Half-Life 2, Part 6: COME BACK WITH MY CAR

[camwyn]

When last we saw our hero, Gordon had just slugged his way out of the Ravenholm mines. The only way out was to follow the railroad tracks, which were littered with railroad cars and the occasional zombie and OH HEY LOOK A SNIPER. I don't know if the Combine set the snipers up specifically for Gordon, or if they're just the equivalent of a Jersey state trooper with his car backed up against a Turnpike overpass, waiting for whoever happens to be traveling an appropriate speed in the appropriate direction. All I can say for sure is:

1. They hurt. A LOT. Even if they only hit you once.
2. They don't like zombies. That or they're horrifically bored and take potshots at zombies, headcrabs, etc. just to stay in practice.

I kind of like the latter interpretation better, because that plugs into the state trooper image pretty easily and furthers my contention that City 17 was Newark even if I can't for the life of me figure out what NJ municipality that would make Ravenholm. (Possibly it's all that's left of Elizabeth or Linden, and those aren't actually mines so much as the underground bits of the oil refineries.) You have two options for dealing with Mr. State Trooper. 'Run like a bunny' doesn't really cut it, unless the bunny in question came out second best in an argument with Greebo. The other option is one that drives me up the wall. I believe I mentioned in the Evil Homicidal Space Chicken report that Gordon had a bad habit of thumbing the hammer on his .357 Magnum. Well, he's out of that habit as of HL 2, but whenever you switch to the use of grenades- every single time- he pulls the pin and holds the lever down. I can only assume he keeps the pins on a loop of duct tape or something, because if you switch out of grenade mode to another weapon, you don't have to throw the grenade to avoid having your head blown off. WTF, people. Think before you code your animations.

Anyway, Mr. State Trooper and his pet sniper rifle Mimi are stationed in bridges that run over the train tracks. You never see them alive. You just see a black window with a blue targeting laser coming out of it. If you play this right, and I figured this out without dying too many times, you can pitch a grenade in there without ever being spotted. Which means that somewhere out there, the last five seconds of some bored transhuman SOB's life consisted of "hmm hmm hmm, pigeon, hmm dee did I hear something, probably not, hmm dee SHIT. GRENADE."

Gordon had a certain reluctance to kill anything from Earth when I was playing him in the first game. Combine are another story. It's partly the storm trooper mask factor and partly 'psssht, I didn't grow up being told you fuckers were defending my country, I don't see why I should care'. He doesn't actively rejoice in killing them, since they're still human-shaped, but there's very little about shooting Combine that troubles his conscience.

Which is good, because at the end of the railway line there's a BUNCH of them shooting at you as you come out into the open. It took me a little bit to realize that there was shooting going on inside one of the nearby buildings, too. I managed to get in without Gordon leaving too much blood on the scenery and ran into the Resistance again, fighting Combine in a warehouse. This was almost a very embarrassing battle, because when you are dealing with the Xbox 360 controller and you are not used to it, moving blue jumpsuits of oppression look very much like moving blue goons with shiny helmets. Fortunately the right people lived and nobody said 'hey, didn't Winston's head move back and to the left?'.

Shortly thereafter, the real fun begins. Alyx's dad got captured during that Combine raid at Black Mesa East, and he's been taken to Nova Prospekt, which is just a little bigger and scarier and more, y'know, cliffsidey and gulaggy than most of your major New Jersey correctional facilities. Who knows, maybe the Combine sank all the landmasses between the prison and the sea or something... heck, considering how far you have to drive, it could just as easily be a correctional facility in Monmouth or even Ocean County. Yes, drive. You get a dune buggy now. It has a tau cannon mounted on it. This is important because there are Big Giant Bugs of Chewing Your Face Off living near the shore now, and it's their spawning season. Congratulations! Welcome to Great Swamp, hope you like miasma!

They call them antlions. For the record, real antlions look kinda like this. Or this. The biggest ones have a wingspan of maybe fifteen centimeters. in the States, they often call them doodlebugs.

These are not doodlebugs.

Yes, that is a washing machine in the background.

