Where I spent many hours watching my brother play conc maps, where I spent many hours playing puzzle maps as: Team Fortress Classic, where I spent hours a day either dying at this spot in dustbowl to an endless parade of cluster bombs, EMP grenades and spy pills, or being the asshole doing that and also occasionally hitting a sentry gun with a wrench. I liked to do this on de_jeepathon2k especially. Setting sv_gravity to like 400 or whatever, sv_airaccelerate to -5, and jumping backwards to have a really good time flying around. Confederates in space with dinosaurs and rogue AI.Ĭounter-Strike, before Global Offensive, before Source! When if you were too fuckin’ dogshit at the game to take it seriously, you’d wile away your childhood on fuckin’ Star Wars maps and other things with vehicles and barely functioning objects which could kill you just as easily your enemies if you so much as moved on them wrong. Last year I gave myself the pleasure of replaying Gunman Chronicles - which had for what I thought for its time extremely cool weapon concepts, and also mashes together fuckin. Somehow I didn’t realise these were puns until after I’d finished my Physics undergrad 14 years later. Of course, Opposing Force and Blue Shift had their own charms ( it was all downhill for Gearbox from there).

So what of other games that made use of the GoldSrc engine? Whatever the fuck that noise was when you take fall damage.Īnd the textures, and the enemies, and the props, and the level design, and so many things which now feel dated but after countless hours spent in it, still feel like a consistent reality, a familiar home. That weird bug where the crowbar hits a corpse a million times a second. The health stations dying to have a beat behind them. The weird fuckin’, accidentally-hitting-the-pan-on-the-side-of-the-sink-as-water-empties-out-ass grenade launcher on the MP5 (I do not know how to describe this I’m sorry).

The placement and activation of the tripmines.

The sounds are maybe what take the strongest hold in my memory - the metal banging sounds, be they the crowbar, the footsteps, or the cacophonous tentacles from Blast Pit. I watched him play, as our older sister read aloud a walkthrough from either PCGamer or PCZone, I can’t remember which. I can’t remember how he convinced our dad to buy it but I am so glad he did. You might not remember a little known game from 1998 called Half-Life.

Half life impulse 101 not working