Aside from the Striders in the city, no. 

Odd. As one example, the various "hold the fort for X amount of time" parts. <--I don't think I've gotten *one* of those on the first try without having to reload at least once.

I get the feeling though, that I'm not making as effective use of my various weapons as I could...maybe I'll try mixing it up more. I also tend to forget about the alt-fire.

Or perhaps I just suck. :) 

I had some problems in "Entanglement", where you have to resist for a time, the zone where there are 3 turrets at your disposal...
When i was becoming to desperate and getting very angry with myself, i used a ridiculous tactic and it worked!!:
After killing 4 or 5 combines or so more or less when they started to knock down my turrets, i decided to hide into one cabin where the turrets where placed originally and simply waited... hehe an infantile tactic but it workedm, sometimes a combine crossed just in front of me and i shooted at him, no problem... i waited listening to the voices of them and Alyx, until finnally i heard her voice calling me, then i dared to get out.
I'll try that part as a brave soldier later, but now i want to finish the game =). 

Yeah, that took a few tries.

[SPOILERS BELOW]

I finally ended up stacking crates which allowed me to climb up on the second floor, and placed the turrets to mow them down as they came up the stairs. That actually made it pretty easy. You have plenty of time, since the soldiers don't actually spawn in until you grab the third turret... 

On that part, you can climb up to the first floor on one side with crates and the grav gun, before the combine get there, take the turrets with you, and just wait in the back while the turrets kill them off (ocasionaly they will lob a grenade up there, which might tip over the turrets, but just put them back up, or even better, blow the grenades outta the sky with the grav gun...).

There's another turret part, where u can stop the combine soldiers from getting near you by blocking the passages with tables or other junk lying around... "Oh no boss! There's a wooder table in the way! it's at least 1 cm thick, what will we do?!?" smart AI my ass... �_� 

How didn't i think about it?!, Maybe i'm aging... I'll try that as soon as i'll finish the game.

I had thought about that way of avoiding the grenades and however never did it, don't know why, i'll have to prove it too.
Another cool use with the gravity gun is to capture a "Man Hack" (those little flying bastards) and throw it against a combine. 

Just walking around holding onto one and using it like a chainsaw is pretty cool too. 

All i did was set up two turrets to guard one door, and the other turret and myself to guard the other door. If one gets knocked down by a grenade, pick it up again. 

medium difficulty. 

I tried to get up there but couldn't. This was the section that took me the longest...no matter what configuration I setup, I could NOT fucking beat it. Finally I put all three of them in virtually the same spot out of frustration, and I had planned to quit and come back later after that try figuring it wouldn't work. Well of course that configuration worked! 

There's no problem with my nick and your post, I was just ribbing you.

<3 

That bit in HL2, I fucking hated it. I hadn't realised that the turrets could be ressurected, so I was basically being swamped after the first few waves inevitably took out a turret.

After what was probably forty attempts, I gave up, switched the difficulty to easy and went shotgunning. 

BlackDog: I was just messin' back. We have no problems. :)

Shamb: I just finished the game, and oddly enough, I had *far* less trouble with the striders than I did with the "hold the fort" bits. It was a bit of rectal discomfort finding that one crate of rockets that I was supposed to find while being fired upon by everything in the world, and the one coming up behind in the subway tunnel was a bit of a shocker--that one killed me once until I reloaded and ran like a scared weasel to the cover of the building.

I think the only strider that gave me trouble was the last one that you had to take out with the gravity gun/energy balls. It took me three or four tries to get a good safe spot to sit and bank energy balls at him...

I liked the ending a LOT. 

i played that when i first saw hl on a friends laptop. i have no clue what difficulty was set, but even with my 1337 lame q3 aim/movement it was hard. very hard.
maybe cause i refused to hide in a corner and camp. thats probably what made hl2gameplay so bad for me - most of the scenes ive played you just _couldnt_ run around strafing, jumping, tricking cause the ai aims 100% after a short reaction time(at least thats what it felt like[hello snipers]).

oh man, how cool the fights against the soldiers in hl1 were. pity. 

well, the game is meant to be treated a little more realistically than the original, so you're supposed to take cover in houses and whatnot and fight "smart".


yeah, i prefer strafing and going nuts too. ;) 

Actually, in retrospect there were a few damn frustrating sections, I guess I was meaning that the overall standard of the game was fine if you average it out.

