Half-Life 2, Part 11: BIG BADA BOOM
Jul. 15th, 2008 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynWhen last we saw our hero, he was carrying a Very Special Message from Barney Calhoun. I think Barney spoke for everyone at that point, really. With the possible exception of Dr. Kleiner; there's just something about Kleiner that feels like he's too wrapped up in Doing Science and Fixing Things and Learning New Things to get around to actually being angry. Yeah, he's terribly important in terms of the resistance and all, but you get the feeling that he'd probably be doing exactly the same stuff if the Combine had never invaded, only in a nicer facility and without the sense of urgency. Sometimes I wonder if he even really noticed things going on around him...
Anyway. That's Kleiner, and he's a looooong way away just now, or at least Gordon really hopes he is. Dog got him into the Citadel's outer perimeter. He's got to go the rest of the way himself. Not as easy as one might hope, given that the first thing he has to do is replicate his creep-along-the-wall, hoppity-jump action from the first game; the actual door into the Citadel proper's on the other side of a gap so freaking huge you sort of expect Gaston to go plummeting by, screaming about that damn Beast. There's a narrower point you can jump, you just have to get there- and not get knocked off the path by the one headcrab that's been lying in wait this whole time. I'd almost wonder if it were Lamarr, but since Lamarr shows up in the sequels as something other than a pile of yellowish mush, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's Lamarr's cousin Cecil or something.
Cecil's the last thing to actively try to kill you for a while. The pathway into the Citadel, once Gordon made the jumps, was unguarded. There is an excellent reason for this: there's jack squat going on down here. Seriously. The passage was windy and snakey and vaguely mazelike, but it was just there to provide a way in that caused Gordon to go 'huh, they have weird architects here', and possibly wish he could snap a picture or two for lileks.com's Interior Desecrators website. There's no computer banks, no doors, nothing alive... nothing but creepy architecture. There's not even STAIRS. There's nothing worth guarding at all... right up until you get to the part where Gordon has to be a moron.
The path, you see, ends at a spot where those creepy clankity pods that Gordon first saw in the G-Man vision and later encountered in person at Nova Prospekt are cruising by. There is literally nowhere else to go except either back or down, and sweet baby Azathoth there is a LOT of down from here. Since going back would involve the jumping puzzle again, and then if you somehow managed to get back up, trying to face down Dog the Combat Droid (hint: don't try), Gordon's a little stuck. The pods are about the only thing that seem capable of moving through here, and they're all dangling from overhead rails like the dry-cleaning from Hell. They stop every so often and their doors dangle open for a while. Then they keep moving. I assume this is a maintenance area, because otherwise the Combine have some very weird ideas about an efficient place to load up their captives. The part where there are two tracks for these dangly pods and one of them leads straight into UNSPEAKABLE SCORCHY ELECTRICAL FIRE before moving on sort of supports that theory. The other track leads... well, to borrow Dr. Venkman's phrase, "Up. They go up."
Now, let's review the situation. Gordon's inside the single most visible and blatant symbol of the Combine Empire's power on Earth. He's seen what happens when their soldiers get their heads blown off (the corpses only show bloodstains, but given the number of headshots he's used, I have to assume he's seen the inside of more than a few transhuman skulls by now). He knows perfectly well that the Combine have no qualms at all about doing horrible things to anybody they feel like. And he's seen them storing people in prison in these pods like something out of the Matrix.
AND THE GAME EXPECTS HIM TO GET INTO ONE OF THE OPEN PODS ANYWAY.
No. I'm sorry, no. He is not that stupid. Unless he has the crowbar in one hand and a primed grenade in the other, such that it'll explode the instant he lets go of it, I CANNOT accept Gordon being willing to take a chance on these things. He has no freaking CLUE where they go in the Citadel. Hell, for all he knows there's an incinerator involved! The game refuses to go any further until he climbs in and the door slams shut on him, but honestly, I couldn't justify it happening that way. I had to picture him waiting for the door to shut and then leaping up and clinging to the outside of the pod like a limpet.
