What you talkin’ ’bout, Vince?
This interview with Valve’s Doug Lombardi is about a month old, but I only just found it. I apologise for how shitty that web site is; seems like it’s impossible to convince web designers that a billion widgets all over the whole page isn’t easy to use — but, hey, I’m not here to bitch at these dudes for their garbage web site, I’m here to bitch at Doug Lombardi for his crazy moon talk.
The reason I linked to the third page of that interview isn’t that I’m stupid and fucked it up, by the way. It’s because I wanted to call out Lombardi’s first comment on that page. You see that? Where he says "my hunch is that more people finished Ep2 than Ep1… because we got back to the variety of gameplay that was in Half-Life 2." Oh, and farther on down there, where he’s harshing on Episode One because it was "kind of you and Alyx fighting in the city streets the whole time."
Is Doug out at sea here, or am I really the only person in the world who likes consistent games anymore? I mean, hey Doug, that’s exactly why I liked Episode One. It had no fucking boat levels, no fucking car levels, no ridiculous crate-stacking puzzles. It was all shooter. Okay, okay, it had that one dumb bit where you’re in the parking garage pushing cars around, but outside of that, it stays within the shooter framework; the gameplay is varied, just not so wildly as before. I’m serious, is this just me? Am I really the only person who doesn’t like it when I’m infiltrating some Combine dudes and then all of a sudden I have to spend an hour playing driving levels before I can get back to it?
Since, frankly, what I didn’t like about Half-life 2, and what I didn’t like about Episode Two, is that they both kept interrupting the game to make me do some dumb shit I didn’t want to do. Stack crates, boat, car, stack crates, car, crates, seige fight in the goddamn CAR. You see where I’m going with this? Episode One didn’t do that nonsense. So, hey Doug, bite me. The end.
