Wertzone Classics: Half-Life 2

The original Half-Life, released back in October 1998, was the title that redefined the first-person shooter genre. As well as featuring the best combat of any FPS to date, it hit on the idea of never having the player's character, Gordon Freeman, speak or stopping the action to have an expository cut-scene. However, some players found the resulting lack of explanation for the confusing plot to be frustrating. Despite this, Half-Life and its expansions (Opposing Force and Blue Shift) won a substantial number of awards and went on to sell millions of copies. A sequel was inevitable and after a protracted development cycle (including the partial theft of the game's source code) Half-Life 2 appeared to much fanfare in November 2004. Since then, the game has sold more than 8.5 million copies, making it one of the biggest-selling games of recent years.


In the original Half-Life, junior physicist Gordon Freeman was present when an experiment with teleportation technology at the underground Black Mesa research facility in New Mexico went catastrophically wrong. Dimensional rifts to another world, Xen, were opened and hostile creatures poured through. Over the course of several days of non-stop combat, Freeman made his way across the Black Mesa installation, reversed the resonance cascade and briefly crossed to Xen to kill the Nihilanth, the alien entity who had noticed the catastrophe and sent its minions through to investigate. At the end of Half-Life Freeman was 'recruited' by the mysterious G-Man, who appeared to be a suit-wearing human with odd diction but was actually a being of tremendous power and unknown origin. He placed Freeman in stasis for the time when he would be needed again.

Half-Life 2 opens approximately ten years after the events of the first game. The G-Man awakens Freeman from stasis and informs him that the world is a very different place now. A disoriented Freeman is dumped on a train pulling into a station in an Eastern European city. The precise location of the city is never revealed, as whatever name it used to possess has been replaced by the terse designation, 'City 17'. Freeman learns that the resonance cascade at Black Mesa attracted the attention of a powerful alien race known as the Combine, who subsequently invaded the Earth and destroyed its military and governments in the Seven Hour War. The planet is now occupied, most of the population has been killed off and the surviving remnants are forced to work for the Combine. The Combine is draining the planet's oceans and it is hinted they are doing something to the atmosphere as well. Periodically the surviving civilians are taken away to be transformed into a cybernetic slave labour force or into cybernetically-enhanced soldiers utterly loyal to the Combine. Freeman also learns that his former boss, Black Mesa Administrator Wallace Breen, is now running the planet on behalf of the Combine, suggesting he may have had foreknowledge of what was to happen.

This information takes a little while to filter through, as the first section of the game sees a confused Gordon making his way through City 17, aided by his old comrade Barney Calhoun (the player's character from Blue Shift) and the other rebels, initially on foot and then by hovercraft. This section of the game eschews exposition in favour of action, with large-scale gun battles with Combine police forces and a genuinely exciting chase sequence through the sewers and along the river with airborne Combine forces in hot pursuit. Upon reaching the rebel hideout at Black Mesa East Freeman is given an experimental 'gravity gun' but is cut off from his allies by a Combine attack, and has to make his way through the town of Ravenholm which has been infested by aliens from Xen, such as the 'headcrabs' who turn ordinary humans into zombie-like automatons. The shift of tone from traditional action game to a Resident Evil-style survival horror is expertly pulled off. The second section of the game opens with Freeman having to drive along Highway 17 to reach the Combine's prison at Nova Prospekt in order to rescue an important Resistance scientist, Eli Vance. At this stage Freeman is joined by Eli's daughter, Alyx Vance, who proves an invaluable ally. Events at Nova Prospekt trigger the uprising of the human population against the Combine, and the last section of the game sees Gordon and Alyx taking part in full-scale street battles with more heavily-armed Combine forces and their powerful 'Strider' vehicles in an attempt to storm the Combine Citadel and destroy their base of operations.