Like a rapidly utterly terrified limpet who probably smells like he's been practicing his pitching arm within thirty seconds of his decision to climb on, because the pod immediately starts cruising through the Citadel, and the vast majority of places where it goes don't believe in individual floors. Gordon can see virtually all the way down wherever he goes; if he's clinging to the outside of the pod, I wouldn't be surprised if he started trying to evolve suckers on the spot. It'd certainly beat thinking too hard about some of the things he sees, like, for example, the fact that the Combine seem to be perfectly happy to chop off a human being's hands and feet and staple a sheet of metal to their face, then tell them 'walk over there and type on that computer terminal'.
Like the dropships being loaded up with more troopers to go and whale on your rebel buddies in the streets.
Like the parade of Striders making their way towards an appropriate point of departure.
Like the gunships hanging on the wall like kitchen equipment.
Like the razor train full of prisoners, pulling in from Nova Prospekt.
And like the fact that when his pod finally comes to a stop? They take all his weapons away.
Understand that by 'they' I mean the Combine in the generic sense. There is no one present when the voice announces that the confiscation field is being activated. Gordon just starts making unhappy flaily gestures as all his beautiful beautiful weapons float away from him and go paff! in midair as the Combine energy beams strike them. Even the crowbar... but not the gravity gun. Oh, no, most definitely not the gravity gun. No, that just absorbs the energy beams, turns shiny blue, and then drops to the floor...
Excuse me a moment. I'm grinnin' like a monkey.
Gordon, you understand, has no idea of what's just happened to the last of his well-beloved toys. Just that it's the only !*&)(& weapon he has left. It's never done him a damn bit of good against living targets before. It couldn't even move corpses. But when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, and when all you have is a shiny blue zero point energy field manipulator, everything looks like you can pick it up...
and now you can. Much to the Combine's dismay.
When the Combine soldiers came running down the next corridor, I sort of pictured Gordon pointing the gravity gun at them, turning his face away with a grimace, and blindly pulling the trigger. Imagine his surprise when he caught one of the Combine with it. That's right, kids, now Gordon can pick up his enemies and shake them like a British nanny! Or throw them across the room and into the wall! Or across the room and into their buddies! Or pick up their corpses and dance them around like the world's worst marionette show! It's as good as having the ability to choke somebody with the Force, only better, because it's fatal! And if he uses the other fire mode on the gravity gun he can zap people with the gun's energy. The zap mode used to break boxes and move cars. Now it breaks NECKS and moves CORPSES. Gordon done gots FORCE LIGHTNING! It's Sith-in-a-Bottle! Only better, because you don't have to go over to the dark side of the Force to use it!
I honestly and truly believe that Gordon spent the next several minutes trying not to cackle like a maniac with unholy glee. He'd just had a colossally bad day, after all, and he'd just had more than a few reasons to despair. Being asked to seesaw from 'I'm utterly doomed' to 'Hey, Vader, BITE MY SHINY ORANGE ASS' is more than anyone should be asked to accomplish without a good therapeutic cackle, I believe. Especially since there are telescreens scattered through the Citadel from here on out, and Breen makes his best attempt at talking Gordon into giving up... and the gravity gun is now capable of ripping his lying face off the wall and punting it into the endless void of DOWN. Unholy glee to the max, my friends.
There's a lot of yip-yap from Breen as Gordon proceeds through the Citadel, and a lot of fun new discoveries. Gordon can schworp those energy balls that show up all over the place right out of their energy streams and use them to incinerate Combine left, right, and center. He can turn off energy walls by pulling all the balls out of a given stream and throwing them into the Combine's faces. He can yank Combine through energy walls themselves and then throw them back at their comrades, which has got to be disheartening, assuming the soldiers have the capacity to be disheartened any more. I mean, seriously. When the enemy's weapon of choice is "That guy right behind me- AUGH", that can't be good for morale. Sucks to be Combine, but them's the breaks when you throw in your lot with the giant green space maggots of evil.
