What HL/Valve gaming memories stand out for you?

[Capt Quark]

For me, I remember playing HL for the first time. After playing Q2 and enjoying it's OpenGL 24 bit gfx (Is that right? Was Q2 24 bit with OpenGL?) I went to CompUSA looking for something different. I saw the Orange Half-Life Box and the description sounded interesting so I bought it.

On to the memories:

Tram ride: The ride through Black Mesa was cool. When I bumped my mouse and my POV changed my reaction was "Holy shit! I can look around???? This is cool!"

Pushing the sample into the analyzer - and everything going to hell. I actually caught myself thinking "It's not my fault! I was just following instructions!!!!"

Getting attacked by a head crab in the air ducts - Jumped, yelled, and nearly wet myself from that!

Intro to the female black ops - The security guard getting shot from behind. I'm thinking "oh shit! Who did THAT???? Then hearing the soft sound of footsteps and PAFF PAFF PAFF! getting my butt shot by a silenced weapon!

The HECU ambush and dumped into the trash compactor. I didn't see THAT coming!

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Do any of you have any memories of HL that stand out?

 

[Omnomnick]

Since we're also talking about Valve memories, I'll mention the two I remember the most fondly.

1. Release of the Orange Box
I remember playing the TF2 Beta early in the morning on September 18th 2007 within an hour or so of the game being released. I think I played for about an hour or so before going to bed, only to wake up again at about 7am to play it for another hour before school. I was 14 at the time, and I remember lining up outside my tutor's room at school ridiculously excited to tell my friends about how I felt TF2 was one of the most fun experiences I had ever had in a video game.

About a month later, on October 10th 2007, I remember getting home from school and immediately sitting down to play Half-Life 2: Episode Two once it unlocked (I actually can't remember the exact time, but I believe it was 6pm GMT). I'd only really played Half-Life 2 and Episode One for the first time earlier that year (which explains my registration date on this website), so I was pretty hyped for Episode Two, with the events of the previous two games still relatively fresh in my mind. Given how interested I was in the story of Half-Life, playing Episode Two was one of the first times I really shielded myself away from the outside world for the entire duration of the game, not paying attention to friends or family from start 'til finish.

After going through Episode Two's 5-6 hour playtime and getting pretty damn depressed at the ending (I'm not ashamed to admit it was one of the few times man tears have been shed at a video game), I remember inviting my brother to come watch me play through Portal for the first time. At the time, Portal was the underdog, the mysterious new IP people knew little about. Sure, we'd all seen the quirky gameplay trailers, but who really knew what to expect? Then Portal blew my ****ing mind. It was one of the most brilliantly simple, interesting, and well-executed ideas I had ever seen in a game. I think I managed to finish it somewhere close to midnight, and I distinctly remember thinking it was by far one of the best evenings of video game playing I had ever experienced, and, while there is most certainly some level of rose-tinted nostalgia involved, I honestly believe that's still the case.

2. Release of Portal 2
I think it's safe to say Portal 2 had one of the biggest and most hyped build-ups in gaming history. As if the seemingly unbeatable standards of the first game weren't enough, Valve pulled off their biggest and best alternate reality game to date, something which made the hype so ridiculously engaging.

Portal 2 was the first games I remember staying up all night to play (the second being Bioshock Infinite). The game was set to unlock about 6am GMT, but I didn't want to go to bed since I might miss the release time, given that it was fluctuating due to participants of the ARG. Instead, I opened up a couple of the participating indie games and waited as the projected launch timer ticked down. Thankfully the game released during a two week study leave prior to my A-Level exams, allowing me to stay up without having to worry about school the following morning. I think the game eventually unlocked sometime around 4-5am, and I jumped on as soon as the Steam servers stopped lagging from too much traffic.

I think I only stopped playing once, which I used to go to the toilet. Given I'd been sat in a dark, enclosed room since well before the game's launch, I distinctly remember noticing how bright the sun was while walking through the hallway. A little while later, my younger brother came in to check out what I was doing before heading to school. I remember exactly where I was in the game at the time, and it's safe to say I couldn't appropriately explain why a potato was attached to the end of the Portal gun and why Wheatley was being shown on a giant monitor.

A few hours later, I'd finished the main campaign in a single sitting, and I was so ridiculously happy with the game I decided to immediately head back to try and grab some of the achievements I had missed. While playing through it a second time sometime before lunch, I remember finding the "Portrait of a Lady" easter egg. Given that the event had an achievement associated with it, I thought other people might be interested in finding it. I then booted up Fraps and recorded three different videos, including the Portrait of a Lady, the Super 8 teaser, and the Borealis easter egg.