Remember how I said the airboat was easier to control once I realized I could take my hand off the mouse and just go? It doesn't work like that with the car. Different surfaces mess with your traction, and you don't really have the same kind of banking ability with the car that you did with the airboat, so turning is a LOT more critical. Also? It's totally possible to ram your car into something at high speed and get flipped over and hurt. Or thrown out of the car. Or over the cliff and into the sea full of carnivorous space leeches. You think I'm kidding. I'm not. Leeches. Big bastards, too, not like the little wormy things back at Black Mesa. They'll kill you right through your suit. Here's a tip: don't drive over the cliff and into the sea full of carnivorous space leeches.

And we haven't even gotten to the rollermines yet! Those are fun, in the way that amphetamine-laden drivers are fun for New York City bicyclists. They pop out of the ground where they've been planted by the Combine and come at you and stick to your car and zorp you repeatedly with electricity and then you have to get out and GRAVITY GUN THE LITTLE BASTARDS TO DEATH, GET THE HELL OFF MY CAR, IT MIGHT LOOK LIKE AN OVERGROWN LAWN MOWER BUT IT'S STILL MY CAR. Dog's ball, back at Black Mesa East, used to be one of these before it got an attitude adjustment. Which is good, because otherwise I'd really have to question the Vances' judgment.

Anyway, the tau cannon is your friend against the antlions, but your real friends are the thumpers. If you, like me, are a Dune fan, you have an instinctive reaction of "whut?" to the Resistance guy who gives you the car saying to use the thumpers and you should be okay. Thumpers, when not referring to multiple small Disney rabbits, are supposed to be used for summoning giant sandworms. You cannot do that in Half-Life 2, although frankly I'd kind of like to see the Combine deal with one of those suckers. No, in this case thumpers make use of the fact that antlions don't deal well with seismic vibrations. Turn on the BIIIIIG black and neon blue thing and it goes WHOMM WHOMM WHOMM into the ground, creating a zone antlions won't enter because it hurts their delicate little buggy ears. Aw. One would almost feel sorry for them- they run away screaming- if it weren't for the par where, y'know, they're trying to EAT YOUR FACE.

stupid bloody giant space bugs, I've no sympathy at all.

There is a lot of driving to be done. I hit a lot of things. Either they make dune buggies out of adamantium in the dark and oppressive future of oppressiveness, or somebody grabbed that one cart from Black Mesa and recycled it into a car, because as many times as Gordon drove into a cliff/hillside/rock/wrecked other vehicle/tree/fence post/small house/Combine (there were surprisingly few chances to drive into these)/checkpoint/tunnel wall/zombie/OCEAN FULL OF CARNIVOROUS SPACE LEECHES, the car never got actually wrecked. Well, maybe it did after hitting the ocean full of carnivorous space leeches. I don't know. Gordon would've been dead by then regardless.

There are, however, some really fun chunks in this part of the game, and one of them is a part where you get to operate an industrial crane to move your car up from the beach to a loading dock. This may not be your idea of fun at first glance, but that is because first glance does not generally include 'hmm, there's a lot of shipping containers about', 'hey, those Combine are shooting at me from the ground', and 'oh, hey, I have a big ol' industrial crane with a big ol' magnet on the end. Hmm.' Let me just note that Combine foot soldiers might be transhuman scary badasses to your average citizen, but they still go squish reeely gud when you hit them with a shipping container.

There are also some challenging parts where the challenge doesn't come from trying to avoid plummeting to a leech-intensive death, like, for example, New Little Odessa. You get a rocket launcher here, one where you have to steer the rocket after you shoot it. More specifically, you get the launcher about ten seconds before a Combine gunship shows up and starts blowing the hell out of everything in sight. You get it from a guy with a weird mustache and a weird accent who somehow manages to find an excuse to stay in the basement the whole time you and everybody else in town is outside trying to bring down the FLYING BUG MACHINE OF DEATH- it looks like the Combine ruined a perfectly good insect or oceanic arthropod by sticking a giant propeller in its rear end and mounting some serious pulse cannonry on it. I imagine the fight would've been easier if anybody else in the world other than possibly Stephen Hawking were at the controls- although given that he has to steer his wheelchair via joystick it's entirely possible that Professor Hawking could've made the kill faster than me, too.

