Unless you live in a cave in the mountains and have just returned to civilisation (I used that word reluctantly!) and this is the first website you have checked, you will no doubt have heard all about Pokemon Go.
I have got almost no idea how Pokemon Go exactly works, nor do I want to, so please don’t explain, but here is how I see half-Life Go working.
At various locations around , well, everywhere, are hidden various Half-Life enemies. You job is to kill or avoid them. For example, when you are in 5 metres of a headcrab your phone starts to make that purring sound that headcrabs make (Listen here Bets to open in a new tab). Upon lifting your phone up and scanning the area, when you are facing the headcrab it jumps and screams at you. The only way to kill it, is to position it at your feet and kick it, making sure the camera sees it happen.
With other enemies, you must use your phone as a gun. In some cases you must run away. There would be ammo caches scattered around the area. For example, if you saw a strider you would know that there is a rocket launcher nearby, as well as some rockets.
Players could locate Easter eggs of extra caches buy looking in groups i.e. the caches only appear if there are two or more “rebels” with 2 metres of each other.
I suppose you could buy extra weapons, ammo or range detection and I assume you can do those things in the Pokemon version.
Anyway, would you play it?
What other Half-Life inspired features would you add?
Would you play Half-Life Go
- Maybe, baby. (31%, 33 Votes)
- Heck, No. (28%, 30 Votes)
- Yes, definitely. (41%, 43 Votes)
Total Voters: 106
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Probably not. Pokemon Go is chewing people’s lives away, and some people do wander to the wrong neighborhoods, or even while driving while they do it.
There are so many different possible new ways of expanding the HL universe into new gameplay, but this way shouldn’t be one.
Pokemon Go is going to provide many hours entertainment for everyone.. even people who never heard of Pokemon Go.
It is already used by criminals to lure weak nerdy kids to remote locations were good bonuses can be given so they can be robbed and bitch slapped for the idiots they are.
It’s going to be funny. Every time there’s a new craze like planking there’s always people who end up getting killed by performing silly stunts.
Recently.. the amounts of people killed using their phones on streets and not playing attention to their surroundings has increased so much that several Governments, such as the Australians have started to install warning lights on the pavement next to road crossings etc..
The fallout from Pokemon Go is going to be sad, tragic yet hilarious.
Natural selection at work. I would bet a small amount that next years Darwin Awards will feature many Pokemon Go fatalities. 🙂 < --- Yes, a smiley
Update – http://news.sky.com/story/nspcc-wants-uk-release-of-pokemon-game-delayed-10500574
ROFL.
And I love the last part –
[i]Niantic had previously been criticised for the game’s privacy policy, which had allowed access to each player’s entire Google account. It altered this feature the next day.[/i]
Icing on the cake 🙂
I guess it’s like that geocaching thing. Half Life Go! Somewhere on planet Earth a copy of HL3 is hidden, who will find it first? 😀
It is finally found, but wait… Spy maps!
Pitchforks are sharpened as the torches are lit! 😀
I think this answers the question: https://twitter.com/LDMythos/status/752891357711204352
I hadn’t seen that. Promise I didn’t steal your idea.
Oh, I believe you! It’s not “my” idea, I’m sure a few people have thought about it. I just thought it was funny that we both thought of it!
The ONLY benefit I really see about this craze is that it is getting kids off their butts in front of their screens to get outside, walk around and exercise. Unfortunately, I think that many players will be so lost in their phone that they’ll ignore their surroundings entirely. And I now see that businesses can pay to become a stop, like McDonalds.
I worry that folks are going to get seriously hurt or accidentally hurt others, while driving, while entering seedy areas, while not paying attention.
PP, I think I’d rather see HL3 go the VR route in the safety of your own home than try and “take it to the streets”.
Pokemon Go’s popularity is in many ways a reaction to all the horrible news coming out lately. People are fed up with the state of things right now and very much want to participate in something simple and fun. People are already zombies on their smartphones, so I don’t think Pokemon Go really makes it worse.
It’s curious what effect this will ultimately have at Nintendo, who seems to have pulled another miracle from the edge of defeat. While he was loved by gamers, Japanese investors weren’t fond of the late Satoru Iwata because he didn’t want to pursue the mobile market as aggressively as they wanted him to. Now that Pokemon Go is a certified hit – and one that wouldn’t have been possible on Nintendo’s consoles alone – one wonders what this means going forward for a company that is in transition. I would hope we don’t lose Nintendo as the whimsical hardware maker that keeps us guessing, rather than the predictable Microsoft and Sony, but the “we told you so” moment is very clear.
I don’t have a smartphone, per se, so I couldn’t participate anyway. I value my time away from the computer, off-the-grid so to speak.
I recently got a new phone after my 12yr old one died (well the battery did) and I am having trouble getting used to it. It is a Sony M4 Aqua and I haven’t yet learned to walk along a street with earphone’s in looking down at the screen oblivious to all around me, I feel such a failure!!!
