Tag Archives: Gordon Freeman

Don’t Worry About Half-Life 3


Prepare for foreseen consequences.


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Half-Life: Full Life Consequences (2006)


Video games indulge their audience more than any other artistic discipline. If gamers line up for a franchise, its publisher will release increasingly uninspired yearly installments, until there’s not a cent left to be made. If players enjoy a certain side character, he will almost certainly return for his own spin-off series. Gamers have a hard time letting go, because they’re so used to getting more, more more. More DLC, more character packs, more endless franchises. They whine when a title gets delayed, and then complain it feels “rushed” upon release. They want constant content, but they also want it to consistently meet their expectations.

So it’s not hard to see how fanfiction reared its ugly head among this madness. Fanfiction allows distraught gamers to access more narrative threads within their favorite fictional worlds, indulging beyond the mere vision of the game designers. Didn’t like the ending to the latest Mass Effect? Write a new one where Shepard throws her crew a big goodbye party! Fanfiction is largely about taking control of a cultural object and finally, truly making it your own. Is it powerful beyond the solipsism and complete disrespect for authorial intent it represents? Sixty billion Fifty Shades of Gray fans (a book that famously began as Twilight fanfiction) can’t be wrong.

Yet every so often, a fanfiction author emerges who is so attuned to the world of his obsession — its tone, its themes, its characters’ dialects — that he not only validates the genre’s existence, but provides a fresh, worthwhile take on a beloved property. Through his capable prose, the form actually transcends mere indulgence and speaks to the fan in all of us, encapsulating what lured us to the source material to begin with. Of all the fanfiction masterpieces recognized as worthy successors to their originals (citation needed), perhaps none is more monolithic, more perfect, and more real than Fanfiction.net author Squirrelking’s magnum opus, Half-Life: Full Life Consequences. Continue reading

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Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007)

For all its grimness and despair, for all the death and malice that finally creep past City 17’s anonymous citizenry and zero in on Gordon Freeman’s closest friends, Half-Life 2: Episode Two is attempting a celebration. It’s an insiders-only affair, a product created by and for those with such boundless affinity for the franchise that it is comfortable risking moments more brazenly comic and outright tragic than any found in the rest of the series. It’s “fan service” to its core, not just trotting out easy references and beloved characters expecting us to cheer in mere recognition, but also using its established toolkit and bond with the audience to strengthen and stretch its universe’s connective tissue. Simply, this is Half-Life at its most comfortable with just being Half-Life, and for every lateral step that entails, it also allows for some leaps forward and maybe even a little self-reflection. Even the original Half-Life‘s nuked microwave casserole returns as the crux of an antagonistic relationship.

Valve’s employment of this insular fan club shorthand is, for better and for worse, a result of its full embrace of the serialized storytelling required by the episode format. Continue reading


Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006)

Looking back, why did people not approach the prospect of yearly Half-Life installments with the same suspicion as a Thomas Pynchon book signing or a Jeff Mangum world tour? (Okay, so every once in awhile these things work out.) Valve’s monolithic, twice decade-defining flagship franchise condescending to become serialized, expansion pack entertainments instead of rare magnum opuses is like your most brilliant, successful longtime friend suddenly frequenting your hometown bar: sure, his presence is appreciated, but wouldn’t you sacrifice constantly seeing him to know he was still on the move toward grander goals? Valve’s desire to create these episodes is understandable, perhaps even noble; both full-length Half-Life titles’ development cycles sound like living hells that would turn any programmer’s hair grey, if he didn’t tear it all out in the process. Plus, a desire to give the world Half-Life at a more frequent and inexpensive rate places them somewhere between Santa Claus and the dudes who invented Napster on my list of generous individuals.

The problem, however, is this is not the Valve way. The company is an ever-buzzing brain trust that isn’t happy unless its members are blasting down the walls fencing in game physics and storytelling, or redefining the distribution paradigm with Steam, or wondering what reality would look like through a stupid-looking pair of goggles. Valve the ideal is so much grander than Valve the developer that when it actually gets around to making a game anymore, that title must stand for the same ambition and playful futurism as the rest of the corporation’s endeavors. The Half-Life episodes were fated to choke on their creator’s chutzpah from the start, dwarfed by the never-ending possibilities and ceaseless perfectionism to which they were once thought an antidote. Continue reading

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Half-Life 2 (2004)



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