Yes, to be fair, although Quake 2 had the best AI we'd seen to date, it was a marginal improvement over what had come before, and when Half-Life came out, the bar had been raised to a whole new level.
Someone noticed that I hadn't said anything bad about HL2. I'm trying harder than I used to to avoid dissing on games - it's kind of lame for somebody in the industry to dis on other people's games in a public forum, for one thing, and it's too easy, for another. Get a couple game geeks together talking about a game and the first thing they start pointing out are its flaws. We just can't help ourselves.
But, in the case of Half Life 2, I think it's even more approriate to point out it's flaws to counter balance the way out of proportion un-critical praise. The first 2/3 of Half Life 2 is not as good gamewise as Half Life 1. Unlike HL1, You don't really engage with and play along with any other characters in HL2 until 2/3s of the way through the game.
It's also massively linear, the story makes no sense, the writing is poor (example: character that has just heard about cat getting mangled in teleporter happily gets in herself while dad looks on unconcerned. Yea, right) That's just one of many. Is it a good game? yes! Does it deserve zero critism and glowing praise? No.
Good parts. Texturing, Art, Sound, Animation system, Atmosphere, Immersiveness, Variety, Gravity Gun, Ants, ...
Bad Parts: Story, Linearness, Level Design, Character Animation (animation system is great, actual, animation is not), Load times, Validation (it takes me 3-5 minutes to get the game started each time I want to play), Effects, ...
Posted by: greggman | January 06, 2005 at 02:08 AM
I don't think it's wrong to talk about things you don't like about a game, but I think it's respectful to be as precise as possible about what you don't like.
For example, though it's quite rude to pick on the poster above me, I don't think vague comments like "The first 2/3 of Half Life 2 is not as good gamewise as Half Life 1." and "the story makes no sense" and "character animation" is "bad" are particularly insightful criticisms.
But if you've got a specific issue with a game and want to use it as a learning example/etc then I think it's fair game to point it out, and furthermore I think, certainly, if it was something I'd made, I'd have total respect for you for doing that.
Posted by: SpiderMonkey | January 06, 2005 at 02:57 AM
I agree with Spidermonkey. Just saying X is bad is not useful which is why I gave specific examples of why the story is bad, why the first 2/3rd of HL2 are not as good gameplay wise as HL1. I didn't give examples of why the animation is bad but that would required actually posting AVIs of good vs bad animation.
There are more details here
http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2004-12-04.htm
Posted by: greggman | January 07, 2005 at 01:43 AM
Guess I was being a bit cheeky with some of my criticism of your criticisms. I guess I felt more that the ones you provided "examples" for weren't really examples that justified the complaint. But that's a different issue altogether and we aren't here to discuss HL2, so my bad.
Posted by: SpiderMonkey | January 08, 2005 at 01:57 PM