I figure this might be a helpful thread. I don’t mean the obvious FPS stuff like ‘shoot the exploding barrels’ and ‘look for ducts’. But how about these:
To get around barnacles without wasting ammo, pick up an item and walk into the dangling tongue. As long as you’re holding the item in front of you, the barnacle will grab it. While the barnacle is reeling it in, waltz on by. I haven’t tried it with little items, but it works great with tires and barrels.
Turn on the Quick Info option, which puts a health and ammo bar on the edges of your reticle. Very helpful.
When the air boat runs over a crate, you get the powerup inside. So make sure to veer over towards the floating supply crates as your racing down the canal.
If you line up the zombies just right, saw blades are great for two-fers or even three-fers.
I’d be interested in a list of G-Man sightings, since I’ve seen a few on my second play-through that I missed the first time around. But that might be too spoilerish.
How high can you go? I put the little doll on the lowered end of the see-saw and dropped various things on the raised end to catapult the doll into the air. I had the best results with a wel-aimed cinder block. Does this sort of frippery actually count as “playing” Half-Life 2?
I’m sure everyone already knows this, but you can also just ride up and kill the barnacles with a single hit of the crowbar (saving ammo), same as in HL1. Unless they are really high up of course, then you take damage when falling.
Tom- just started playing, well more like looking around cuz I have to split in a couple of minutes. Sadly, I was sidetracked doing the same exact thing.
I was actually thinking about dragging over some boxes or something and jumping off of them onto the see saw.
Is it playing- absolutely. This is what playing is all about.
If I want diorama after diorama then I’ll go to Disney World.
You know, I’ve been seriously thinking that someone should build a competitive monitor-launching mod into HL2. You know, grab the gravity gun and fire a computer monitor off a building, you get scored based on how far away it came to rest and how many pieces it smashed into.
I’ve only seen one so far. Spoilar: When you are driving Frank Herbert’s Dune Buggy, there’s a station with a telescope that you stop at; the telescope is spying on the human outpost that you get to way later in the level. When the telescope pans to the left, the g-man is talking to a guy in the upper level of a barn; when it pans back to the right they are both gone.
Okay this one is pretty obvious but for completeness, near the beginning of Nova Prospekt you see the G-Man straightening his tie on one of the video cameras.
I spotted him in the waterboat section where you blow up the chopper. When I was up by the chopper maintenance building I saw him walking on the concrete berm near the gate that you have to open. He was actually fairly close, so I ran after him, but in the few seconds it took me to get there, he was gone.
I also saw him in the trainyard after Ravenholme. If you go clear to the end where there’s a traincar blocking the way, you can crouch and see through on the left-hand side. I saw him walking away from me down the tracks.
I saw him a couple of times more near the beginning of the game, too, but I don’t remember where.
I’ve only seen the G-Man once outside of the intro sequence. It was after beating the chopper in the hoverboat where you open the gate and go into the next area. He was standing over by the dam controls.
He was actually fairly close, so I ran after him, but in the few seconds it took me to get there, he was gone.
You pretty much expect he’s not going to be there when you turn the corner. So wouldn’t it be double-awesome if Valve actually had a hidden Gordon/G-Man conversation if you were alert enough to catch up with him? Maybe in Half-Life 3…
While we were watching one of the guys at Shoot Club play last night, he found the missing block for the tic-tac-toe set on the playground! We didn’t get a chance to go back and try to put it in place, but you’d think that’s the sort of thing that would unlock an easter egg.
Similarly, Supertanker and I were talking about trying to get Dog’s “ball”, that inert roller-mine, through the basketball hoop. System Shock 2 has conditioned us to expect an easter egg there, but I don’t think either of us could make the shot. You know, being the dorky white boys that we are.
While we were watching one of the guys at Shoot Club play last night, he found the missing block for the tic-tac-toe set on the playground! We didn’t get a chance to go back and try to put it in place, but you’d think that’s the sort of thing that would unlock an easter egg.
I found that. It didn’t occur to me to try and put it back. Not sure I even knew how to pick things up at that point though…
It seems like the angle is too severe for the speed of the ball, so it just bounces off the backboard. It might work if you back way up and lob it in. I may try some more tonight. There is a number on the backboard, so maybe you just score some points? A multiplayer mod waiting to be made?
I don’t think I could repeat this, but as we were trying to get from an earlier save point to the part with Dog, I somehow did a backflip in the airboat as I jumped the dam. I don’t think it unlocked any Easter Eggs, but it looked really cool!
When they release this you guys will really have fun with the physics. Gabe used the ‘physgun’ to showcase the physics during his demos, but it’s not in the final release. It lets you do really really fine manipulation. You can build a stack of objects and then play jenga or whatever – slowly trying to eak one out without knocking down the stack. Secondary fire welds objects together.
Just as an aside, I thought that whole Dog section was incredibly well done, with Alyx laughing and adding comments here and there. It was almost spooky how realistic it all was.