Half-Life 2 is a tightly-scripted first-person shooter. Those who have gotten used to the freedom afforded the genre in Far Cry and Far Cry 2 (or to a lesser extent Crysis) may be taken aback at how linear Half-Life 2 is. In the original game the linearity of the game was rationalised by the setting, an underground base made up of offices, corridors, silos, factories and military checkpoints. However, in environments such as city streets and open stretches of highway, Half-Life 2's linearity is far more noticeable with only one direction to proceed in at any one time. In an age where FPS games seem intent on forging new ground in giving choice and options to the player, Half-Life 2's lack of freedom feels pretty dated. Once you get used to it, the strengths gained from choosing this route become more apparent, with spectacular set-piece action sequences, thrilling battles and even some nice moments of characterisation. Whilst you rarely spend time with NPCs other than Alyx, the animation, direction and voice acting of characters such as Barney, Eli, Dr. Kleiner and Dr. Mossman are all top-notch. The atmosphere of the game is also fantastic, with the excellent art direction and minimalist music providing a pervading sense of wrongness that this isn't how the world should be and it may all be Freeman's fault. At around 12 hours in length, Half-Life 2 is pretty long by the standards of most modern FPS games (such as Call of Duty 4, which barely clocks in at half that, or FEAR which comes in a good two hours shorter). Also, whilst the game looked extremely impressive on release its PC system requirements were modest, and most modern computers can run the game at full detail without breaking a sweat.

Whilst the pluses are all significant, and give the game its classic status, there are a couple of additional problems which come from the linearity of the title. Because there is only one route through the game and one possible ending, its replayability is severely limited. It's unusual for a player to find every side-room, explore every roadside building or locate every weapons cache on a first run-through of the game, so it's definitely worth playing through a couple of times but you simply don't have anywhere near the variety of say the original Far Cry, where the sheer openness of the levels means there are often a half-dozen or more routes through each stage of the game. A second issue is that both enemy and ally AI (Alyx being an honourable exception) is a bit lacking at times and worryingly comes across as less inventive than the much older original game, although still a step ahead of many contemporary games. A further issue is that the game ends (deliberately) very abruptly, literally in mid-sentence, so you may wish to have the continuation, Half-Life 2: Episode One, ready to go once you have finished this game.

Niggles aside, Half-Life 2 is a classic and gripping action game which is well-worth playing. The atmosphere is terrific, the combat visceral, the weapons inventive (particularly the gravity gun) and the game immersive, once you get used to its limitations.

Half-Life 2 (****½) is no longer available as a solo game in the UK, but only as part of The Orange Box, alongside Episode One, Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and the spectacular Portal. This package, available for the PC, X-Box 360 and PlayStation 3, is well-recommended. The game is still available as a solo PC game in the USA, and also as part of The Orange Box (PC, 360, PS3).

Supertoys Last All Summer Long by Brian W. Aldiss

Way back in the mid-1970s director Stanley Kubrick was looking for a new project and ran across Brian Aldiss' short story, 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long', in which a childless couple create their own android son, who tries to understand if he is real or not. Kubrick was moved by the story and started trying to mould it into a film with Aldiss' help. Their work on the project went on for more than a decade (including the full gestation periods for Kubrick's movies The Shining and Full Metal Jacket) before Aldiss eventually left, exhausted by Kubrick's demanding work schedule and his insistence on drawing parallels to Pinocchio that Aldiss had never intended. Kubrick died in 1999 and Stephen Spielberg picked up the project, released it as the moderately successful A.I. in 2001. Aldiss sold several additional ideas to Spielberg which made it into the movie, and expanded these ideas into two sequels to the original short story.


The short story collection Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Tales of Future Time was released in 2001 to tie in with the film's release. As well as the original 1969 short story, it features the two sequels: 'Supertoys When Winter Comes' and 'Supertoys in Other Seasons'. These very short stories (each is 2,000 words or less) depict the story of David, an android who is created for a childless couple, but whose quest for self-identity proves problematic and he eventually leaves to wander the city. These stories are masterfully economical, transmitting much of the same story and concepts as the movie with Spielberg's sugar-coated schmaltz and Kubrick's worrying Blue Fairy fixation removed in a very small number of pages. You can read all three in considerably less than a single lunch break, as compared to the movie's sometimes bum-numbing two-hour running time.