(Side note: the settlement is across the bay from a house that has Combine in it. One of the Combine set up binoculars to look across the bay. If you spend long enough at the binoculars you can see the G-Man talking to Mustache Boy at some length. It may be a good thing that he never comes out to fight...)

There's also one house that I found just... oddly heartbreaking, for some reason. It's not a very challenging house. You kill a couple of Combine outside, and then you go in and start looking. And there's a kitchen with some stuff in it, and there's a table and a newspaper on it, and there's stairs leading up, and there's what's left of a bed- just a frame and a mattress- and there's some weirdly neat and well-kept furniture. An armoire, I think, and maybe a nightstand. I think I saw a coffee mug in that house, too. And there's a couple of crates of supplies neatly arranged to one side in the upstairs room. Somebody cared about that house once. Somebody did the best they could with what they had, and tried to live with a little dignity. Maybe they were reluctant rebels who didn't want to lose what they had, but they saw that the end was coming and they decided to act. Maybe they were silent sympathizers from the start and nobody ever knew, and the Combine dragged them off to do God knows what to them... but that place belonged to somebody once, and if it could be said that you could feel the former owners' presence anywhere in the game, I think it was there. Right up until the Combine pitch their first grenade through the window, anyway (which they managed to do at exactly the moment when Gordon was starting to wonder about the former residents' story, when I played through). That wasn't a battle of giggles at ragdoll physics. That was a battle where Gordon was genuinely angry.

Eventually, though, the houses get left behind and you come to a critically important location: the House Next To The Bridge. Oh, God, the bridge. Um. Understand that my great-grandfather was one of the men who worked on the building of the Triborough Bridge in New York City, back during the Great Depression. I've always had a fascination with bridges, and tend to hold them as objects of reverence, both in the sense of 'it's beautiful' and in the sense of 'it could kill me in a heartbeat, couldn't it'. The latter crops up mostly when I'm on foot or on my bike. Gordon has to get across the bridge on foot to turn off the forcefield that keeps him and his dune buggy of righteous doom from getting across at any kind of speed. The forcefield blocks the upper level of the bridge, but not the part below.

There are no handrails.

There are no safety pathways. At least, no accessible ones.

There is no floor. There's just girders, and fallen bits of former pathway, and narrow girders, and seventy feet of drop to the water below... and all that Gordon's got on his side is his tiny tiny feet. Not even the prehensile ass can save him here. He's got to pick his way along those OH GOD THERE IS A TRAIN MOVING UP THERE, THIS WHOLE THING IS SHAKING girders and towards the SHIT SHIT SHIT I DIDN'T SEE THE BARNACLE maintenance huts with bits of extra equipment, along the CRAP THERE ARE COMBINE ON THE NEXT PLATFORM next set of girders and down the WHY DIDN'T I TAKE THE JOB AT APERTURE SCIENCE last few feet of sheer jump and drop to the platform that wends around to the force field control room. He gets shot at a lot on the way there. And then? HE GETS TO DO IT ALL AGAIN.

With a flying bug machine of death coming after him this time.

Gordon is so far in over his head at this point that he's looking up at submarines.

The fun part is that, after you kill the deathbug gunship thing of evil, you still have about a third of the bridge to go. I slipped a few times on that return trip. Gordon's leg bones go crunch very loudly when he hits; poor man, if it weren't for morphine he'd have no sensory nerves left at all. It's not even a clear run back to the car when he gets out, either, because by then there are ZOMBIES on the cliffside path and they are fighting ANTLIONS and the ANTLIONS want to EAT YOUR FACE. And also there might be a poison zombie in there if you didn't kill it on the way to the bridge, which was a hell of a thing for me to discover, let me tell you. I'm pretty sure Gordon finally made it to the car, dropped into the seat, plonked his head against the steering wheel, and whimpered like a kicked puppy for a good long while after that.

