Half-Life 1 At 200 Ping

When you have over 3000 articles on a single blog, sometimes you forget things. That was the case when I started playing Sven Coop with a new buddy of mine. While me and my friend were struggling getting through the levels, it turns out, we didn’t have to. Because aabicus has written lots of articles about Sven Coop. Had I remembered aabicus’s stellar articles, then my friend and I would have had a way, way easier time. Still, it’s been interesting playing through the original Half Life campaign, but in multiplayer.

It’s oddly stressful yet fun

I should point out, me and my anonymous friend aren’t exactly Half Life veterans. She’s definitely a Half Life 2 veteran, and has been working on all the achievements. I’m a complete noob, and my only saving grace is having watched Freeman’s Mind a ton. Well, I suppose my few hundred hours in Garry’s Mod helped a little.

Either way, we were basically stumbling through Half Life 1. Although, frankly, it wasn’t easy. The thing with Sven Coop is that it’s not 100% like Half Life 1. Things are slightly tweaked, and the weapons are somewhat different. I’m pretty sure the difficulty levels aren’t the same either, but we were playing on hard mode.

Being unable to save is brutal.

A major difficulty is that, because we’re playing in multiplayer, we couldn’t save. If we both died, we’d have to restart at the beginning of the chapter. And, depending on the chapter (and our ineptitude), death could reset a good 10-15 minutes of progress. I suppose, on the plus side, if we fucked up three times, we could skip to the next level. That’s totally what we did with the giant hydra. But frankly, I’ve always hated that level anyway.

Although, really, we were to blame. If I’d taken five minutes to read aabicus’s article on how to play HL1 for free, we’d have worked out how to turn “survival mode” off. Which would mean we’d restart at the last checkpoint, rather than at the beginning of the level. That being said, depending on the level, checkpoints are far and few between. And the level changes aren’t nearly as smooth as they are in Vanilla Half Life. Mainly because there’s giant orange signs saying “level change” as you’re about to change level. That can be forgiven though, since Half Life wasn’t intended to be multiplayer.

The hardest things are doors and ice.

Playing at high ping has its own troubles though, on top of the saving issues. And most of those issues are things that crush and things that move and slide. On Rails was pretty hellish, simply because it was so jittery. At least, it was jittery for me, it was fine for the host player. What was worse though were any areas that were slippery or covered in ice. Rather than sliding smoothly along, I’d jitter back and forth, and it made platforming insanely hard.

Still fun though.

Problems aside, Sven Coop is a ton of fun, and it’s a completely new experience. Sure, the game is mostly identical to vanilla Half Life, but two brains are better than one. And two guns are CERTAINLY better than one!