Facing the last strider was gay, I quicksaved about 180 times going down the corridor.

As for the turret bit, thank fuck I had some warning about this. I took the tables and filing cabinets and shit and blocked off not one but two of the entrances. Even so it was still pretty annoying. After it was over I stacked X amount of shit to try to get on the second level, but couldn't.

P.S. How the fuck do you right turrets? Pick them up (at the same stupid angle they fell at), then what? Drop them down again? At the same stupid angle they fell at... Never got the hang of that. 

an annoying fact about turrets -- if you pick them up with the gravity gun, they right themselves. If you pick them up with the use key, they don't. 

The big question: is trackmania better than the classic stunts? 

An excellent game, some little details could've been slightly different or better in my opinion, but it's a personal taste question.
Generally, i repeat, excellent, this is between the better games, of course.
I think, it wasn't be strange to see a third part.
I remembered, mainly in the final part, Neo and Trinity comparing with Freeman and Alyx, it's not the same story, of course, but i noticed a slight touch 

Facing the last strider was gay, I quicksaved about 180 times going down the corridor.

Heh. I quicksaved on the ledge before you jump down and tried a few things. I died once normally, then ran like hell to the other end, hoping for a hallway or cover of some kind (and noticed the energy ball stream things), then died. Then I just sat, mystified, for about 2 or 3 minutes thinking "WTF. This is kinda shitty." and finally realized that I was supposed (?) to get behind the cover near the energy streams, and grab them and bank them. It worked but it took me a couple more tries. I kept leaving a shin exposed or whatever. A designer needs a groin punch from that scenario, IMO.

cyBeAr: Are you talking about: http://www.kalpen.de/stunts/downldst.htm ? (I did a little googling.) I don't think I ever played it. You can basically do everything in the demo I linked above that you can in the game.

There's a race mode (trying to get a medal time upon completion), a puzzle mode (assembling a certain number and type of track sections to connect a start and end point in the fastest way to get a medal time), and a general sandbox mode that lets you make your own race or puzzle tracks and save them off for others. The resulting map files are tiny (~10KB or less), so are easy to exchange with others.

Jaj: Yeah, I got a slight Neo and Trinity vibe every now and then too, now that I think about it. The whole "good luck, hope we don't die so I'll see you again" thing. 

Stunts!

i love this game! i remember way back i had discovered that, although the game didn't allow you to save a track unless it was closed off (ie: was a closed loop from start to finish) if you did a small oval, you can then fill the map with any junk you wanted without having to connect anything. i love this game! ^_^ 

If you liked that game, then you very well might like Trackmania--it looks similar. (I just spent most of the afternoon making a new track for it.)

On the other hand, you might hate Trackmania with a passion, and hope that I die in a fire after trying it. Either way.

Demo link to save you from searching back a few posts, if you do feel like trying it:
http://www.noos.fr/animation/trackmania/TrackManiaDemoInternet_Setup.exe 

I guess I'll have to try tackmania sometime. 

Trackmania may seem cool in theory, but when played online it is nothing but an excersise in frustration. All the player made tracks are nothing but poorly designed and executed mazes. I consider this a puzzle game more than any kind of arcade racer. The game might be some fun on a decent track, but the community that surrounds this title is terrible. You should never be forced to start a race over a check point because you failed to make a rediculous jumps. This isn't a racing title.

And pjw I don't hate you, but it wasn't anything like you described to me. 

Hmmn.
I've spent all of ten minutes playing the game online. Perhaps that's part of the reason for the differing experiences? I rarely play online anyway--most people are lame and annoying, unless it's a specific group or restricted community.

There are a lot of horrible, horrible player-made tracks out there--you are quite correct. It is not as technical to make levels for this game as it is for FPS games, thus lots of really abominable shite made by silly twats.

The majority of the fun for me has been searching out the really good tracks (Trackmania Exchange: http://www.tm-exchange.com/ ), and playing them, and making my own tracks for it--since it requires a wholly different kind of design skill to make a good track for this than it does to make a good FPS level.

It's good to know you don't hate me. :)