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Even though it was like 11am and I was ridiculously tired at the time, I had played what remains my favourite game of all time and uploaded a bunch of relevant, high quality videos I thought were interesting. After over three years, all three videos have a combined view count of close to half a million, and the Portrait of a Lady video remains one of the most popular results on YouTube, just below stuff like RoosterTeeth and NextGenTactics. It was also pretty funny to hear that friends I later met at university had randomly come across my video while looking for easter eggs just after the game's launch. Uploading these videos and seeing just how interested people became was definitely one of the main reasons I wanted to get into content creation here on ValveTime.​

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Anyway, long post is long. tl;dr edition: Valve games are fun.​

 

[Pikminiman]

For me, there are two memories that stick out in particular, and both have to do with my ineptitude with video games.

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When I first began playing Portal, it was the first non-Nintendo game I had ever played. I'm not sure what drove me to play the game in the first place, but I'm very glad I did. That said, I was not great at it.

When I got to infamous chamber 16 (the one with all the turrets), I tried over and over to make it through the level without being noticed by any turrets and by defending myself with cubes. It wasn't until I had stumbled around that chamber for three full afternoons that I realized how much of an idiot I was.

"Whoa! You can deactivate the turrets by knocking them over!" I'm still unsure about how such a mechanic escaped me so thoroughly for so long, but at least I learned in the end. And now, Portal and Portal 2 remain my favorite video games of all time, with 101 hours and 209 hours, respectively.

*************************************************

The other game through which I stumbled around like an idiot for far too long was Half-Life 2, which I only had because I wanted to buy Portal, and the Orange Box was the only way to get it in a physical copy. (I didn't have Steam yet.)

Of all places to get stuck, the place that stumped me was the second map where you exit the train station and walk out onto the plaza right outside. I was completely stuck there, but for the first hour and a half I didn't mind at all, since I used that time to admire, in complete awe, the level of detail that went into the world I had just entered. That train station plaza completely blew me away, since I had never played a game with a realistic art style before, and the world of Half-Life is veritably full to the brim with minuscule details that Valve really didn't need to include. Suffice it to say that I was more than content to wander aimlessly around the map until I had the opportunity to properly take it all in. Honestly, it's that feeling of stumbling into a world as detailed as Half-Life that really makes me yearn for HL3, but I digress.

I was having the time of my life searching quite literally every single nook and cranny in that map (of which there are quite a few), but even that beautifully constructed plaza started to become old as the first full 80 minutes or so were behind me. At that point, I was genuinely starting to wonder why I wasn't making any progress. I had attempted to converse with every single citizen and citizen patrol that I saw, but all that earned me was a bunch of shoves, some threats, and a handful of light beatings.

Since trying to talk with everyone wasn't getting me anywhere, I figured there had to be something I was missing, so I simply tried walking through all the various blue forcefields in the map, to no avail. And after another solid 15 minutes of zero progress, I broke down and watched a YouTube playthrough (they weren't widely called "Let's Plays" yet) of that level, which took no time to explore the plaza and went immediately the ladder on the far right of exiting the train station. Needless to say, I felt like a complete and total dumbass, especially after realizing how many subtle cues there were to end up there, all of which I somehow missed.

Still, the experience taught me quite a lot about what to look for in the Half-Life games when wanting to progress. And, more importantly, it gave me an immense appreciation for the detail in the world itself right out of the gate. I've never watched a playthrough to make progress in a Valve game since then, and the Half-Life series remains to this day my second favorite video game series (after Portal).

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TL;DR I love Valve games now, but it took some real idiocy on my part to get there.

 

[-smash-]

I was a big Counter-Strike player back in the day. I think the CS1.6 update and CS:CZ/Deleted Scenes release are, together, one of the more memorable experiences for me.

Half-Life 2 and CS:S were the most memorable experiences. 2004 as a whole was arguably the best year for PC gamers, and HL2 and CS:S amplified that for me.

The media coverage for CS:S alone was insane. The reveal itself at E3 2004 was epic. Seeing Counter-Strike on a brand new engine made a lot of PC gamers giddy. And then I remember when the first public demos were going on in Japan and everyone was clambering to catch some real gameplay footage. The first footage was shaky cam and the video quality was absolutely terrible (I wish I could find those videos). But de_dust looked amazing on the Source Engine.

Then the CS:S beta started to roll out. First the Steam Cyber Cafes gained access, and then CZ owners jumped in. Everyone was anxiously waiting (some were impatient and installed the cracked version) to play. And when the beta was in full swing, everyone was playing it. When it finally released, everyone was still playing it. BUT, I ended up sticking with CS 1.6 for another few years instead, lol.

