Favourite chapter!

[99.vikram]

Exit 17, because of the final explosion. That will stay in my mind forever.

Then Urban Flight, for the setting of the chapter.

 

[Adabiviak]

I'll take "Direct Intervention" for 100. I liked exploring the ruined citadel, like a futuristic haunted house. Getting through the energy ball channels was pretty fun. Did you grab them with the gravity gun or dodge them with sprint?

 

[Ennui]

Exit 17 because the end sequence was so amazingly epic.

 

[BigBoss7556]

I really liked the hospital part in urban flight as well as lowlife because of zombies(especially zombines) and flares. The end of exit 17 was the best part though.

 

[Hypnosos]

Undue Alarm. A great start to a great game.

 

[kupocake]

1. Undue Alarm. The first section was really the only part of the game to feature the kind of in-depth drama scenes we got in Half-Life 2, and Dog's way of getting the Player into the Citadel was just one of those flashes of ingenuity that Valve's games are full of. Seeing that citadel breaking down was just awesome, that swirly sky-box was great and the battles inside the citadel were all good fun. This level dripped with the kind of tension that I felt in Route Kanal / Water Hazard and I just lapped it up.

2. Urban Flight. Not necessarily anything new, but a hell of a lot of familiar stuff turned all the way up to 11. That Gunship battle was inspirational, the Hospital was truely like a trip down Nova Prospekt and emerging from the subway was classy, Kliener's speech was by turns hilarious and then deeply scary. Just listen to him whilst looking across to the distant Citadel... that's some scary stuff! The more you linger, the more you think you should get going, however, that's kind of the one major weakness of this chapter, and I had hoped that Valve could pull off something a little more tense. As it was, the Citadel's imminent explosion still felt like it was only going to happen once you walked through this invisible trigger...

I would kill for a mod that added a timelimit to the game and actually triggered the Citadel's explosion, thus ending your game if you haven't kept tight time-keeping.

3. Direct Intervention. With the tension high as the atmospheric reality of the Citadel on its last legs is shown so well, this chapter is the major turning point for the Half-Life saga to me. It kick-starts the action of the episode and beyond through what Alyx finds. The core room was amazing, some wonderful effects in there. Sadly, whilst it moves the story forward, I didn't feel it did nearly enough for the gameplay. Stalkers were a bit disappointing.

4. I'm in two minds about Exit 17. Short of giving us a clever way of killing the Strider, I think that has to be the best Strider battle I've played through. The Ending was - lets be honest - approximately Twenty-Nine different types of awesome. What impressed me that much more was that, not only did we see the Citadel explode in an awe-inspiring way, but you actually experienced the train-ride and it showed us the Half-Life 2 opening that we always wanted to see (though in reverse and at the end of the City's existence!) - the City 17 Perimeter, the wastelands etc. BUT, the Citizen escorting sequence was long, and it felt lazy and uninspired. The encounters were repeatative with too many duplicated Combine positions. It wasn't hard or anything, but it just dragged and I was worrying that nothing interesting was going to happen...

5. Lowlife. Wonderfully put together, atmospheric, love the Gordon/Alyx interaction, but at the end of the day, a Zombie chapter is a Zombie chapter. Also, the Antlion "invasion" seemed so minor, and the "block the holes" gameplay was just something that sounded good when I heard about it.

 

[Black Op]

For the moment, I really can't identify what my favorite chapter of Episode 1 is. The moments that stuck out for me though include that final Lowlife battle in the dark, the Kleinercast (I always payed attention to those Breencasts and appreciated how they were basically parodied), the big hospital battle where you just blaze through with a shotgun, and the final Citadel explosion scene. The Citadel scenes were basically repeats of the HL2 scenes gameplay-wise IMHO and I wished that the Stalkers would move around more, but the visual feel of the Citadel chapters were absolutely great. I thought having to constantly plug Antlion holes in all Antlion battles was repeative and I would have liked more Antlion confrontations that didn't include this element. I thought the escorting portion of Exit 17 dragged on for too long and could have been condensed in favor of scenes like the final Strider fight.

 

[Asknoone]

BUT, the Citizen escorting sequence was long, and it felt lazy and uninspired. The encounters were repeatative with too many duplicated Combine positions. It wasn't hard or anything, but it just dragged and I was worrying that nothing interesting was going to happen...

Really Kupo? I thought it was fun.

 

[Defpotec22]

I run out of shotgun ammo on Lowlife.

I don't run out of shotgun ammo on Urban Flight.

Urban Flight gets my vote.

Lowlife gets my vote for longer lasting batteries.

 

[kupocake]

Really Kupo? I thought it was fun.

What exactly did you find fun about it? You know I dislike repetition in all its forms It would have been ok, but Valve's enemy placement was off. 20 waves of Combine soldiers rappelling from the rooftops in an identical way each time is far less variety than i've come to expect from Valve. The whole chapter felt like it got the Halo-treatment in order to put more effort into the closing sequence. In fact as I walked up to the door after the very first, I knew "aww shit, I want to go out there and get to the GOOD bit!"