Obviously, 6,000 words do not make a full collection, so an additional sixteen stories are included. They are united by the themes of dislocation and loneliness, which are approached from different angles. Many of the stories are ambiguous and few have any solid resolution. Aldiss' goal here is to raise issues and questions and see what the reader makes of them, not provide pat answers. Interestingly many of the stories are prototypes or condensed versions of other stories he has written: the lengthy seasonal cycle of 'Apogee Again' feels like Aldiss' epic Helliconia Trilogy on extreme fast-forward, whilst 'A Whiter Mars' is a direct tie-in to his stand-alone SF novel, White Mars. Some of the stories are obvious - 'III' is a simple commentary on humanity's fixation of exploiting natural resources, whilst 'Dark Society's twist ending will likely be spotted by experienced genre readers but remains haunting nonetheless - but others are more inventive, such as the Lord of Light-esque 'Becoming the Full Butterfly' and the judgmental 'Galaxy Zee'.


This is a fine collection of stories reflecting Aldiss' impressive writing range. There is a feeling of distance and coldness in many of the works - possibly an attraction for the likewise non-sentimental Kubrick (Blue Fairy obsession aside) - which may be offputting for some, but overall this is an intelligent and thought-provoking book and well worth seeking out.

Supertoys Last All Summer Long (***½) is published in the UK by Orbit (out of print but copies seem available on Amazon) and by St. Martin's Griffin in the USA.

The Forbidden Planet Multi-Author Event

I travelled up to London tonight for a multi-author signing event at Forbidden Planet, also known as the 'mingle' as the authors brushed shoulders with the great unwashed without the benefit of a desk to cower behind. The evening was the idea of author David Devereux, whose new book Eagle Rising (pimped by Graeme here) was being launched and he decided to invite along a bunch of other authors to turn it into a bit of a mini-SF con in the bowels of FP.


The other attending authors were the omnipresent Joe Abercrombie (who heroically strove to sell people copies of the 'new editions' of The First Law - where the typeface and font on the front cover are slightly different), Jaine Fenn, Suzanne McLeod, Mark Chadbourn, Alex Bell, Jon Courtney Grimwood, Steven Savile, Tom Lloyd and James Swallow. Also present, but only in a supporting capacity, were Chris Wooding and the ultra-popular Robert Rankin. Many books were bought, more were signed and much fun was had by all.

No scoops from the publishers this time. I did hear from Gollancz's dark lord Simon Spanton that Ian McDonald's The Dervish House (which will do for Turkey what River of Gods did for India and Brasyl did for, erm, Brazil) is now a 2010 release rather than a late 2009 one, but that's about it for insider info.

I did pick up a lot of books at the event and correspondingly hope to get my reading back in gear shortly as it's been taking a battering in favour of DVDs and computer games in the post-Christmas period.

EDIT: A slight amendment to reflect the fact that the evening was arranged by David and Danie from Forbidden Planet, and a most enjoyable evening it was as well.

Food!

As a British SF&F fan living less than an hour from central London on the train, it is unsurprising that I make relatively frequent trips to the capital to see friends, to visit the city's plethora of comic shops and SF stores (Forbidden Planet most frequently, obviously), attend author signings and so on. One of the frustrating things about London is that despite being the biggest city in the country, one of the biggest and most important cities in the world and so forth, finding a decent place to eat can be tricky. The number of alleged 'restaurants' whose fare is little better than a Hungry Horse pub meal (but they charge you twice as much) is quite surprising.

For that reason, I found this blog, dedicated to finding great places to eat in London, to be quite interesting, and vow to put its recommendations to the test soon :-)

New Interview with R. Scott Bakker

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist has just posted an interview carried out with fantasy author R. Scott Bakker by myself, Pat and Larry from OF Blog of the Fallen to accompany the release of his new novel, The Judging Eye, the first novel in The Aspect-Emperor sub-series and the fourth in The Second Apocalypse over-series.

As usual, Scott proved forthcoming in his in-depth answers to our questions. One of the most encouraging notes was that after finishing his second stand-alone thriller, Disciple of the Dog, he will switch to working full-time on The Second Apocalypse until it is completed, with The Judging Eye's sequel The White-Luck Warrior to hopefully follow next year.

The Cimmerian on A Dance with Dragons

The award-nominated scholarly website 'The Cimmerian' has run an article on A Song of Ice and Fire and in particular analysed the current long wait for the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons, here. The article is reasonably interesting, touching on the current flamewars sweeping various websites over the delays to the book and the shockwaves of fear sent through some of the more ill-informed corners of fandom by the death of Robert Jordan in late 2007. I was rather amused to seem them picking up on an Amazon post I made some considerable time ago about how J.R.R. Tolkien would have fared whilst working on Lord of the Rings in the Internet age. Others later pointed out many flaws in my comparison (not least that some of the target audience for the book would have been more worried about, for example, storming Monte Cassino than waiting for a sequel to a book they read as a kid ten years earlier) which led me to believe I should have cited The Silmarillion instead, but there you go. Anyway, I may have to start introducing myself as "A. Whitehead of the storied legionary city Colchester," were it not for reasons of brevity.


