this kind of thing has saved my life so many times, please keep doing it! also I get a little excited when someone replies to an old post.
!remindme 12years
There’s (kinda) an xkcd for that https://xkcd.com/979
I used to hate when this happened to me. Someone reviving a post from ages ago to answer a question that I already found months/years ago.
But hey, it could help someone else in the future if I didn’t go back and post the answer to my own question (spoiler alert: I didn’t) so now I just do what OP does and thank them for their time, move on with my day. Chuckle at the stupidity of my youth.
Some people get angry about things like that. Just be chill, they probably didn’t notice how long ago it was posted.
Yes, many forum troglodites have this heinous reaction. Many of them are incompetent forum moderators. They are upset because they have notification of all changes happenning on the forum but this isn’t novel and interesting to them personnally so they attack it with words like “necroposting”. Those mostly recycled bbs people with almost no life left in them or OCD people who must compulsively complete and categorize everything and are upset when something is added to something they believed completed. Eventually we will rid our information ecosystem of these, at best, overzealous users or at least marginalize them so they stop causing damage, cutting connections, creating deadends and stopping progress generally. It’s like I always say, progress occurs one funeral at a time.
I still occasionally get replies on reddit from threads that are over a decade old. I used to use reddit a lot, but that has dropped to almost nothing after switching to Lemmy.
I’ve gotten that here, which is incredibly surprising because search on Lemmy kinda sucks. I haven’t been here a decade, but I did get some replies from a year old comment I made.
I think it was just a few years ago they changed it to make that even possible
Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I thought it used to be possible, then for a number of years they started “archiving” posts and not allowing interaction, then they changed it back.
hm, yeah probably, I’m just not remembering when it was initially possible
I checked Reddit last month for the first time since June of 2023 and had 4 notifications. 3 of them were about buying into Reddit’s fucking shitass IPO. I guess people just aren’t interested in my half-life hot takes :(
What, like Blue Shift > Opposing Force or HL1 > HL2? Or lore-related stuff?
Uhh yes. Oh boy, an invitation to ramble!
Tap for spoiler
Personally, while I don’t hate either of the Gearbox games, I don’t think they deserve to be on the same pedestal as the Valve games, either. BS is so short and does so little worldbuilding that it’s like one step up from Lost Coast in terms of replayability. I’ve only felt the need to replay it once, and that was like a decade after my first run (I run through the mainline HL games almost every year). And it’s a huge stretch for OF to be considered canon. While it definitely goes further than BS in trying to impart interesting details, mostly it seems to recycle beats from the original game, and the parts it adds on don’t have a consistent tone. I also strongly dislike how the game tries to whitewash the military. Plus it doesn’t seem like Valve was a fan either; in HL2, the way Mossman describes teleportation working for either the humans or the Combine doesn’t fit with the existence of Race X, the headcrab life cycle is completely retconned, and not one element of that game has ever resurfaced, not a single easter egg among all the Xen fauna throughout HLA. Maybe the Xen grenades could be a reference to the OF alien grenade launcher if you really want to push it? I mean Laidlaw has even said he didn’t consider the Gearbox games when writing HL2.
As for HL1 vs HL2… I dunno, they’re very different games. HL2 obviously wins in terms of narrative storytelling, but I totally see the argument when people say that HL1’s gameplay is more fun. On the other hand, I also think HL2’s more restrained weapon design came about because Valve was being more careful about crafting enemy encounters. Like in HL1 you get weapons like the Tau cannon which are super cool but Valve don’t seem to have thought the ammo placement through very well. It’s so rare that you get used to not using it unless all your other guns are out of ammo, which is also rare, even on hard mode. The Black Mesa fan project did a much better job of showcasing those lategame weapons (at least, unless you’re a fan of Tau jumping).
Edit, actual hot takes: HLA was extremely average, even among VR games; the only standout it has is looking pretty. The boat and car in HL2 aren’t bad. More lukewarm but Breen as a character is a fully selfish, evil prick and only uses “saving humanity” to justify himself to others, he doesn’t believe it at all.
Ah jeez I’m gonna stop. Feel no obligation to read any of that. But yeah I used to post about all kinds of half life stuff. Once I wound up permabanned from okbuddyhalflife when I argued that valve popularized lootboxes and gaben was not a good billionaire
I agree with all your opinions except I would give more credit to HLA as a first timer’s VR experience.
