15 Comments

1. PlanetPhillip

   15th August 2015 at 9:07 am

   

   I hated this.

   So, the question is: Why the heck did Phillip give this a Maybe?

   Because if you like this sort of never Ending maps then you might enjoy this. There is very little time between pressing the red button and the baby dying – maybe 3 seconds, so there is very littlr tactical interst – at least for me.

   I can’t believe that the counter has six digits, that’s 999,999 and there is NO WAY that anybody could be that patient, good or even interested long enough to reach that score (yes, that’s a subtle challenge ther!).

   All in all, not much interst for me and I don’t get the “The Stanely Parable” reference in the readme as I haven’t played the retail game.

   Play this at you own risk. I suspect most of us will be baby killers.

   Installed:
   Using Gauge

   Difficulty Played At:
   Medium

   Playtime:
   3 Minutes

   Reply
   1. PlanetPhillip

      15th August 2015 at 12:26 pm

      I played the mod and didn’t like it.

      Reply
   2. Bolx

      15th August 2015 at 11:11 pm

      Thanks Kiwec, I have to assume you are being ironic/sarcastic in your post?
      I haven’t and won’t be playing the mod thanks to the video you shared.
      The problem for me is that it is something that only a few artyfarty pretentious more education than sense type’s will like.
      OK. so lets see (based on the video), the author did not have the skill to make a baby or a puppy in the HL style! The author had no inkling or realisation that the Half-Life series is a GAME.
      For a long time I used Rogat as a description of a BAD mod/map, this is now my description for as bad as it gets.

      Reply
      1. Maki

         16th August 2015 at 12:02 am

         I wouldn’t call Stanley Parable pretentious at all. It’s basically a satirical look at the illusion of choice in video games, and whether or not something is really a choice if there’s an elaborate scripted outcome regardless of what you do.

         Back when Stanley was being made, a lot of triple-As were obsessed with the concept of choice. It was a big selling point for things like BioShock and Mass Effect and it still is. Typically, it’s a moral choice, good or evil. But a choice which, in the long run, rarely made any meaningful difference. They wanted to appeal to your inner smart-aleck who thought you could get one over on the developers and outsmart their story. But if you’re following their scripted outcome either way, was it really a choice after all? It’s still their story, not yours. They simply let you pretend that you had a say in it.

         What makes Parable unpretentious is the method is uses to explore this. It’s satirizing the whole idea by taking it to an extreme and showing how silly it is, rather than being condescending and “thou shalt not” about it.

         It’s a game where the Narrator has his own ideal story, but the player is constantly given the ability to defy him and go another way. But no matter how flustered the Narrator becomes over your insubordination, you’re still trapped in his story either way. The choice to be free of the Narrator is an illusion. The Narrator always wins.

         When you really get right down to it, this is exactly what the G-Man is talking about at the end of Half-Life 1. And again at the end of Half-Life 2 when he talks about the “illusion of choice.” This is a running theme in Half-Life’s story – the question of whether or not Freeman has a meaningful choice in anything he does, or if he’s simply being led around by forces beyond him.

         In the context of Stanley, the baby game comes about in the Narrator’s desperate attempt to invent a more interesting game with action and danger and most importantly, gameplay. He’s not very good at it, which is why everything is covered in dev textures and why the only “gameplay” involves hitting a button over and over again. Afterward, you’re supposed to rate his game.

         The player is not expected to stand there for hours doing it. The player is free to move on and visit… some other games. However, if they decide to play the Narrator’s lame excuse for a game, they built an ending around that. Because that comes back to the whole inner smart-aleck thing. You want to waste your time playing this intentionally dumb little game? Fine, be that way…

         … but don’t think for a minute that you’ve outsmarted the Narrator. 🙂

         Now, whether or not that humorous approach works depends a lot on the player. I personally thought it was funny, but I enjoy that kind of dry humor. Phillip found it boring to listen to the Narrator drone on and on, and that’s fair enough. Humor is a subjective thing. My only purpose in writing all this is to explain what Stanley is talking about.

         Reply
         1. Bolx

            16th August 2015 at 8:24 pm

            @Maki.
            Call it humour or satire, if you need to go into such a long explanation to justify it then the joke was obviously not funny in the first place! The Stanley Parable was a great piece of work for those who want to philosophise about games and how they should be made, but the base human instinct in FPS’s is ‘I want to kill something’ and to hell with the psychology behind it. At the end of the day the HL series is just a game, something we play for escapism, not something we need to think deeply about.