On a somewhat related note, the Winter is Coming blog has issued a general update on the status of production on the Game of Thrones TV series. Unfortunately, we are now in the doldrums of news with pre-production under way but no solid progress to report, since we are still many months from shooting and likely several months from casting even beginning. However, we can hopefully expect confirmation of a shooting and production location in the coming days or weeks.

Two great actors pass away

Today we lost two great actors who had iconic SF&F roles in their careers.


Patrick McGoohan is best-known for his portrayal of 'Number Six' in the iconic 1960s TV series The Prisoner, which he also wrote and produced. The series was supposed to be a mystery about a former secret agent forcibly 'retired' to a facility called 'The Village', but soon became steeped in metaphor and confusing artistic imagery. The final episode is still hailed as one of the most surreal hours of television ever. A remake of the series featuring James Caviezel and Ian McKellan will air later this year. In addition to this he had many additional popular roles, such as that of secret agent John Drake in Danger Man (sometimes believed to be the same character from The Prisoner, but never confirmed). He had a late-career resurgence following a memorable performance as King Edward the Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson movie Braveheart. He passed away today at the age of 80.


Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban had an long and successful career beginning in 1943 and continuing up until his death. Despite an immense and varied filmography featuring such notable roles as the villain in the first Naked Gun movie and the memorable Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island, he will forever be linked to the role of Khan Noonian Singh, Captain James T. Kirk's greatest nemesis in Star Trek. He originally played the role in the first season episode Space Seed in 1966, before reprising it memorably for the 1982 movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He passed away today at the age of 88.

Both were excellent actors who achieved both popular and cult acclaim with their iconic SF roles. Both will be sorely missed.

Battlestar Galactica Returns for Last Episodes

The final ten episodes of Battlestar Galactica start airing on the Sci-Fi Channel in the USA on Friday and on Sky One in the UK from next Tuesday. As is to be expected, preview DVDs of the first couple of episodes have been sent out and spoilers have started to emerge. For the sake of a few days, I strongly advise avoiding not just the usual spoiler websites (the Patriot Resource, the spoiler pages on Television Without Pity etc) but also the Sci-Fi Channel forums, where so far two monumental spoilers (including THAT one) have slipped out already.

After all, you wouldn't want someone randomly posting an image or spoiler to accidentally wreck your viewing pleasure would you?


Damn!

Alex Bell launches new website

Alex Bell, the distressingly young and talented author of The Ninth Circle and the forthcoming Jasmyn, has set up a new website at this location. Interestingly, she appears to be taking self-promotion lessons from the shy and retiring Joe Abercrombie and it must be said, what better role model can there be*?


As linked by Graeme at the Fantasy Book Review, a plethora of young, up 'n' coming fantasy authors including Alex, Joe, David Devereux, Tom Lloyd, Mark Chadbourn, Jon Courtney Grimwood, Suzanne McLeod, Steven Savile and James Swallow will be carrying out a signing at Forbidden Planet in London at 5pm on January 22nd, which it looks like I may be attending, so it will be good to see people there!

* Note: not a rhetorical question. Answers not to exceed 25 suggestions. 'Darth Sidious' is an acceptable answer.

Wertzone Classics: Rome: Season 1

Four hundred years ago Lucius Junius Brutus killed the last of the tyrannical Kings of Rome and founded the Roman Republic. Rome's power and might, under the rulership of the Senate, has grown to encompass most of the Mediterranean and its legions hold sway from the Atlantic to the Black Sea and beyond. In 52 BC Rome's most famous general is Gaius Julius Caesar, who in the course of a bloody eight-year campaign has subdued the tribes of Gaul, finally defeating the Gaulish king Vercingetorix at the epic Battle of Alesia. Caesar's returning emissaries and troops have brought much loot from the newly-subdued province back to Rome and his popularity with the people is at an all-time high, to the disquiet of his former ally and friend Pompey Magnus, the head of the Senate. With Caesar determined to use his hard-won power and influence to enact desperately-needed reforms in Rome and Pompey resolved to stand against him, the scene is set for a bloody civil war.