With Pokemon Go maybe I can learn to walk into people, lampposts and busy roads in the full knowledge I am not at fault.
As soon as Half-Life Go is released, I will head for my local hardware store, guided by my phone (even though I know where it is), buy a crowbar and get started. Any enemy that shows up on my screen is going to get it big time. I shall wield my crowbar like a real Free Man, no headcrab or zombie will survive and when I eventually look up from the screen I shall let out a mighty exclamation of:
OOPS!
I will admit that I downloaded Pokemon GO (before the official UK release) because I like the concept. It’s simple and fun, a lot like the recent craze with trading card games.
That said, I’m old enough to be responsible when walking and using my phone, so I’m not going to walk into anything or fall off a bridge any time soon.
Half-Life GO, if it were just a simple reskin of Pokemon GO would have the amusement factor, but would get old fast. Not many creatures in Half Life compared to Pokemon’s 150 after all.
The game you described seems far too complex by comparison, so I would have to pass on that one. 😛
What if it was something like, the streets are full of Xen aliens post-Black Mesa Incident (and pre-Combine) and you’re cleaning them up? So the objective is not that you catch them all, but rather to clean up locations from infestation. That’d fit the Half-Life universe and lore perfectly, especially since we know the Portal Storms kept bringing aliens to Earth.
Also, when I mentioned this on Twitter, I was thinking in much simpler ways than Phillip’s “kick headcrabs” idea (which may be a bit ambitious for current tech, but I like it!). Essentially, you’d get a crowbar and you could whack enemies or protect yourself from attack. I also think you could perhaps get guns somewhere and use them instead until ammo runs out (and that’s where the ‘free-to-play’ aspect could come in: virtual gun shops where you could get them).
I’m really surprised by all the Pokemon Go hype! It must be connected to the Pokemons themselves because while I can’t play the new game on my old smartphone, I already played something similar years ago. Only then you were just looking for ghosts to catch:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spectrekking.full
Well, I would think that it is mostly down to Nintendo’s marketing. Niantic made another game using the same tech previously called Ingress and it seems to have a similar number of downloads (on Google Play at least) but I sure as Hell had never heard of it.
That game attracted the Secret World crowd almost instantly, I know this because I know a LOT of those folks.
What surprises me is that Google didn’t automatically depopulate areas which would logically be off limits (like public courts, funeral homes, that kind of thing) because they *have* all that information as it ties directly to their maps. I’m sure that it’ll get refined a little over the next few weeks – the game’s only been out for a week, so it’s impossible to say what the longer term uses or limits might be.
I’m surprised about all this hype, it must be a Pokemon thing! Because I played a very similar Android app years ago already in which you catch ghosts and it never got that kind of hit:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spectrekking.light
As a Half-Life fan I would say NO…. But then again, when I think of those cute little headcrabs jumping around the city (or your own hose)… What a trip! 🙂
Either way, hell to the yes.
A ‘Lambda Locator’ game would be fun, though probably incredibly dangerous because of course where were all the lambdas in the game? lol! Terrifying scary dangerous locales, right?
I like the headcrab idea, though I’d say you’d get a crowbar ‘weapon’ like the pokeballs are for the Go game, or a grabbity gun and a number of puntable items to hit them.
Crate Crusher! Not literally of course, but boxes and whatever, to break open for rewards.
Now I want this!
How about this: You turn on your cell phone to play HL-Go at 3:00 a.m. and the first thing you see is the G-man standing in the middle of your living room… What would you do? 😀
LOL well… um, knowing me, I’d say screw the fake crowbar and grabbity gun I’m tackling him myself 😀
Gman sighting game, lol that would be sooooo awesome.
How about ‘Call of Duty’ Go? The app would come with a replica assault rifle and a balaclava and would send you to famous landmarks such as Trafalgar Square in London for example where you would foil imaginary terrorist attacks.
What could possibly go wrong??? 😀
Yes, I don’t see any downsides.
Square-Enix had a neat series of mobile games with “Go” in their title, Hitman Go for example, which resembled miniature figurines in a turn-based board game. It was a really cool looking style.
I have better things to do instead of walking everywhere with my phone catching virtual creatures, my GF does play the game (because she is a fan of the universe and the games). Also, having the GPS (and the camera if you disable augmented reality) always on drain the battery faster (on all phones), some people even bought those “external batteries” kit to play longer.
As for the Google thingy, this is why I never use the “connect with Google/Facebook…” function.
Something that disgust me are those people who catch Pokemons inside private properties (could be factories, enterprises, parkings…) and public (police stations, hospitals…) fences. The game should have taken those in account from day one.
For educational purposes, I’ve decompiled the APK but I couldn’t learn anything from the game itself (the Java stuff is obfuscated except the public libraries), I just know that the game uses Unity with a skinned Google Maps.
The latest trend in cellular mass hysteria looks like it came straight out of the In Mouth of Madness, “do you play Pokemon Go?”