Game Journal 03/29/2020: A Highway To Better Prospekts
I love Highway 17, not the one I have to drive on to get to San Jose, that one sucks ass, but the one in Half Life 2? Favorite part of the game! Coming after a brief interlude following the waking nightmare that was Ravenholm, Highway 17 makes widespread ecological devastation look downright cheerful. Right at the start you’re given a stripped down dune-buggy that’ll soon be your best friend, and zooming down an old coastal highway full of buildings and docks that....well they used to be on the water. The look and feel of Highway 17 is what makes it go above and beyond any of the other sections of the game for me. It’s not a particularly complex part of the game, you mostly just drive down the road until you find something of interest, get out of the car, do whatever you’re gonna do, and hop back into that same car. Damn near every location you do explore has one major detail though: The ocean isn’t where it’s supposed to be. There’s plenty of hints earlier in the game that the Combine have been stripping earth of it’s natural resources, and Highway 17 is where you see that clearly for the first time. The sea level of this games version of earth is clearly wrong, buildings that were obviously built to be docks and shipping ports rest on the dry land that used to be the seabed. It’s a detail I’ve always really loved, and always thought added a surreal feel to the parts of this game that take place next to the ocean.
Gonna be hard to get the boat in the water from here, but we do have a gravity gun!
The end result of this (fairly long and varied, I didn’t even touch on the bridge section, or the short but iconic “Sand Trap” platforming section later on!) trip is the fortified prison assault of Nova Prospekt, which i’ll cover tomorrow. I’ve said this before, but it’s hard to really quantify how good some of the sections of Half Life 2 were since....all of them are unbelievably good.
Random Screenshot Of The Day:
Eugh....Guru Andma didn’t make the transition to 3D without looking.....more than a little creepy.
Stray Game Notes:
- The Bridge part of Highway 17, which I sort of touched on, rules. Having to work your way around the rickety, half fallen apart undercarriage of a bridge over the bay is tense, exciting and fun! Especially when the gunship shows up and starts shooting at you! - The “Sand Trap” chapter deserves some recognition too! It’s probably the shortest in the game before the assault on Nova Prospekt kicks off in earnest, but it’s a fun platforming challenge. Essentially you just have to use a bit of creativity (and plenty of those crazy Half Life 2 physics) to keep off the sand of a beach, lest you anger the “antlions” who will soon be your friends in the coming chapters! It really does only last about ten minutes, but it’s very cool while it lasts. - I’m interested to dig into the advances in graphics between Half Life 2 and it’s episodes, I always seem to forget when I go back to these games that they came a longer way with those expansions than we all tend to think.
