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Half-Life: the soldiers have arrived

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I still have never completed Half-Life. I must have played through the opening levels multiple times, enjoying the scene setting and the initial escape from the headcrabs. The game is still quite spooky and panic-inducing at times, with mild jump scares and swarms of enemies appearing; the library in Halo is an obvious comparison, but Half-Life’s setting is much more varied and less monotonous than that.

I play the game quite cautiously, conserving ammunition as much as possible but shooting at the enemies from a distance. There are quite a lot of health recharge stations around (as far as I’ve got, at least), and I’m making maximum use of quick save functionality to keep my health high as I work through the levels. I get the feeling that this isn’t the way I’m supposed to play it, and maybe once I’ve completed it once I might be a little more gung-ho and run through the levels, much as I do nowadays with the first three Halo games.

For now, though, I’m enjoying it. I’ve reached the part where the soldiers first appear (in the chapter “We’ve got Hostiles”), and the scientists are overjoyed to be saved … until they aren’t. I’ve made my way up the lift and outside, only to run back into the vents as a helicopter started to attack me. They’re now using laser trip wires to set off sentry guns; I get the feeling they’re not interested in a chat over coffee.

Pokémon Blue: j’ai Mewtwo

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After the credits, I loaded my game to find myself back at my house, where my mum offered me a rest, almost as if nothing had happened. The world seemed unchanged, as if my quest had never taken place. Sure, if I went to the gyms I’m sure I’d see my name listed, always below Quillum, but that was just a small detail.

The real prize was elsewhere, in a cave which had previously been blocked by someone warning me that it contained high-level pokémon and it was too dangerous for me to go in. Hah, no more, I’m the champion of the world, don’t you know? There is no pokémon too mighty for me to beat!

I stopped at a pokémon centre, picked up the master ball I’d been saving, and off I went.

Fighting through the cave was tricky. It was a proper maze, with multiple routes which meant that more than once I ended up back where I’d started. Moreover, the enemies in the cave were exclusively random encounters, with no trainers – meaning that when I quit out due to having sustained too much damage, I had to start again when I reentered, with only my knowledge of the route improving. In other dungeons, the trainers were the most difficult opponents, and once you beat them once, they let you past freely. No such grace from wild pokémon. Luckily, Vaporeon’s attacks were highly effective against many of the pokémon I encountered.

I collected a couple of new pokémon as I progressed, generally evolutions of those I have already captured, as well as some higher level monsters I could possibly use as trades in the future. And eventually I found an opponent standing tall on a mound in the deepest part of the cave.

Zapdos was quite excited

The master ball actually made this a little anti-climactic. There was no attack from the level-70 opponent; no desperate juggling of revives and heals. I threw the ball, Mewtwo got in it.

And I think I’m done. There are quite a few pokémon which I could catch but haven’t, but getting those will require lots of grinding (for evolutions) or random luck (in the Safari Zone) and I have other things to be doing. Farewell, Pokémon Blue, it’s been a blast.

Populous the Beginning: innovation in objectives

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I maintain that this is the best game of all time.

Having passed Bloodlust, I moved onto the next few levels: Middle Ground, Head Hunter, and Unlikely Allies. Having introduced all the mechanics by this point, the game starts to be clever with its objectives. Middle Ground is a level based around the Armageddon spell – being the first to claim it, and building up an army quickly to do so. Head Hunter is a much more varied level, with one tribe (the reds) being overly powerful and looking to obtain Armageddon before others are ready, and this means there is a key objective of getting the shaman up to the stone head before the prayers are completed. Unlikely Allies sees you having to protect the yellows – who are seemingly a lot less capable than in other levels – from red attacks, all while suffering from limited building space.

Middle Ground is probably one of the easier levels, since it’s possible to prevent others from attacking you while also protecting the centre stone head. It’s a symmetric level, and it’s advantageous to encourage the three other tribes to attack each other as a preference. I was able to build a balloon army to carry out skirmishes on the reds and greens, again laying swamps where I knew the red shaman would try to go after being reincarnated. After enough attacks on the other armies (with earthquakes doing a decent amount of damage, I called the Armageddon and won the level.

I took no chances when worshipping the centre stone head.

Unlikely Allies was tricky to start with – it takes a while to build huts and a balloon to transport the shaman, and the first attack on the yellow base was soon after starting. I concentrated on building mana for swamp spells, which I cast on the ramp up to the yellow base, and this alone meant that the red shaman died several times, helping me to grow faster. I used land bridge to block off access to my settlement from the red village (by casting it between two hills), then expanded sideways and installed fire warriors in watch towers along the coasts and on top of the ridge. I then took the fight to the red village, with fire storms and earthquakes destroying the firetraining huts and fire warriors quickly. I was half expecting a plot twist where the yellows suddenly turned on me, but that didn’t happen.

The hardest level was Head Hunter, where my village was in the centre of the other three tribes, and there was an urgency to stop the reds from gaining the Armageddon spell. The greens kept sending boats from the South, so I built a wall of watchtowers manned by fire warriors, and set up a campfire with many warriors and preachers circling. This didn’t help protect from the yellows, who kept landing on the West side, so I again set up defences there. In order to buy myself time to do this, I sent my shaman to hypnotise the red army who was in the way of the stone head, and I cast multiple swamps around the base. It turned into a bit of a war of attrition, renewing swamps and building up my village over and over again. In the end I set up multiple fire warriors in balloons overseeing the stone head, then went off to examine and decimate the yellow and green armies to stop them attacking me. It took four hours in total, reducing the sizes of other armies before I obtained and cast Armageddon myself.

The green army kept on repairing its huts, so I had to send in a ground force

I’ve now completed the four levels at the divergent point on the plan, so next I have the last two levels I can try in any order.

