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I'm loving it so far. I'm at Nova Prospeckt,


I finished the game last night. Some of the coolest set pieces are in Nova Prospekt. I was very frustrated with the scanner-gun-standoff scenes at first, until I figured out the secret to how to place them most effectively. (Won't tell unless someone asks.)

The opening segment to Nova Prospekt, where you're entering the prison from the outside, is brilliant. I'd loved taking on the gunship with the laser-guided rocket launcher earlier in the game, and I was thinking that maybe I'd seen the last of the gunship segments. Then at Nova Prospekt they make you take on multiple gunships simultaneously before you even make it inside. Talk about sphincter factor. Truly a great gameplay experience.

In fact, I think that this single game has more genuinely over-the-top great gameplay moments than every other game I've played combined. I mean think about it... How many truly great moments can you think of in games? There's the first time you encounter the Cyberdemon in the original Doom. There's the battle for Endor in Rogue Leader. There's the final battle in Homeworld with the cavalry showing up at precisely the right moment. But how many games can you name where mind-blowingly good moments like that happen at least once in each level?

By the way, did I mention that I've been playing the game on the hardest difficulty level? I read a review that said that the combat seemed too easy, so I wanted to make sure that I was challenged. I sure was, I think I had to reload one of the Nova Prospekt scenes about 50 times before I got past it. I'm told that you can change the difficulty level on-the-fly, even in the middle of a firefight if you want, I didn't bother doing that. Wanted the full effect.

Oh, now that I've finished it, I find it fascinating that some of the scenes we saw in the E3 videos simply didn't exist at all. The one big scene with the striders? Didn't happen. We get multiple other scenes with striders that are all equally good (and others that are even better), but that particular moment in that particular level never happened. At one point I recognized that I was standing at that place, in a modified version of that map (the UMF letters on one of the buildings gave it away), but a completely different set of events was taking place.

There was also a moment in one of the E3 videos where a strider blows through the wall in one of the secret labs while you're talking to Alyx and one of the scientists. Scene never happens in the final game, that whole scripted segment is gone.

What this tells me is that they were very serious and meticulous about tweaking every bit of that game. A scripted sequence like that is a lot of work to put together, and the fact that they simply threw it away in favor of a different plot segment says a lot about their design philosophy. Other developers would have kept a sequence like that in place simply because it represented a lot of work. These guys ruthlessly edited and reworked it until it was just right, and it shows.
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Tony Fabris