The channel wakes up and smells the ashes thanks to the Patrons! - https://patreon.com/IFinishedAVideoGame Use code CROWBAR for 50% off your first month! TWITCH - https://www.twitch.tv/ifinishedavideogame DISCORD - https://discord.gg/EvApzbyBsT ===== There are few games that loom as large as Valve's Half Life 2 - a revolutionary first person shooter that rebooted it's genre and laid the groundwork for Steam to take over the world. It's a tale that has been told countless times already - but do we really know the full story? Today we're going to try answer a simple question - Is Half Life 2 the masterpiece it is constantly described as or was it a piece of video game madness? It's a journey that is going to take us through it's absurd development, require us to reassess it's strengths and weaknesses, honestly investigate it's launch and sales numbers - before we unpick it's strange episodic ending and work out why it went away forever... It's part critique, part retrospective, part review and part history lesson - obviously full of spoilers and obviously full of my opinions ===== Credit for the fantastic thumbnail goes to the visionary - https://x.com/HotCyder Additional editing in chapters 1 2 3 9 and 11 came courtesy of Liam! All media in this video is used for the purpose of review, commentary or criticism and is defined as fair use under US Copyright law. Source and Bibliography will be added shortly === Chapters === 00:00:00 – Wake Up and Smell the Ashes 00:04:07 – Everything Possible Goes Wrong 00:18:16 – Somehow Everything Got Even Worse 00:30:23 – Welcome to City 17 00:44:51 – Is This Even A Sequel? 01:01:16 – Beautiful Structural Incoherence 01:17:11 – Where Gordon Goes Wrong 01:27:10 – An Ending That Doesn't End 01:37:01 – The Forgotten Middle Years 01:50:53 – Return to Castle Combine 02:03:20 – Agent Orange Box 02:12:29 – A Portal Storm in a Teacup 02:28:51 – More Than Just A Cliff-hanger 02:42:09 – The Truth About Half Life 2 === #halflife2 #valve #Retrospective
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My day is saved!
My grandmother passed away today. It’s been hectic trying to figure out funeral and travel plans and I need a good distraction so this is perfect timing. Thank you so much for everything you do.
You should do the Deus Ex series next!
Bro 100k views in 17 hours congrats. Nothing better than HL2. Here's to your Half Life 3 retrospective on my 70th birthday
How is it possible a single man has made more Half-Life related content in the last few months than Valve has in over 20 years?! Absolute insanity and bro is an absolute legend for doing it!
You are a gem of a creator.
the Steam gambit sure was insane and paid off
About the ramps and weights puzzles: If you didn't play it back then you probably won't understand how fuggin impressed we all were with that. It felt like magic to see physics like that in a game. So I never got tired of it even after 10 replays.
I feel like you have taken over the reins of the recently retired video game Historian, Glad to see this video come out!
You have one of the best videogame channels on YouTube. Great work!
I always felt like the clumsiness and sometimes awkward ways you were given information was really cementing the idea that Gordon is being thrown into things by the G-Man. He’s made clueless by being thrown back into the fight after what he had just been through and now has to view the events unfolding before him almost as a bystander at points.
Again my man here makes a banger masterpiece of a retrospective…this is one of my favorite games and you were still able to shine new light on it for me. The wait was well worth it, well done sir!
Rise and shine, Mister Freeman.
I have woken up and smelled the ashes! Thank you for what is certain to be yet another banger of a retrospective!
This is my favourite channel on YouTube right now. Was literally re watching the alpha protocol video earlier so this is great timing
Its amazing how Half-Life 2 went on to change SO much. How people built upon the engine, made their own games, mods. Much like Half-Life 1 but with 2 and the better engine, it got even BIGGER. It went further beyond, its so impressive and amazing how this single game inspired so many people. And still do to this day!
This video made me as sad as I thought it would..and I loved every minute of it as usual.
1:40:54 Um, Battlefield 2 was no slouch back in 2004 graphically. Not as much as HL2, but it held its own. I went to a PC Gaming Cafe just to play BF2.
I have no idea how I missed your previous Half-Life video; I swear I didn't get an notification until THIS video popped up. Anyway, marathoning these two should make my weekend OT more bearable. Like death and taxes, sequels to profitiable new IPs are something we can't escape from, but we can at least hope that they'll lead to something better. That said, my fingers have been crossed for Half-Life 3 so long that they're basically a caduceus now. While I certainly enjoyed Half-Life 2's gameplay, presentation and story when I first played it decades ago, I still remember it more by its technical achievements than the game itself. Gaming magazines like Maximum PC lauded its groundbreaking usage of Direct X9, with one of its examples being their usage of shaders that ensured that water along shorelines appeared seamlessly transparent, rather than the stark polygonal outlines we'd seen in nearly every 3D game up to that point (the latter being a problem that persisted in AAA games as late as Skyrim). I also remember the game running far smoother than World of Warcraft (which released the same year), as I was able to finish HL2 on a somewhat budget PC, but WOW forced me to build a gaming PC. Looking back, HL2 achieved a feat PC games rarely accomplished: presenting something that technically appeared far ahead of its time, but performed admirably on hardware well before its time. Man, I totally forgot about the wild legal battles between Vivendi and Valve (and probably didn't understand it all too well back then). Considering what I know now about corporate America, having internal memos outright stating orders to destroy records is unfathomably reckless; anyone who's suffered through corporate compliance training knows this. And it's even more baffling that Vivendi thought a mere Korean language barrier would be enough to shield them; considering that they were based in Los Angeles (a region that is home to one of the largest Asian populations outside of Asia itself) they really should have known better. Furthermore, Valve is based in Washington, which has a solid Asian population of its own. Altogether, the odds of a Korean speaker being present between the two companies (or available for legal counsel) was _incredibly_ high. Valve managed to dodge a bullet simply because Vivendi held the gun backwards.
1:14:13 don’t laugh