Pokémon Blue: completed!

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Going South seems to have been the right path, as I came across Cinnabar Island, the location of the seventh gym and also a large science laboratory and ruined house. I spent some time exploring the house, then went to the lab and had my fossil and amber studied and converted into pokémon – Kabuto and Aerodactyl. This gave me a couple of well-needed slots in the pokécentre item storage system, but I’m not sure I’ll actually find space for either of the new pokémon in my main team.

I went to Vermillion City, stopping in at my house on the way, and found that the gym leader had returned. It was Giovanni! Shock, amaze, horror. I am sure that the surprise would have had slightly more impact if I haven’t so easily defeated him twice already, and his pokémon roster was largely unchanged. His ground and rock monsters were defeated easily by Vaporeon and Zapdos, and I took the Earth Badge – completing my trophy cabinet – with little difficulty.

Greater difficulty was to come.

By the time I got Gyrados, I didn’t need it any more.

I went along routes 22 and 23, passing the guardians who checked each of the badges in my possession, until I got to the cave system known as Victory Road. Not a road, and not actually the location of victory. I battled through, with Haunter and Vaporeon doing the majority of the heavy lifting, and managed to manipulate the current in the basement to enable me to find Moltres. Tempted as I was to swap the new bird to my team, I had too much emotional connection with Charizard, and fire types aren’t actually as powerful as you’d expect. I found myself at the end of route 23 in the Indigo Plateau, and I healed up, bought a lot of revives, potions, and heals, and I set off for the Elite Four.

On Pokémon LeafGreen I managed to defeat the Elite Four, after many attempts, only to be foiled by the final battle against my rival. That was the furthest I’d ever managed to get, until I managed to complete Pokémon X. As such I was pretty anxious as I made my way into the first battle arena, and this feeling didn’t disappear since Lorelei proved herself to be a formidable foe with her water and ice monsters taking a lot of strategy to take down. Eventually, however, she fell, and the next three trainers were dispatched with comparative ease. Lance was a little tricky, with his dragon-type pokémon, but Dugtrio in particular dealt a lot of damage in each turn.

And then it was on to the champion; my rival who had beaten me to the position. I have no idea why I named him Quillum, but it mattered not. I was expecting an incredibly difficult battle, but I chose my team well so each opponent took a maximum of two hits before fainting.

I won. I beat Pokémon Blue. I saw the credits roll, I had my team entered in the hall of fame, I saw a very definite final screen before the game reset to the title screen.

Zapdos proved to be the key to victory

Of course, that’s not quite the end. I’ve only caught 70 different pokémon of the 150 available, and even if not all of them are going to be obtainable (since I have no friends with the 3DS games) there’s at least one I have my sights on …

Pokémon Blue: j’ai Articuno et Zapdos

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Going South seems to have been the right path, as I came across Cinnabar Island, the location of the seventh gym and also a large science laboratory and ruined house. I spent some time exploring the house, then went to the lab and had my fossil and amber studied and converted into pokémon – Kabuto and Aerodactyl. This gave me a couple of well-needed slots in the pokécentre item storage system, but I’m not sure I’ll actually find space for either of the new pokémon in my main team.

I then tried to head to the gym, only to find out that it was locked and the key wasn’t nearby. It was, in fact, nearby – but in the ruins of the Pokémon Mansion, evidently in an area I hadn’t found. I went exploring again, and almost by coincidence I fell off the edge of one of the upper floors and landed in an area that was otherwise inaccessible. Working through the rest of the mansion – with regular attacks by ponyta and other fiery pokémon – meant that Vaporeon was catching up with Dugtrio as being massively overpowered. I got the key, went to the gym, and Vaporeon killed everything with a mixture of surf and bubblebeam. Seven badges!

The route number to go south of Pallet Town was 21, and usually I would then assume I should be following 22 – which is a route West from Vermillion City. However that route is the path to the Elite Four, and there were parts of the map that I hadn’t explored. In particular, the power plant up in the North East corner; and routes 19 and 20 in the water along the South side. Both of these required a surfing pokémon. I decided to fly1 to Lavender Town first, to visit the power plant.

Unsurprisingly, there were hordes of electric pokémon waiting for me, which would have been scary were it not for Dugtrio, who merrily absorbed attack after attack while digging its way to victory. I collected Raichu here, because my own Pikachu seemed to be taking forever to evolve, as well as a few other electric types. At the end of the power plant I found Zapdos, who took ages to capture; I had to reduce its health slowly using normal attacks, to prevent it fainting, and then I used Weepinbell to send it to sleep to maximise capture chances. Even with a small sliver of health, paralysed and asleep, it still took multiple ultra balls to capture.

From fossilised pokémon to those who can escape even when asleep …

A level 50 Zapdos quickly replaced Pikachu in my party, particularly because it could learn fly and as such overcame one of the key weaknesses of electricity (against ground). At its next level, Zapdos learnt thunder, making it invaluable.

I then flew back down to Cinnabar Island, and set off to the East, with Zapdos and Weepinbell faring well against the water-type enemies. I came to the Seafoam Islands, and thought I needed to battle through the cave to get to the next route. Instead I found Articuno, who again put up a significant resistance to the pokéball before finally being caught. I decided not to add Articuno to my team, however, since it significantly overlapped with Vaporeon, and the quick attacks of the latter were useful for capturing.

Two of the legendary birds caught, then, and I’m not sure where I’ll find Moltres – the obvious place would be around Cinnabar Island, but it’s not there. I think my next stop needs to be the mystery eighth gym leader, in the newly reopened Vermillion City.

  1. This involved swapping one of my team members out to Fearow, who could learn fly, then swapping them back when I got to my destination. ↩︎