Obviously HL2's early history is rich. The first demo at E3 2003 was just amazing. I wish that everyone could have experienced that moment. I mean everything about it was just perfection for the time. Then I saw the DX9 HDR demo and was just blown away by the detail, atmosphere, and immersion in that little thing (HDR was dropped from the final release of HL2 ). I soon picked up an ATi 9800Pro to upgrade my TNT2 and with it came a disc with high-quality direct-feed Bink videos of the E3 HL2 demos. Epic stuff.

The source code theft was basically earth shattering and a very memorable experience.

Half-Life 2's preload started before the game had gone gold, but it was a nice reassurance that it was coming soon. Preloading began in August 2004. Half-Life 2 went gold in October 2004. I was jumping for joy.

Release night came. Unlock time was 12AM for me and my plan was to skip school that morning. Even though many of us had preloaded the game, Steam needed to decrypt and verify. For many of us, that took a long time or didn't work at all. Ah, the early days of Steam. But it was amazing to watch as people slowly rolled into the game, posting their initial impressions and screenshots on the forums. And when I finally was able to launch the game, I was blown away by the title menu screen alone! I don't think I had ever seen a menu screen that used a live map as the background. The opening G-Man sequence gave me the craziest chill up my spine, and the rest is history.

 

[[SK] Covered in Boo-Boos]

I remember

Spoiler

Eli Vance being killed at the end of Half Life 2: Episode 2, then immediately thinking; "WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN MAGNUSSON?!"

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Simply put: The GoldSrc mod scene during the WoN days. Better go crawl back into my cave now.

 

[TheWiktor]

I remember

Spoiler

Eli Vance being killed at the end of Half Life 2: Episode 2, then immediately thinking; "WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN MAGNUSSON?!"

Spoiler

If Magnusson died then I still would have cried for him. He was kinda funny.

 

[Capt Quark]

Simply put: The GoldSrc mod scene during the WoN days. Better go crawl back into my cave now.

Those are some good memories indeed! It amazes me that some mod teams have still made mods using this engine with incredible gfx! I vaguely remember a Dragonball Z mod for GoldSrc that had looked very impressive.

 

[TheWiktor]

Is this the mod?

I think I've played it.

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Those are some good memories indeed! It amazes me that some mod teams have still made mods using this engine with incredible gfx! I vaguely remember a Dragonball Z mod for GoldSrc that had looked very impressive.

Mod is called Earth's Special Forces, I think they have some sort of loose group still doing stuff: http://www.esforces.com/

Science and Industry was my favorite out of initial memory.

 

[Capt Quark]

Mod is called Earth's Special Forces, I think they have some sort of loose group still doing stuff: http://www.esforces.com/

Science and Industry was my favorite out of initial memory.

ESF was the name of it. Thanks!

S&I!!!! That was downright fun! I used to use the GI destabilizer on a enemy then incapacitate then shotgun to take them out.

 

[Matt]

Tram ride: The ride through Black Mesa was cool. When I bumped my mouse and my POV changed my reaction was "Holy shit! I can look around???? This is cool!"

Pushing the sample into the analyzer - and everything going to hell. I actually caught myself thinking "It's not my fault! I was just following instructions!!!!"

Getting attacked by a head crab in the air ducts - Jumped, yelled, and nearly wet myself from that!

Intro to the female black ops - The security guard getting shot from behind. I'm thinking "oh shit! Who did THAT???? Then hearing the soft sound of footsteps and PAFF PAFF PAFF! getting my butt shot by a silenced weapon!

The HECU ambush and dumped into the trash compactor. I didn't see THAT coming!

I love watching people react to moments in games and movies in the same way that I had, so I love watching blind playthroughs, but when it comes to Half-Life, due to it's release date, there are so damn few.

 

[Capt Quark]

There was also a awesome single player mod called They Hunger (I think). Zombie apocalypse theme and scary moments too! It was a mod trilogy.

 

[Matt]

There was also a awesome single player mod called They Hunger (I think). Zombie apocalypse theme and scary moments too! It was a mod trilogy.

Yeah, that'd be They Hunger. I haven't got around to finishing it yet...

 

[Adabiviak]

My first steps on Xen... I never played these games because, frankly, they looked pretty lame with a nerd, grunt, and rent-a-cop on the covers with nothing else for context. I kept hearing how awesome they were, winning tons of awards, and a friend convinced me to play it, so I bought a GOTY edition (years after it came out). At first, I was like, "Hey! This is a pretty good shooter." Then I got to Xen and, as that meme goes, it blew my freakin' mind.

I was very lucky to have been able to experience this game as a "virgin"... so many iconic moments that wouldn't have been as entertaining if I knew what was coming ahead of time.