I won't relay Dr. Breen's speeches here, since he's kind of a windbag. There's five or six of them. There is, however, one that caught my attention, and it happens to be the shortest:
"Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can. You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing? I thought not."
That speech right there is the single most important reason for Gordon to have to have met the All-Knowing Vortigaunt early in the game. If Gordon's never heard what the AKV (or the other Vorts) have to say about him, that line is free to rankle and sting and throw off all Gordon's actions thereafter. Gordon- my Gordon, at least- tends to write off what humans say about him as heavily delusional, or at least the result of inflated opinion, so he doesn't have to take their opinions of his abilities into account. But the Vortigaunt in that dank little poison-smelling cave was a creature speaking neither from blind faith, nor from reputation grown huge by years of telling and retelling stories, but from knowing him and perceiving him directly. So my Gordon, who had met the All-Knowing Vortigaunt, was able to look at the telescreen and say exactly one undeniably true word:
"Hope."
And then, because he could, he ripped the telescreen off the wall and bounced it off the floor a couple of times. Jeez, the man's only human and Breen's a colossal sphincter.
From here there's not that much territory left. A couple of soldiers, a couple more fields, and the corridor big enough to hold a football game in. Gordon spent most of his time in that corridor with his back to the wall, hiding behind unused people pods, picking up charging Combine and throwing them violently into the opposite wall or each other. Same deal with the flying camera bots. It was fun. It was also only a warm-up, because behind the hordes and hordes of Combine? There was a Strider waiting.
Fortunately, Gordon had cranked his suit power up to 200 by this time (he got that capacity when the grav gun got zapped- yay) and had some empty people pods to hide behind, so the ensuing battle was a case of 'run out, grab an energy ball from the wall over there, run back, wait for the Strider to stop shooting for a moment, poik the ball at him, lather, rinse, repeat'. It took forever, as I'm not very good at aiming things with the gravity gun, but Gordon finally killed the Combine's giant spider. When Dr. Breen started ranting again from the giant telescreen at the end of the hall, Gordon picked up a Strider leg and chucked it at him before heading on his way.
Unfortunately, he shortly found out that he was, once again, in a situation where he couldn't climb or take an elevator to go any further. THIS time, I'm pretty sure he was willing to get into the pod- albeit with both hands wrapped so tightly around the gravity gun that they'd NEED his crowbar to get his fingers off. Lord knows he wasn't in any kind of mental state to cling to the outside of the pod again. The pod went further up this time, and he got to see a couple of new things; apparently the Combine have lobstrosities in their employ. (The game material calls them crab synths. They're friggin' lobstrosities. Ask anybody who's read the Dark Tower books what the lobstrosities look like. And then tell them what the Citadel looks like and wait for the twitching to start.) There's some other weird synths in the area, and there's windows, and there's... wow that's a really nice view of Newark and the river all the way below...
... oh, look. Another confiscation field. Joy.
And a Combine Elite to grab your grav gun before you can.
And frickin' Doctor Mossman telling you not to struggle as the pod gets wheeled into Dr. Breen's office. Thanks, lady. Thanks a lot.
Now, I have a tendency to listen a little too hard for links between one canon and another. I'm the first to admit that. But when the first thing Gordon overhears Dr. Breen saying is "...Carbon stars with ancient satellites, colonized by sentient fungi. Gas giants, inhabited by vast meteorological intelligences. Worlds, stretched thin and across the membranes where the dimensions intersect... Impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary.", I kind of HAVE to say that I'm hearing a link to the Mythos. The Mi-go qualify for sentient fungi, and the meteorological intelligences- well, Lovecraft referred to a sentient violet gas named S'ngac in several of his stories; it's not hard to make the connection there. Fun, neh?