I feel that excuse only goes so far. It’s funny; the original Half Life was my first PC shooter experience, and Alyx was my first VR experience, but HL1 manages to be engaging for me even now while Alyx already feels stale. Like, I get the decision to dumb the movement way down for VR first timers who might get motion sick, but it goes way too far and offers vanishingly few options for people who might want more immersive physics. Or, like, a sprint button. Apparently I have naturally strong VR legs, but jeez, it bothered me even on my first time with a headset
Other things should still have had more room to expand as the game runs on, too. There’s so little weapon variety and even among what it does have, the SMG and pistol fill almost the same niche. Apparently they made the AI painfully bad on purpose, but why couldn’t they have saved a more engaging combat experience for the endgame or higher difficulties? And the constant orb puzzles they used to replace the traditional physics based ones get incredibly repetitive, especially when replaying the game.
It fails to iterate on the mechanics it introduces in meaningful ways, instead choosing to introduce new things that are entirely self contained (i.e., the Jeff sequence and the final level’s vortigaunt blasts). Like, Jeff was super memorable, but part of the reason for that is he breaks up some seriously repetitive gameplay, and nothing about that level is ever relevant again.
Plus I have other gripes about sound design, physics (especially for heavy objects), even the way fall damage is handled. And the way it retcons Ep2 feels cheap to me. Idk. The game was ultimately fun, but flawed far beyond what I think can be said of the earlier games. Obviously I’m biased, but I wound up having more fun with HL2VR than Alyx.
That makes sense to me. I think 1 vs 2 comes down to personal preference, they both excel in different ways. I prefer the focused gameplay loop of 1, but I can imagine how groundbreaking the NPCs and the physics of the boat and car sections were back in the day. My main gripe with BM’s weapon balancing is limiting machine gun grenades to three, but I understand that ten was overkill and fed into my “I’ll save five in case I really need them” hoarder mentality lol.
Wild that you got banned for saying that given TF2 pioneered the practice.
Yeah it feels like BM picked 3 because that’s what HL2 did, but to be fair there needed to be fewer than 10 because each individual grenade was way more powerful than in the original. At least HL2 didn’t go as far in reducing weapon variety as HLA!
Also I edited in some actual hot takes into my original post.
Yeah okbh was a meme comm and I guess its mods were equally unserious. Not like I got banned for making a non-meme post, mine was the only viewpoint in that thread that got deleted so I guess they just didn’t like what I was saying lol
People say Breen is sympathetic? That’s more of a hot take to me lol. He’s actively helping them destroy the human race (suppression field/other war crimes).
And I like the boat/car sections, I just love HL1 and how it mixes gunfights and platforming challenges. The only part of 2 that hit that high for me was the underside of the bridge, which is an inspired sequence in an already brilliant game. They both deserve the praise they get and will go down as some of the best games of all time.
I suppose my hottest take is that I refuse to believe in anything HL3, even if they announce it, until it’s actually released. I thought for sure that Alyx meant it was around the corner and it’s been five years… at this point I think it will never happen (I’d love to be wrong though).
9 years later: You’re welcome!
LoCk StAlE ToPiCs bEcAuSe ThEy’Re OlD
Ban users for “necroposting”.
I never understood that tbh
Because they hang out in the “sort by new” looking for novelty but get upset when non-novel discussions happen. They get tired of seeing them so they kill and lock them. Especially discussion that lean against their values.
Necroposting should be eradicated from the vocabulary. I search for people who use that word and bully them mercilessly. The idea that you can’t continue a conversation from 1992 by people who are all dead is ludicrous. The gatekeepers of our information ecosystem are incompetent troglodytes by and large unfit to manage their own underwear, let alone the great archive of the public square.
I sometimes do the same.
Pretty cool but not really my jam
“Songs To Do Nitrous To”
(Also RO might be my favorite game experience I’ve ever had in my life. It got me through school alive and I still listen to the excellent soundtrack when I’m working sometimes.)
Always great to meet another RO fan in the wild!
If you want a small bit of nostalgia, give the “Ragnarok ROO” (Ragnarok Origins) app a try. It’s not the same, but it’s similar enough that it grabbed my attention for about a year and I had some fun experiences on there without spending a single cent (though if you’re susceptible to IAPs, I wouldn’t go near a gacha game like that).
I probably have more time in RO back in the day than any other game I’ve ever played! I played on Chaos and Sakray mostly, maybe 2-3k hours of just wearing hats and chatting with friends outside of Prontera or in Payon (RIP Old Payon.) So many fond memories!
I’ll take a peek at that!
RIP old Payon!
I wasn’t much of a chatter, but I was on Chaos as well. Most of my later days were spent leveling my monk in Glast Heim while listening to Gorillaz Demon Days on Winamp. Good times
Almost penpals by now
Lostwave has entered the chat
deleted by creator
Reminder: Be sure to flair it as “Solved”!
