Knew God Doesn't Like Him, alongside the testicle monster and the THREE ARMED ALIEN FETUS CREATURE THE SIZE OF THE STAY-PUFT MARSHMALLOW MAN. The whole town. I don't think he ever breathed such a sigh of relief as he did when Father Grigori got him into the churchyard and offered to show him to the mines that would lead him out of town. The zombie battle in the churchyard is fun; your job is basically to provide covering fire while Father Grigori reloads Annabelle and blows a path through his former congregation to the mine gates. You can't bring him with you- he insists on staying and fighting- so I figure Gordon saluted him as he gave his last line:

"Farewell, brother! I fear I deliver you to a darker place. May the Light of Lights be with you. Look to your own *BOOM* salvation!"

And he laughs madly and starts blowing zombies away again as you head for the mineshaft.

The last bit here is kind of a pain in the neck, but it has this going for it: no zombies. You have to get down the initial shaft first, which is an experience not unlike clambering down the tunnel that had the giant tentacle thing in it back at Black Mesa. Namely: use bumps on the wall and bits of bracing to slow yourself down, but do not attempt a direct drop to the bottom, or you will die. Gordon makes a very crunchy sound when that happens. It's not fun. As long as you don't make too huge of a drop to the walkway at the very bottom you should be all right; there's medical kits waiting for you… and about forty or fifty headcrabs of all kinds. Fortunately they're on the cavern floor and you're on a walkway, so they can't get you yet, but it's still an "Asps. Very dangerous. You go first" moment. Gordon's never going to be able to look at cockroaches scrambling away from the light again without thinking of that sight.

Fortunately, you can get out of there by sprinting and shooting barrels and climbing in a hurry, and then by swimming and not getting grabbed by a barnacle. Man those things have long tongues. When you finally get out of the water there's one last trap for you to use: a cart that runs back and forth along the length of the tunnel to the surface, with one of Fr. Grigori's choppers inside. Turn it on and crouch the whole time you go up the tunnel. It'll whack any zombies in half, and probably take out any loose headcrabs, too. Once you reach the surface…

Well, as leeshajoy pointed out, either the Combine have sped up Earth's rotation so that night lasts an hour and a half, or you spent a LOT longer in those tunnels than you thought. It's full daylight on the surface. I’m assuming Gordon took a nap at Black Mesa East and spent some extra time getting patched up in Father Grigori's church, but even I can only stretch my rationalization so far… Not that it matters, because the welcoming committee involves a poison headcrab (frigging cats!) and a skinless zombie. Just what you wanted, huh? Yeah.

The level doesn't end here, but by that point I looked at the clock in RL and had to go home, so we'll save the rest of the level for next time.

*To the tune of 'What do you do with a drunken sailor?'

Comments

[tundra-no-caps.livejournal.com]

I thought you were going to let your zombie fighting friend tackle this section?

[minkhollow]

...I'm not sure whether to be amused or disturbed that 'and the pants were dead' actually wasn't that far off.

[camwyn]

Changed my mind.

[camwyn]

Ravenholm is full of dead pants. Not that you don't spot them elsewhere in the game at times, but you get more dead pants per square mile in Ravenholm than anywhere else in the game.

[pat-trick.livejournal.com]

skinless zombies dear me.

also? that "Full Life Consequences" vid made me laugh harder than i have in some time.

[camwyn]

It's bloody brilliant, is what it is. And, yeah, skinless zombies. I forgot to mention that they don't appear to NOTICE when they're on fire, since their asthmatic pug noises don't change much except to get faster- so you've got something that can run almost as fast as the suit lets you sprint coming after you, capering and leaping and generally imitating Venom, and it's on fire. Worse than the cats, so they are.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

Father Grigori sounds very much like an "I kick ass for the Lord!" sort of guy. Be on the lookout for a headcrab zombie wearing a priest's coat. That sort of guy never makes it to the endscene without being reanimated.

[camwyn]

Yeah, I was thinking he needs to meet Father McGruder. They'd get on amazingly, I'm sure. That, or there'd be a spontaneous arm-wrestling contest or other feat of strength on both their parts.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I was hoping Gordon would beat up on the zombies with the half-corpses.

And I've played Resident Evil. It's nothing like Ravenholm. Now if the good Reverend took lots of cocaine, thought (rightly) that everyone was out to get him and contemplated eating puppies, it'd be like RE.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

*snicker*

Poor dead pants.

[feasco.livejournal.com]

Yay for everyone's favorite little mining town, and the best priest guy EVAR.

This and the write-ups of the previous game have made for a very entertaining read.

I CANOT GIVE YOU MY LISENCE OFFICER

BECUASE YOU ARE A HEADCRAB ZOMBIE

[camwyn]

ZOMBIE GOASTS, LEAVE THIS PLACE.

[feasco.livejournal.com]

John Freeman... you got here slow and now i am zombie goast. you will pay...

to be continued...?

I'd also recommend the dramatization of another of his works, HALOS IN SPACE (http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D4Y5EkwBHPbM&ei=BcdJSMu7LqHUpgSR19TSBA&usg=AFQjCNHasYZdRzpjfhSeN9cQnez7Wc6FeA&sig2=1fWOMC5Qq7a5q_ViUZgSDA)

And while I'm here I might as well recommend to anyone GooseGoose's series of video commentary with a unique perspective on HL2 (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=608679) as well a Episodes 1 (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7791992304107970746&hl=en) & 2 (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=608679) (But only if you've finished the games and have too much spare time).

And the Civil Protection (http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcivil-protection.blogspot.com%2F&ei=jslJSLKoIIzmpgSiqqDSBA&usg=AFQjCNHzLcUefamy6_edhUSdsmOGtnaI1w&sig2=AE8p8KQSUCdgkBT41W3zWg) machinima series.

and

and

[camwyn]

Oooh. I'm going to have to check those out at some point after I've ploughed through both the Episodes. (I'm actually almost done with Episode 1. I played through HL 2 on the Xbox; I'm writing these up as I catch up with my Xbox performance on the PC.)

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

Random note: Do not play Chapter 4 of Episode 2 right before bed. I watched a YouTube walkthrough last night, and it led to creeptastic dreams.

[lccorp2.livejournal.com]

Super grav gun: I shoot blue lightning at u now kthxbai.

[camwyn]

'Dark Energy Gravity Gun', 'Emperor Palpatine's Force Lightning', potayto, potahto...

[(Anonymous)]

Hahaha I love Full Life Consequences! "John Freeman is Gordon Freeman's brother who was one day an office!" God I love those ^^

Also, if you liked those, search for Quarter Life: Halfway to destruction. Same idea. Written by a different person but was animated by the same person.