Half-Life Preview from E.C.T.S continued...

Page 3

   As I've mentioned before the sounds are far more impressive than in any other FPS that I've seen, another example of the beam effects and the sound is actually depicted in a very recent screen shot. Computers are along one wall and your passing through the room as a massive room shaking explosion rips a hole in the comp terminal leaking some sort of plasma blast which extends to the opposite wall very visually and sound FX impressive.

   The first scientists that we met were helping other scientists and Barneys around the place, when you spoke to them they would exclaim that they hadn't a clue about what had happened and you needed to get to the surface of the facility, one of the scientists that we saw gave us a jab from a syringe to help replenish some of the health that we had lost from various head-crab attacks. They would follow you around and help if you asked them, but if they even so much as smelled danger they'd be off, one was following us and we came upon an alien slave and some barrels which we shot and blew up, turning round to see the coat flap of the scientist disappearing quick style round the corner.

   All guns in the game, or at least the ones that we saw have to be reloaded, the shotgun was pretty cool, after pumping off all the shells at head-crabbed scientists he reloaded all shells into the appropriate place and pumped it again ready for the first shot, superb quality sound FX on this. We met Gabe as we finished looking at HL and he was interested in what we though of HL and if we'd seen any other good games at the show, he was going deaf because the noise at the show was really loud.

   This was the first time I'd seen Half-life out side of the Internet, and I was extremely impressed, had I not already pre-ordered it I would have done it there and then. One thing is for sure, the Extremely Impressive AI and story line element will make this FPS stand out from everything for a long time.

AND FINALLY.

   Ten minutes before the end of day one (which I had to go home at the end of L) me and Alex went back up to the Cendant stand, to find only a couple of people around the HL computer and Robin Walker was not only playing it live, but it was Teamfortress II oh yes. The models weren't finished and so were not in the game but the weapons designations, the HUD and the levels were, I also think the sounds were for the most part.

   He (Robin) was showing the accuracy and recoil modifiers present in TF II, firing the pistol, which all classes have, at the wall putting bullet holes in it slowly, the holes were appearing in roughly the same place, he held down fire/switched fire mode and fired much faster only the bullets spread out all over the place, within reason of course. He switched to the MP5 model, the place holder for the Massive belt fed machine gun belonging to the heavy weapons guy class or heavy soldier I think it called in TF II.

   It's a very big sounding gun and can let rip a complete 100 round belt in under 5 seconds, he fired it into the base computer monitor and it sported bullet holes followed by the monitor smashing as he continued. The only other weapon shown was the rocket launcher infantry's weapon, the rocket launcher Dur! He stood out side and fired, this rocket started out pretty fast and got faster as it reached arming range and was followed by a big explosion on the wall at the end of its flight path. As said in other TF II previews there is a large backwash from the launcher and any standing behind will be fried, I confirmed with Robin that the weapon models were Half-life's. He followed up by saying, we already had weapon models when Valve bought us and we were pretty happy with them, but as you can see the models in HL are so good that we decided to make new ones.

   He's right, the HL models are extremely impressive. Neat/useful feature alert!

   Robin was dropping the console and changing maps to show us different things in TF II, not remembering exactly what the maps were called he typed maps* and it showed a list of the maps currently installed. I'm not sure if that was TF II specific but its bound to be in HL as well. He showed us a tiny map where you started on top of a plane and there was sky all around (very pretty/realistic btw) he said that it was a model for air support on of the maps where you could call in air support on the other team ;) very nice. It was shortly after this point when he was trying to explain something else to us that the power was cut to the entire show L, he was totally knackerd having sat there nearly all day showing off HL, and he still wanted to show us TF II even after the 6:00pm when the place closed, talk about dedication.

   Anyway that's it from me (thank god I hear you say!) a very eventful day and enjoyable too. If anyone wants to know any more specific's about what I saw then just mail me and I'll see if I can explain. I'm gonna buy TF II as well I think....

by Dave 'MaDMaXX' Monks