            Reply
            1. Maki

               17th August 2015 at 12:32 am

               I wasn’t trying to “justify” anything. I was trying to provide context to something you were bashing that you never even played.

               It’s a bit like showing the infamous crate jumping sequence from Half-Life 1 without any context and concluding that the entire game must suck based on that one scene alone.

               Reply
               1. Bolx

                  17th August 2015 at 11:46 pm

                  If you are referring to The Stanley Parable, yes I have played it. If you are referring to Baby Game then no I haven’t played it as the video Kiwec linked to was all I or anyone needed to know about how it functioned!
                  The Stanley Parable is akin to The Emperor’s New Clothes, it was about the blindingly obvious that in a game we THINK we have choices but we choose to ignore reality.
                  We don’t play games to reach a higher level of understanding, we play games for entertainment!

                  Reply
                  1. Anon_1397845

                     18th August 2015 at 3:59 am

                     I’m pretty sure The Stanley Parable does give you loads of choice on what to do and the entertainment comes from the jokes and bizarre endings that are littered throughout the game.

                     Reply
                  2. Mr.Walrus

                     18th August 2015 at 11:26 pm

                     @Bolx
                     Considering the vast array of games that exist (first person shooter, strategy, online competitive games, exploration games, building games, horror, point-and-click, puzzle games, adventure games, and even philosophical games) I think that trying to generalize why humans play games is a bit difficult. Even if the reason can be broadly summarized as “entertainment”, different people find different things entertaining, and some people find philosophy/analysis entertaining or at least engaging.

                     There’s a certain demographic that’ll certainly enjoy Stanley Parable because it’s sort of like a “study of gaming”, analyzing the concept of choice, philosophizing about how games work (and maybe free will/life in general), has dry humor, etc. and that appeals to some people. It’s got less straightforward, blood-pumping exciting entertainment value than a shooter game, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% flat-out not entertaining; it’s simply entertaining in a different way. Sort of like how some people enjoy watching a science documentary more than a fast-paced war movie, or reading a book about philosophy rather than an action novel. Not to say that one is better than the other- personally I like both action/adventure/shoot em’ up games like HL as well as philosophy/abstract/humor games like SP- but bashing a game and calling it pretentious just because it doesn’t have the same kind of entertainment value as shooter games seems a bit silly :/

                     Reply
      2. Anon_1397734

         16th August 2015 at 12:45 am

         @Bolx What even?

         Reply
2. Anon_1397742

   16th August 2015 at 5:46 am

   I het that this was probably just something for the author to make, but the baby game in TSP was meant to be dull and not fun so the player would just give up and let the rest of the ending take place. It kinda defeats the joke if you turn it into an actual game.

   Reply
3. 2muchvideogames

   15th February 2016 at 5:21 am

   

   Follow my journey as I go down the list of source mods at http://www.runthinkshootlive.com/hl2/

   This is the 4th map on the list.

   Single gimmick map. Sounds cool perhaps, but the button consistently stops working after some time period into the game, like maybe equivalent to the time it takes for around 30 button presses. Maybe I missed some additional instructions, but map isn’t interesting enough for me to find out.

   Whether you think stanley parable is a tryhard pretentious game is based on your own personality. I don’t theres much to do if you want to get ppl to understand your impression.

   Reply
4. Hec

   19th February 2016 at 11:26 am

   

   So I think this is possibly the one and only, “dark-humor” mod around. And I don’t think this map was intended to be an humorist one.

   Just one weird map unique in its own kind…

   That’s all, I didn’t liked at all.

   Installed:
   Using Gauge

   Difficulty Played At:
   Medium

   Playtime:
   1 Minute

   Reply
5. Micila Micillotto

   31st August 2016 at 1:15 pm

   

   I spend 10 minutes of my life playing this…
   I have no idea if the author made this to have fun of kids or to send us a message
   Anyway, I think this map needs to be played with friends like a cell phone game.
   5/10 I like the spawning system!

   Installed:
   Using Gauge

   Difficulty Played At:
   Hard

   Playtime:
   10 Minutes

   Reply
6. Marsh

   14th October 2018 at 4:23 am

   how do i give 6 stars

   Reply

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