Man of Few Words

To read this post on my new site, please go to http://www.alatartales.com/?p=6

 

I’m going to shock the world here, as I know it’s a very uncommon thing to do, but I am quite a big fan of the Half Life series, even those bastardized Black Mesa spin-offs made by Gearbox! My love for it forces me to get a hard-on if anybody mentions crowbars and make everybody’s favorite theoretical physicist my player skin on Minecraft!

Gordon Freeman: The secret love child of Gregory House and Master Chief

 He is adored all over the world for being a man who nerds can happily project their soft, flabby selves on to, and a standard-holder for the “every-man” giving the dystopian, Orwellian aliens what for! The last 110 or so words may lead any human with an ounce (The British Empire is still going strong over here) of logic guess that I will lend my voice to the infinite, heavenly choirs singing their praises to The One Free Man, which on any other day I would!

But lending a voice is precisely what Gordon doesn’t do.

I’m not sure who they could get to voice him… from my previous comparison, Hugh Laurie would be prefect in a film adaptation if he has a decent American accent, but I understand that in the 90′s voices weren’t all that great in games. The NPC’s (all four of them) struggled as it was! But what about Half Life 2 and the Episodes? A risky move by Valve, but they found good voices actors for all their other games! Surely Gordon just seems ignorant?

I’m not kidding, either. As a scientist, he could get away with being quiet – he had to rush to put his suit on and drive a very dangerous, untested, unstable yellow crystal into an ominous green laser that had the smallest possibility of ripping a hole in between two dimensions to unleash a host of frightened, murderous, Shakespearean wizards; leading to the US Army being sent in to kill every living thing in the facility!!! He was a busy guy.

Watch the video from 2:20. Your mentor – and also the guy who got you a job – (or perhaps one of his many clones in this sixth-generation game) says hello to you in the hallway. What would Gordon do?

 

Walk right past and ignore the fucker, that’s what!

As I said before, voice acting isn’t as good as it is now. Fast forward ten years to Half Life 2, where Freeman is a symbol of hope and freedom in a cruel, not-quite-1984-Nazi-ish future.

A guy on the train says some random bullshit to you. Small talk. Fine ignoring him, he’s a stranger and all!

Oh, a woman at the station is crying about her husband who may or may not be dead. Maybe we should offer a quick wo- NOPE! Off we go to ignore some people who kind of recognise you!

You get rescued by your old security guard friend, Barney Calhoun. Off Gordon hops without a word of thanks or mentioning that Barney doesn’t really need to owe him a beer after saving him from the menacing Civil Protection.

Alyx Vance – a toddler when you last saw her – saves you from a shocking (excuse the pun) ass-beating. Remember, this is the love interest. Give her a hug? Ask for directions? Give any kind of response at all? Are you there, Doc?

Reunite with your mentor, Kleiner, and he, Alyx and Barney have a long discussion about portals, maybe hoping you’ll chip in… Do you notice a pattern here?

It just seems a bit ignorant of him, since he is a hero and a leader of the Resistance and all… What if he actually is a mute though? How does that explain why everybody seems so bloody excited to see him and trail off about how much he is flirting with Alyx and what a pain the whole Combine thing is. It’s only Alyx who notices it (ONCE) and she passes it off as being just shy.

I know there are silent protagonists in other games, such as Metroid and the Resistance series. Then again, Samus is a girl and when she is given a voice, she’s a whiny cow! Let’s stick with “seen and not heard”, eh? Chell didn’t talk at all, but she communicated by jumping, apparently (it’s funny when Stephen Merchant says it, it seems)

Other silent protagonists such as Nathan Hale and Joseph Fuckface-who-shot-Hale Capelli have voices that are used in cutscenes, and that seems to work, kind of? I can kind of relate to them… Better than Marcus Fenix who won’t shut the hell up, the fat bastard!

But for me, Freeman’s lack of dialogue takes me completely out of it. They say it’s so the player can put their own personality into the character, but it just seems unrealistic that everybody can be so chummy with a guy who ignores them, steals their med-kits and ammo, indirectly started this whole mess, went missing for twenty years, blows up casseroles and sends Gnome Chompski and Lamarr into space for the sake of 30 Gamerscore.

Is his face really THAT charismatic?

... Yep.