Say what you like about Valve, they make the trains run on time. Eventually. Half-Life 2 got a small surprise update yesterday which changed the speed of a train in the 2004 shooter’s driving sequence (the level called “Highway 17”). This change will let you once again beat said train in a game of chicken that it has been winning against most players for nearly two decades.
“Restored speed of the train near the end of Highway 17 to better match the original shipped difficulty,” the somewhat belated patch notes read, alongside a couple of other fixes.
The train in question approaches the player head-on during a tense moment in the dune buggy level, and you hear its whistle through the fog before you even see it coming. In the original release, you could easily boost on towards the train, and nip out of its way just in time, as you can see here.
But when the driving physics were updated alongside the release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two back in 2007, that feat became much, much harder (though not impossible). The strategy then became reversing and waiting until the train passed. It’s likely if you’ve only played the shooter since then, you’ll think of this as the only way to progress. But now we know: you were always meant to beat that train.
There were a couple of other corrections to the beloved FPS. “Fixed missing collision that was allowing NPCs to shoot through some walls in Entanglement,” the patch notes continue. “Fixed issue where Alyx could obstruct the player’s path when boarding the teleporter near the end of Entanglement.”
I don’t know about wallhacking Combine soldiers, but the latter bug regarding a stubbornly unmoving Alyx is not a long-standing bug, but a trickling hangover from Half-Life 2’s big 20th anniversary re-jig last year. While I like to imagine there is a lone caretaker employed solely to give the venerable manshoot laughably nitpicky tweaks and bugfixes long after its debut, it’s more likely that these are just the last few tidy-up jobs following the anniversary update.
After all, it isn’t the first time we’ve seen the game get re-tweaked because of its birthday makeover. We previously reported how one invisible wall in a sewer pipe was removed because it annoyed speed runners. I wonder how these latest fixes help or hinder such sprinters.
Still, it is fun to imagine that one dedicated person at Valve, whether they exist or not, who goes to work every day frustrated and disgusted at the missing collision walls of the tenth level in a shooter from 20 years ago, who daily boots up the Radiant level editor to fiddle with its Windows XP-era interface just to fix a problem few other souls care about. Godspeed the invisible Half-Life 2 caretaker.