Anyway, he has to get over the top part of the bridge now, which would be fine and dandy if it weren't for the fact that:

- there are only two tracks
- one of them is mostly taken up by an idle train
- when you're halfway down the open track the light at the end of the tunnel really and truly IS an oncoming train

I, um, died a lot trying to get through that section. Mostly screaming about BACK UP BACK UP YOU STUPID CAR BACK UP BACK UP. That or WHY ISN'T THE TURBO WORKING, WHY THE HELL ISN'T THE TURBO WORKING. (Answer: user error. Lots thereof.) I eventually made it across, and Gordon found his way to the next human settlement without disgracing himself too badly... at which point he found out the Combine were looking for his car, so he was just gonna have to walk now. Oh, and help the locals fight the incoming dropships. Which I'd seen before in the game without knowing what they were, it so happens; when they pass overhead, they look like weirdly fluidly moving giant robots. I think my initial response to the sight was "Holy crap! Is that a Gundam?". (From above they look sort of like long-limbed crabs.) The Gundams of Evil can shoot at you, but mostly they exist to drop dumpsters full of soldiers to fight you on the ground. Whee. And whee AGAIN because there's another !*&(*&)! gunship coming after you and you get to fight it from the top of the LIGHTHOUSE and god fricken dammit by this point Gordon would take the Red fricken BARON as an opponent because those bug things just have a weird way of moving. Flying metallic monsterbeasts shouldn't bend and flex like that.

Fun fact: once you've killed the gunship, the last dropship decides not to reclaim its soldier dumpster. It steals your car instead. You don't get to fight it off, either; you have to stand there and watch the Gundam of Evil fly away with your car.

Yes. The oppressive space empire towed your car away. SO totally New Jersey. Too bad the Combine don't maintain an impound yard.

... anyway, from there it's a foot journey to the next section, which is all about the Doodlebugs from Hell. I saved and went home.

Comments

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

It still amuses me to think that maybe Alyx mentioned in passing that Dog's ball is a disabled mine. "Oh, don't worry, the explosive's been disarmed." "Okay, that's--wait, what explosive?!"

[lienne.livejournal.com]

*giggles*

Is "Gordon done got bitchez" comin' up?

[camwyn]

The next chapter might as well be entitled Gordon Freeman Versus the Landscape of Angry Bitchbugs, yep.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

*snicker*

[mattador.livejournal.com]

I'm loving this walkthrough, by the way- it's been a couple years since I watched my roomies play through this game, but it's aaaaall coming back to me now.

[adiva_calandia]

I love reading these. A lot. :D

I was also talking them up to BFF who just let me play a couple rooms of Portal on her computer -- particularly in the vein of "It's creepy to see your own name in death threat graffiti on the wall."

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of the cut scenes in Goldeneye 64. Don't like the fact that the bad guys are kidnapping your honey? If you rig it just right, you can blast the bad guys and they stumble to the ground, choke and die. Or your honey does. Whatever. Yay, violence!

[slarti.livejournal.com]

Oh, the crane. Did you get the OSHA Violation Achievement? The thing that amazed me the most with that part of the game is that the physics engine not only notices "oh. crane touching buggy, magnetism goes there" and "oh. crane touching shipping container, magnetism goes there", but also, "oh. crane touching buggy, buggy touching shipping container. magnetism goes there too." I got OSHA Violation entirely by accident, because I was trying to put the buggy down before using the crane and container on the Combine, but instead ended up snagging the container on the buggy and whipping it along into the Combine. So much splatter, and I was agape.

Also, I only survived the train thing by driving the buggy backwards until I heard the train coming, then jamming it into forward and turbo, so I could get back behind the parked one and let the moving one pass. After that, you can go without trouble.

[camwyn]

I hadn't realized the magnetism thing was transmitted or I might have tried that. I got the OSHA Violation achievement by starting to steer the crane, noticing the Combine were shooting at me, picking up a container, smacking the Combine around like "O Fortuna" or "Dies Irae" was playing on all the speakers, knocking the bridge into place, then moving the buggy.

I wound up driving towards the train until I heard the horn, then backing up in a hurry to get behind the parked train- I couldn't remember which Xbox control was for the handbrake, so I just went straight into REVERSE REVERSE REVERSE COME ON MUST GO FASTER MUST GO FASTER. On the PC last night, I turbo'd the whole forward drive and flung the buggy sideways the instant I was past the parked train. Just barely avoided a leech-intensive death there.