Meanwhile, two of Caesar's soldiers are set on a path that will lead them to greatness. Centurion Lucius Vorenus and legionary Titus Pullo rescue Caesar's grand-nephew Octavian from certain death and recover Caesar's stolen standard. Their names become known and Pullo finds Octavian to be a powerful ally, whilst Vorenus is drawn into the orbit of Caesar and his ruthless lieutenant, Mark Antony, against his own moral judgement.

Rome was a co-production between HBO and the BBC, filmed on location in Italy on an immense open-air set that cost a staggering sum of money to build and was subsequently used by other productions, such as documentaries and an episode of Doctor Who. As a cable production, Rome was free of many of the restraints traditionally placed on American TV drama and featured scenes of violence and explicit sex that some audiences found unpalatable, and resulted in a lot of tabloid coverage, whilst the series' exemplary writing and stunning acting were roundly ignored.

The show is epic, with a complex, multi-stranded narrative following multiple characters across several years of tumultuous history. The political struggle for control of Rome is shadowed by the rise and fall of Vorenus and Pullo's lives among the soldiers and the lower classes. Their viewpoint on events is occasionally reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (if they'd been badass Romans and hadn't died), and provides an interesting viewpoint on the narrative. At the same time the story follows the fierce and building rivalry between Caesar's niece, Atia of the Julii, and his former lover, Servilia of the Junii, over who shall have influence in the new Rome. Servilia's love for Caesar is complicated by the fact that her son, Brutus (a direct descendant of the original Brutus who founded the Republic), is aligned politically against him. An apparently minor subplot follows the education and maturing of Caesar's nephew Octavian, whose intelligent, canny mind and innate grasp of politics is limited by a lack of charisma or reliable friends.

Rome is built around the central figure of Caesar, played with significant gravitas and weight by Ciaran Hinds. Remarkably, the show does not seek to humanise Caesar too much. As in history, his motives are not always clear and his tendency to keep even his closest allies in the dark as to his intentions means he is a somewhat distant figure, even when he has lots of screen time. Hinds delivers an exceptional performance, ably backed up by James Purefoy as Mark Antony. Although Antony doesn't truly shine until the second season, Purefoy channels Pure 100% Magnificent Bastard in his role and pulls it off remarkably well. It is also impossible to find too many superlatives for Polly Walker's performance as Atia, which is nothing short of amazing as the viewer goes from hate to admiration to sympathy, sometimes in the course of a single scene. Lindsay Duncan's more stately, reserved and far colder Servilia is also a triumph and scenes with the two women being polite and correct with one another whilst communicating their mutual loathing and hatred with just a tone of voice or well-timed look are riveting. Kenneth Cranham also excels as Pompey, whom a lesser drama would have painted as a simple villain opposed to the 'good guy' Caesar. Cranham makes Pompey an honourable, sympathetic and complex figure.

However, the series lives or dies by the performances of Kevin McKidd as the honourable, stalwart Lucius Vorenus and Ray Stevenson as the headstrong, passionate Titus Pullo, who are our anchors and eyes throughout the narrative. Both actors are excellent, bringing their characters to life vividly and engaging the audience's sympathy even when they do terrible things. In fact, one of the most underrated accomplishments of Rome is its depiction of a time when morality was very different to now. Many of the major characters murder or betray others for the most trifling of reasons, where the consequences, if any, are more a product story requirements than the legal system. Yet the characters remain compelling and watchable.

The are very few criticisms to be made of the first season of Rome (*****). History is sometimes condensed or dramatised for the purposes of clarity, and the sex and violence may be offputting to some, but the writing, acting, production values and pacing of events is superb. The story is riveting, even when it's ending (the first season ends on the Ides of March, 44 BC) is known in advance. The first season is available on DVD both by itself (UK, USA) and as part of the Complete Rome box set (UK, USA).

At least one of the producers of Rome is in contention to work on the forthcoming HBO version of A Game of Thrones, which is most welcome news. If HBO are even half as successful with that adaption as they were with Rome, it will be an excellent series.