Box Tactics

I wish Kevin Costner would spy on me sometimes.

The example I'm most aware of is the FOV change in the midst of the Uplink episodes, but I figure it should be pretty easy to patch that up with a video transition.

Maybe annually. I seriously doubt Ross is going to do something like this; it's just not that important and it clearly requires a lot of extra work. I'm not sure if he even still has the files. But that's where motivated fans come in. New footage would absolutely have to be recorded in-game to account for the gaps, if you wanted to do it seriously.

Hey! I have a vision for a sort of fan-recut of the Freeman's Mind series. It's somewhat akin to the "Freeman's Mind Movie"-type ideas that get posted around here, but I have more specific ideas on how to bring it about. Unfortunately, my computer is a colossal pile of shit, which has become slowly less able to play video games over its lifespan, let alone film them. However, I figure that I might be able to bring about this vision, nonetheless, through the magic of organization. My Freeman's Mind recut, designed to turn the entire series into one conglomerated thing-to-watch, entails the following steps: 1.Remove all introductory sequences and credits sequences from the series. Keep Freeman's thoughts over the credits sequences; just delete the video aspect of it. 2.Produce a new single introductory sequence and a new single credits sequence. The credits sequence in episode 68 might fit the latter? I'm not certain. If not, though, I'm sure we could just add some credits to it to cover those gaps. 3.Where appropriate, film new footage in Half-Life: Source, to smooth the transitions between episodes. This is the hard part, as the new footage, while generally brief, necessarily needs to start identically to where the one episode ends, and end identically to where the other episode starts; we will generally cut off the original footage early, as well, due to fade-outs. Keep in mind background audio during these transitions. Episodes that are separated by teleportation or unconsciousness are freebies; no new footage needs to be filmed! And there you have it! It might be a long and tedious process, but every time a transition between episodes is completed, we'll have advanced. Ignoring the three special episodes, we have 68 episodes and therefore 67 transitions. A considerable number of those transitions are teleportation or unconsciousness; nearly all of the Xen episodes, for example. I think that if enough other people are interested in this we could get it done.

If/when Freeman's Mind comes back, it'd be nice to have some kind of extended monologue for Freeman set during the extended sleep between games.

I do hope we see a Freeman's Mind 2 someday, but no-one is more deserving of a rest than you. Happy trails, and what a great final episode!

I'd like to think that somewhere, in some universe, Willy Wonka Versus Hellraiser is an actual movie you can go to your local cinema to see.

I don't know how they celebrate Christmas in Poland, or if Ross is going about things in a more American way, but I hope Ross is having a great holiday season there!

Ugh, I really hate this trope from the lesser Mind series. I'll admit I enjoyed Shephard's Mind anyway, though.

It's also entirely possible that, rather than Half-Life 2 starting on "Freeman's Mind: Episode 69", it'll start on "Freeman's Mind 2: Episode 1". Or it might not start at all, if Ross wills it.

You're so lucky being married to Ross and stuff.

I prefer a constant flux between calm and collected Freeman and screaming Freeman. So whatever happens, I'm happy!

Yeah, the Nihilanth battle won't fit in a normal-length FM episode, but that doesn't mean it'll be multiple episodes; it means it'll be a longer, special episode.

HL2's music is good, but so was HL1's. Why would Ross undo one of the central aspects of Freeman's Mind, which is altering aspects of the game experience to heighten realism?

One more Xen Island, then the factories, then the Nihilanth.

I lost my shit at that point. Great work as always, Ross. Ditto on both counts. I thought it was kind of interesting that Gordon didn't seem to notice that the Gonarch was producing Headcrabs? If he did, I missed it somehow.

That would also remove quite a lot of extremely good content as well. No, Ross's lines would still be there. There just wouldn't be a fade to black over them.

It's pretty easy to do that in iMovie. It takes a while, that's all, and the tediousness increases for every clip you want to make into a full movie. I guess you'd just need to delete the Freeman head intros... maybe keep one of each alteration, and maybe kill the video but keep the audio for the stingers (The lines Freeman says during the accursed farm logos.) Would be even easier if the intros were uniform- I believe the ones that just had freeman's head were. It'd be much harder if you did what I really wanted, and shot new footage in Half-Life: Source to smooth the episode transitions, so the video only cuts out when it makes sense (when Freeman goes to sleep, for instance).

People keep saying shit like this, and it always strikes me as a relative underestimate of Half-Life's storytelling quality and an overestimate of Half-Life 2's.

Maybe Gordon was too busy hallucinating episode 61.5 to hear the Nihilanth?

I would certainly be delighted to see Freeman's Mind continue to HL2. But it's up to Ross whether to do so or not.

Yeah, the obvious is pretty much that there's some other gravity source far away from the "islands", and the question you should be asking isn't "why can I fall off of the island", it's "why is the island floating". HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT FREEMAN'S IN XEN!!!

Thanksgiving coming in a couple of days. We might wind up being blessed with Xen from our Ross.

Although there's no real point in a Blu-Ray or DVD, I support this project for the simple reason that I'd love someone to smooth out transitions between the Freeman's Mind episodes so I could watch them as a single movie instead of a chopped-up series. At least, when HL1's done, that is.

This is a bad opinion to have. I think you'll like the next episodes, there's a lot more screaming in them than most. This is a good opinion to have. (Don't blow out your voice!)