Punished Obesity

I like HL2 for it's art style and environment. But for gameplay and story, HL1 takes the trophy. The combat and puzzles in HL2 were very underwhelming compared to 1, and the only thing that really helps it stand out compared to other games is "Wow, we have cool physics!" HL1 on the other hand is more balanced and fairly challenging, not being extremely easy for most of the game and then having random difficulty spikes across the chapters. The story was more nuanced as well, being one of the first games to feature environmental story telling and allowing the player to interpret the situation for themselves. The ending was also perfect, making way for something completely mysterious and ambiguous that leaves you fascinated, when they could have just ended it off with "Congratulations, you saved the world!" HL2 however completely throws the environmental story telling out of the window by forcing in more dialogue sections and having you to drag along a fan-service character for 90% of the levels.

(Pre-Disclaimer: Hey all, I'm fairly new to the forums here so if this topic is something that's been discussed a thousand times over in previous threads, please understand by no means am I in the know here.) Lately I've been seeing a lot of discussion around AI algorithms that can apparently almost perfectly mimic human writing and vocal speech patterns, like ChatGPT for example. Initially, I've had mixed feelings on how these programs will affect us; I don't think by any means are they going to replace people in the creative industry for example. However, what I have started noticing more is the prevalence of fake bait accounts within places like Youtube comments, blog-posts, discussion threads, etc. I know bot accounts have been around since the beginning of the internet; but with the existence of these AIs and the fact that anyone can use them for various purposes, it's starting to make me wonder how long will it take before social-media is completely overrun with non-existent users. I remember reading a post on 4chan a while ago about how someone was using Amazon IP servers to host bot accounts that would engage in entirely artificial conversations on threads with both real users and other bot accounts. As of right now, it's somewhat easy to tell apart a fake account from a real person just by how uncanny and inconsistent the writing in the comments are, but it's obvious enough this technology is only going to get more convincing as time elapses. There's also the proposition that one day governments are going to force people to use a universal internet ID system in order to discern them from bot accounts, which only makes the future seem even more grim and unnerving.