New folks show up only as fast as you let the old ones die. Whenever NPCs are spawned dynamically, there are always four of them. (This seems to be a magic number for the game engine. Defending them is in fact my explicit goal: Barney has dragooned me into shuttling people from a safehouse to a waiting train, four at a time.
![half life 2 final boss half life 2 final boss](https://i.imgur.com/5qc0M6F.jpg)
This time around, though, it’s not just a regrettable happenstance. The latest quit-for-the-night scene for me is one of those scenes where people start following Gordon around and get massacred for their trust in my ability to defend them. I’ve mentioned before how the structure of Half-Life 2 makes me end most sessions in the middle of a difficult battle. There’s little motivation for game producers to tell people in advance that they shouldn’t bother buying their games. So the stated “minimum requirements” of the game, which would have it running on a fraction of the RAM I had beforehand, are a lie. Speaking of hardware modification, it turns out that I was right: all that I needed to pass the Point of Certain Crash in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 was a second gigabyte of RAM, which seems to cost about two cents per meg these days. And that’s Gordon’s life in a nutshell, isn’t it? Trains have been a major part of Half-Life all along, bringing Gordon to places he doesn’t want to be, literally railroading him. Being on a train isn’t completely necessary to the feeling, but it adds a lot to the sense that your course is beyond your control. The sense of doom can be surprisingly peaceful at these moments, because if there’s nothing you can do, there’s no need to react in any way. Dreams of near-escape, followed the realization that you’re doomed and powerless to do anything about it. Then the fireball (plasmaball? otherworldly-dimensional-energyball?) engulfs the places your train has just sped through - it’s sort of a “Yee-haw!” moment, staying just ahead of the wall of white in your wake, until you have the dismaying realization that you’re not going to make it. At least, it’s in the distance at first, as you see the ships flying out of the towering citadel just in time to escape and speeding off in all directions. The tripod is too large to follow you as you wend your way through the maze-like environs, but its weapons are strong enough to physically alter the environment in ways that must have taken a good deal of careful planning on the part of the designers.Īfter that, Gordon and Alyx set a train in motion, hop into the caboose, and watch the city explode noiselessly in the distance.
![half life 2 final boss half life 2 final boss](https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aOV9G2y_460s.jpg)
Half life 2 final boss full#
It turned out that I had only one major set-piece battle to go before the end of the episode, against a tripod in an enclosed area full of boxcars and other obstacles. Spoilers strut about boldly in the daylight ahead.