Half-L.A.I.F. 2 - Chapter 4 - Water Hazard
11Half-Life 2 - Looking around is forbidden
My attempt at playing through the entire HL2 series without ever looking around using the mouse or whatever input methods you could think of.
This is a segmented run, not aiming for speed, but merely to get through. Each video starts where the last one left off. If you see any weird cuts, it's because of Source's save stutter. Similarly, some graphical errors occur due to reloading saves.
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3VOvhaRTDJMAqMJv_WqdudGi8WH0IPNw
2:22 canals_07
3:20 First gate
5:24 canals_08
5:48 Second gate
6:56 canals_09
8:20 canals_10
10:38 canals_11
12:43 Airboat gun
14:10 canals_12
16:50 Helicopter skip - near canals_13 transition
Logo by 9joao6
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I expected myself to get stuck on this chapter, due to some tough parts, but surprisingly, it all worked out in the end!
All skips that I did are required, because the fights of the "regular" route would be impossibly hard without turning.
The first gate trick was already showcased in several HL2 speedruns, but the extra challenge of shooting a 10 pixels tall barrel comes when you can't look around. The spot I chose for shooting was basically the only one that let you high enough, and it used an angle of 174.6.
We can actually change our view's pitch using the airboat, but it isn't reliable and so having a route which does not require specific pitch values is helpful.
The second gate is circumvented entirely, also similar to older speedruns. I recreated the scene with triggers visible, to make it easier to understand.
By leaving the airboat and re-entering it after it has passed the trigger, we trick the game into not triggering the gate to close. That's because the camera motion of getting into the airboat is just a fancy transition - the player actually teleports into the airboat the moment you press E on it.
The hardest part of this chapter was the helicopter fight skip. A recreation with triggers is included here as well.
If we were to walk into the trigger, the Hunter-Chopper fight starts - impossible for us. It stretches across the entire playable area, meaning we can't go around it. Additionally, it is incredibly thick, so we can't do the trick exactly like with the second gate.
Good for us, however, is the fact that the trigger doesn't reach into the water. A straight path from one side of the trigger to the other doesn't exist, but we can barely get close enough to the border of the trigger when pushing the airboat past it and entering it from below.
I shoot the airboat with the SMG, because it has enough knockback to slowly push the airboat to where we want it to be. Grenades would make it go flying, which is hard to control.
For reference, the trigger starts at Z -484 (use cl_showpos 2, because 1 uses eye position), and I tried aligning myself to the position X -5183 and Y -1045. Straight ahead is the longest deep passage below the trigger. There is another passage further to the right of it, but it is harder to navigate due to the slope angle changes.