Breen's saying this to Eli Vance, mind you. I guess he's trying to impress Vance into coming over to his side. It's not working, because Vance points out the whole 'um, hello, unspeakable evil and genocide' thing in return. This is where Mossman and Gordon arrive and the gravity gun gets stashed on Breen's desk (the guy doesn't seem to understand what it is, which is just fine with me), and Alyx gets wheeled in via pod herself. When Alyx refuses to assist Breen he threatens to send her and Eli to the other end of a Combine portal, which is Mossman's cue to argue for keeping Eli, at least, on Earth. Breen's answer amounts to "hahahaNO- oh, hey, Freeman, they follow you, don't they? how about it, Freeman, wanna be my puppet instead of your current boss's?"
I like to think that, for all that he was clamped into a pod and effectively immobilized, Gordon was too furious to speak aloud at that point and instead flipped Breen the bird.
Not that it matters, because by that point Mossman was over by the control panels on Breen's desk, and she had Alyx's sonic screwdriver. OH HAI SURPRIES TRIPLE-CROSS. She's on the good guys' side after all, which pisses Breen off to the degree that he tries to use the gravity gun and nearly blows up the office in the process. At least everybody's free when the smoke clears, right? Right? ... well, unfortunately, Breen's on his way to the portal he was planning on chucking Alyx and Eli into. Guess who's got to stop him? Hint: It's not the old guy with the prosthetic leg.
Gordon and Alyx trot off to catch up with Breen, briefly surprising him talking to one of the maggot monsters on a humongous telescreen in his office. If you ever wanted to hear Robert "I Spy" Culp saying "Oh shit" in a really disgusted voice, this is your chance. If not, that's okay too, because Breen proceeds to run like a bunny and drops the gravity gun in the process. YAY YOU HAVE THE FORCE BACK. You're gonna need it; Gordon has to play jumpity-splat games to beat Breen to the very top of the Citadel before their portal opens and Breen goes through. Thankfully it's nowhere near as bad as the jumpity-splat games he had to play to get to the Black Mesa reactor, but the whirling equipment he has to ride and get off at the appropriate instants may have triggered a few flashbacks.
On the other hand, he's playing jumpity-splat as Combine are shooting at him, which is at least somewhat distracting. The fact that he has to yoink energy balls out of place to make any progress might be a little therapeutic too, since they mean he gets to zorch Combine as sacrificial lambs for good luck before making the really critical jumps. He has to ignore Breen mocking him the whole way, too. I'm not sure what Breen thought he was accomplishing like that. All that kind of thing does is make Gordon angry, and when Gordon Freeman gets angry, everybody in front of him dies.
At the very, very top, there's reactor stuff (apparently the Combine reactor runs on 'dark energy', which is why you now have Force Lightning and Force Choke- whatever, I don't care). There's a big-ass portal forming. There's Breen in a bubble of space that's supposed to be teleported through the portal once it reaches the right condition. And there are four gunships. Theoretically you can shoot the gunships down using the energy balls from the reactor streams, but my Gordon had his suit and his health at full charge by the time he got to the top, and considered stopping Breen from bringing the rest of the Combine down on their heads more important than not dying. He ignored the gunships shooting at him and devoted all his attention to blowing the snot out of Breen's transportation arrangement with the energy balls, which proved to be the right decision in the end; for all that he was bleeding from every major and most minor orifices by the time he was done, he blew Breen's travel arrangements to kingdom come. WITHOUT, I might add, using any cheat codes this time.
And then- because this is Half-Life, and while Baby Jesus doesn't love Gordon, somebody else does- the G-Man showed up. I think I might just let him speak for himself this time.
... ya-HUH.
Son of a WHORE. Son of a sheep-shagging, syphilitic, toothless WHORE.
I don't like to think how frustrating this must have been for people who bought the game when it first came out. I mean, I had the Orange Box and it was STILL frustrating as hell! But... there you are; that's what happens at the end of Half-Life 2. Needless to say, I'll be launching into Episode 1 as soon as possible, because that's just a BAD way to end a game if you don't want gamers to come to your house and hit you with sticks...
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Date: 2008-07-17 01:44 pm (UTC).... not that I didn't start last night anyway.