Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Forget the DDR guy
Half-Life 3/4 of an hour, yo.
I want to say this is a fake. I want to say that nobody is able to do this, and that it's like the Mario 3 in 11 minutes--done through a slo-mo hack and lots of patience. I really, really do. The video has a surreal feeling to it that everything is just too slick, that something is wrong.
But. I've played Half-Life a fair bit. I've seen people play Counter-Strike really, really well. I know some of the odd quirks of the Half-Life engine, such as the act of merely touching a ladder stops you dead, or that water of any depth negates falling damage. These little touches, like the fact that you move slightly faster holding the crowbar, or while sidestepping in mid-air. This guy bends the rules of the game to the breaking point. He knows where all the enemies are, and exactly how many hits of which weapons kill them the fastest. He knows the ins and outs of all the levels, and he can maneuver with jumps and do the "you can't hit me" dance* like the best CS players can. He can do things that I would never have though of, like using the trip-laser mines like stepping stones, or the snarks as an elevator, or using the slanted walls of the canyon in the Surface Tension chapter to Gauss-jump up the sides over the top of the map. He skips entire chapters of the game by forcing doors open by pushing NPCs around.
I'm still not going to say it's 100% geniune, but it would surprise me not at all to find out that it is. It's a long watch at 45 minutes, but if you have an appreciation for speedgaming, or for Half-Life, it's worth it.
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* Less glorious than it sounds, this is basically just quickly moving in random directions just enough to avoid getting hit. It works surprisingly well. ¶ 8:54 p.m.
Half-Life 3/4 of an hour, yo.
I want to say this is a fake. I want to say that nobody is able to do this, and that it's like the Mario 3 in 11 minutes--done through a slo-mo hack and lots of patience. I really, really do. The video has a surreal feeling to it that everything is just too slick, that something is wrong.
But. I've played Half-Life a fair bit. I've seen people play Counter-Strike really, really well. I know some of the odd quirks of the Half-Life engine, such as the act of merely touching a ladder stops you dead, or that water of any depth negates falling damage. These little touches, like the fact that you move slightly faster holding the crowbar, or while sidestepping in mid-air. This guy bends the rules of the game to the breaking point. He knows where all the enemies are, and exactly how many hits of which weapons kill them the fastest. He knows the ins and outs of all the levels, and he can maneuver with jumps and do the "you can't hit me" dance* like the best CS players can. He can do things that I would never have though of, like using the trip-laser mines like stepping stones, or the snarks as an elevator, or using the slanted walls of the canyon in the Surface Tension chapter to Gauss-jump up the sides over the top of the map. He skips entire chapters of the game by forcing doors open by pushing NPCs around.
I'm still not going to say it's 100% geniune, but it would surprise me not at all to find out that it is. It's a long watch at 45 minutes, but if you have an appreciation for speedgaming, or for Half-Life, it's worth it.
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* Less glorious than it sounds, this is basically just quickly moving in random directions just enough to avoid getting hit. It works surprisingly well. ¶ 8:54 p.m.
