Source episodes.
So in the last couple weeks I “picked up” both Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Sin Episode One: Emergence off of Steam. Both were under twenty bucks and it was seamless to download and play them. As much as I first disliked the idea of Steam I really, really dig it now. It’s a distribution system for games that seems actually done right.
Sin Epsiode One: Emergence
I’ve never actually played the first Sin, but after watching a bunch of preview gameplay movies for this I bought it. It was definitely worth it - the game itself for me lasted a good six hours or so in total. It uses the Source engine (hence the title for this entry) and looks very good.
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There’s not much action in the screenshots since it’s hard to take a picture while actually playing those scenes :) One refreshing change in Sin was that it was hard - I fucking died like 30 times playing it. It has an adaptive difficulty system which makes the enemies harder depending on how easily you breeze through preceeding ones. It works really well (in an FPS that is - I still hate Oblivion’s levelling!)
Half Life 2: Episode One
This one was a hell of a lot more anticipated than Sin, by me and everyone else on the Internet. It too was worth the wait. It’s a great game - er, episode. It picks up exactly where the last game left off and it’s just as polished as the full Half Life 2 was. It looks fantastic - there’s a lot of liberal use of HDR that really works well. The first chunk takes place in City 17’s citadel which is a massive, semi-open structure and the dynamic lighting blew me away there.
Alyx’s AI should get awards too for being the first escort NPC in a game that I didn’t immediately want to kill. Most situations like that are just awful, with the NPC dying all the time, getting in your way, and so on. Not with Alyx - she follows you as opposed to leading you, and never really blocks your path. She can die though (that surprised me at first), but it only happens if you fuck up.
Here’s a batch of shots. I think it looks pretty good on my old(ish) system, with HDR and filtering and what not (although I think FRAPS takes screenshots without the card’s anti-aliasing visible):
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There’s also a ton of commentary where the developers talk about everything - covering engine implementation details, level design, sequence scripting and all sorts of things:
The commentary first appeared in the Lost Coast tech demo, and I hope they keep it in all their future releases.
Comparison
While I enjoyed both of these episodes I definitely had more fun playing Sin. Blasphemous, I know. Half Life was more polished, thought out and so forth but Sin had a lot going for it. I mean, you can literally blow people’s brains out. And the breast physics are unmatched.
Seriously though, Sin gave me about three times the amount of play than HL2E1. I don’t regret either purchases, I just hope that Valve makes the next one a bit longer.