[camwyn]

When I play at daniidebrabant's place (it's my Xbox, but it's at her apartment, largely so that we have an excuse for the three of us to socialize over violence), I keep having to yell at sylveraven. "This is not Grand Theft Auto! I am not going to crowbar that guy to death just because he's there! ... No I'm not going to shoot Dr. Kleiner!" etc.

[camwyn]

Yeah, and I can't decide whether the Marines mangling the spelling back in game 1 made it more or less creepy.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Smashing in the scientist's skulls are for AFTER you defeat the level and are just playing around.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

These have inspired me to work on finishing the first batch of Half-Life games and consider picking up HL2. I don't know if you've done Blue Shift or Opposing Force, but they provide some interesting extras to the story. Blue Shift is the story of Barney Calhoun's exodus from Black Mesa, and it's a bit short. The highlights include passing Gordon in several spots. Barney's the guard banging on the door as Gordon's tram pulls into Level 3 at the beginning of HL, and the very end of Blue Shift has a short scene where Barney sees the two Marines dragging the unconscious Gordon down the hall prior to dumping him in the garbage compactor. He gets out by helping some of the scientists activate the prototype teleporter and setting it to teleport them outside of the complex. The final bit has Marines welding through the blast door as you wait for the teleporter to recharge the last time, making for a running gunfight that goes across a catwalk, down a ladder, and across the open room to the teleport gateway, as an increasing number of Marines fill the room. Good times.

I haven't finished Opposing Force, but Corporal Shepherd seems to be getting dicked around as badly as Gordon. Being told that his unit is bugging out, that things at Black Mesa have gone so badly that the Black Ops guys are showing up (The ninjas from HL are actually Black Ops operatives, and in Opposing Force, they're using a lot more than silenced pistols. Getting a rifle grenade in the face is an interesting visual.), Shepherd fights his way across the complex to the helipad and gets told to get down to the Osprey that's about to lift off. Hoofing it past a scientist being interrogated, you take him into the hangar and round a corner towards the exit ... just in time to see the hangar door close, with the G-Man watching you through the window. A definite "SON OF A BITCH" moment.

[camwyn]

I've considered grabbing them once or twice, although I admit I'm more interested in Blue Shift than Opposing Force. The stuff I've read about Race X just doesn't impress me all that much. Barney, on the other hand, is somebody that I actually like- and that was even before I started playing HL 2.

Gaaaah on Opposing Force, though. Poor Shepherd.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing I find, with OpFor, is that Shephard was, presumably, being sent in to do the same sort of silence-and-cleanup job that every other soldier that Gordon gunned down was... except due to circumstances, he never actually gets his proper orders, so he just kind of ends up being another good guy by default. Also, you occasionally get a couple of Marine buddies that you can boss around, either to heal you up (medic) or burn through sealed doors (engineer).

Oh, and that screw mentioned above? That's only maybe halfway through the game. Shephard gets even more screwed by the end of the game. A bit worse than Gordon, even, I think.

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

Oh, god, yes, Ant Lions. I'd repressed the fucking Ant Lions.

So very, very much hate for them.

[camwyn]

The next chapter is the one with the DON'T STEP ON THE SAND injunction in it. It's all antlions from here on out, baby.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm waiting for the other shoe. I just at the run the the sewer tunnels. Total darkness, night vision goggles, and alien spiders the size of Buicks that throw lightning. Good times.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

An addendum on Opposing Force that might make you want to at least watch the first part:

When Shepherd wakes up from the crash that starts OpFor, he's in a lab where some scientist has helpfully rescued him and his squad from the crashed Osprey. As this is prior to the Search and Destroy mission that Gordon encounters, the scientists are friendly. They inform you that there is a radio back at the crash site where you can get orders from command. As you walk through the area, it becomes quite clear that you're in the biology research area, and they're experimenting with headcrabs. One scientist is poking at a headcrab in a dog carrier ("These creatures are fascinating...."). The last thing you see before you get to the guard who lets you out (they introduce another character map for an overweight security guard that has a Yooper/Minnesotan accent; he's also in Blue Shift, but not as much) is a scientist, in an isolation lab, getting attacked by a headcrab zombie wearing Marine fatigues. So, yeah, Shepherd gets pretty much fucked from Day One.

[camwyn]

Hm. Might download the expansion packs when I get home, then. Steam has 'em for cheap.

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