Plus the whole sequence was hardly difficult, and the repeated runs were just for the sake of wasting time. There was no logical reason for not sending all the citizens across at once, or even for having the player escort them. They were too damned good at protecting themselves anyway!

 

[UltimaApocalypse]

Yes, that section had to be my least favorite. It was just back, and forth. 3 times. Has to be the most uncreative thing Valve's done.

 

[kupocake]

It feels even weaker because you're spending too much time with the old-AI which hasn't been tweaked in the slightest. You feel like you and Alyx are babysitting the Resistance not because they're vulnerable and poorly armed, but because their thinking is broken and they're just plain stupid. It's an immersion breaker.

 

[99.vikram]

But if everybody had an alyx level AI, it would chew up memory.

 

[bigburpco]

I think it would be better if they were all unarmed. Then ah... that's better.

 

[Black Mesa corp]

What exactly did you find fun about it? You know I dislike repetition in all its forms It would have been ok, but Valve's enemy placement was off. 20 waves of Combine soldiers rappelling from the rooftops in an identical way each time is far less variety than i've come to expect from Valve. The whole chapter felt like it got the Halo-treatment in order to put more effort into the closing sequence. In fact as I walked up to the door after the very first, I knew "aww shit, I want to go out there and get to the GOOD bit!"

Plus the whole sequence was hardly difficult, and the repeated runs were just for the sake of wasting time. There was no logical reason for not sending all the citizens across at once, or even for having the player escort them. They were too damned good at protecting themselves anyway!

Gordon escorted the citizens in small groups because logically, if all the citizens came at once, then they could all die at once. If they were ambushed by a gunship or combine vehicles etc they would all easily get wiped out. It's logical escorting the citizens in small groups, to drop the risk of lots dying at the same time.

However, I disagree about the scene being repetitive. Apart from the fact you got to take out a whole load of different combine enemys with all variety of weapons and styles, the atmosphere of the combines desperation to get Gordon and Alyx was successfully showcased and put across.

Each time you passed through the area to get citizens, the immediate environment was changed to play across differently and force you to think about your actions in a new way, to take out a new enemy. Nothing was repetitive in this nature.

 

[kupocake]

The fact is that you ran between Point A to Point B to Point A to Point B to Point A to Point B to Point A to Point B. This is repetition. You also don't address the fact that though there are a handful of developments to chop it up (The sniper, the manhacks, the APC, the Elite knocking the train down) The combine are STILL coming out of the same holes, rooftops and windows every time. The enemy placement was dull. Enemy placement in the Half-Life games is its trump-card.

 

[Cpl_Facehugger]

I don't know... I absolutely loved Undue Alarm. Finding out what happened to Gordon and Alyx... seeing Dog dig you out of the rubble and Alyx leap over and hug you was amazing. That alone made the game worth the money I spend on it.

Urban Flight was my second favorite. It just had so much that was interesting. From Alyx covering you with a rifle to meeting up with Barney to a tough gunship battle... it was just so intense.

After that comes Direct Intervention. The core was one of the more interesting moments in the game, and it had many juicy plot points. (Very important to me since the whole reason I bought the game was for the plot. )

Next comes Exit 17. It was fun for the most part, and the ending was very good (especially the Combine Diaspora,) but I felt that the lack of an interesting physics-based way to kill the Strider, and the repetitive escort the citizens objectives got on my nerves after the second batch.

Finally comes Lowlife. I liked it (as I liked all the game,) but besides a bunch of Alyx and Gordon interactions, there wasn't much that held my interest compared to the other chapters. I think it's because Zombies are just not as fun to fight as Combine troops. Mind you, the Zombines are better in this regard, but they still fall compared to normal Combine troops.

 

[Asknoone]

What exactly did you find fun about it? You know I dislike repetition in all its forms It would have been ok, but Valve's enemy placement was off. 20 waves of Combine soldiers rappelling from the rooftops in an identical way each time is far less variety than i've come to expect from Valve. The whole chapter felt like it got the Halo-treatment in order to put more effort into the closing sequence. In fact as I walked up to the door after the very first, I knew "aww shit, I want to go out there and get to the GOOD bit!"

Plus the whole sequence was hardly difficult, and the repeated runs were just for the sake of wasting time. There was no logical reason for not sending all the citizens across at once, or even for having the player escort them. They were too damned good at protecting themselves anyway!

It was just a tiny bit of repetition.
It made sense, because Barney was expecting attacks. I thought it was fun because I wanted the citizens to make it. I wanted to get them out - I knew what was about to happen, and I'm not one for goodbyes. In the final stretch I had the citizens jump down and move towards Alyx, and then all I heard was gunfire and that familiar, smile provoking voice - "Gordon!"

"Barney!"

So I came rushing, gunned down the soldiers and looked at Barney. "That's my Gordon!"

Pure awesome. And besides, I loved seeing that parking lot - the whole thing, visually, was superb.

 

[xombine]

Well it seems that I'm in the minority of people who liked Lowlife the most.

 

[Shippi]

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