It sucks when you love a multiplayer game that no one else ever wants to play. As a kid I loved the card game War, but no one would ever play it with me, probably because it’s a genuinely terrible game which is entirely luck-based, so it’s really just gambling (which may have been why I loved it, now that I think about it). As a teenager I always wanted to play Running Bases (Pickle) but everyone else was into shooting hoops or touch football. Lame.
And apart from a brief period in December of 2004, very few of my friends ever wanted to play Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. It’s my favorite multiplayer mode ever, mostly because it was hilarious. Using the gravity gun to fling furniture, rusty bicycles, and explosive barrels at my friends—then watching them go sprawling, accompanied by those violently goofy Source Engine ragdoll noises: thumpa-dumpa-doompf!
I remember laughing so hard one night during a particularly chaotic match where five or six of us died to physics objects in such rapid succession that I couldn’t even see the screen, my eyes were so filled with tears.
But there was another reason I loved it beyond the slapstick comedy of watching someone die because they got hit in the head with a flying toilet. I was good at it.
Like, I’m not terrible at multiplayer shooters, but I’m not great, either. Middle of the pack, at best. My biggest problem is that no matter how much I play, I just never get any better and just about everyone else does. In the early days of the TF2 beta, I was pretty darn good as a Demoman main. A month later, I was roughly average. Beyond that, I was dogshit because everyone else had improved and I simply never did.
But in Half-Life 2 I was routinely at the top of the leaderboards after a match. Often number one. That never happened in any other game I played, which was why it was so heartbreaking when everyone quickly drifted away from HL2: DM, back to Counter-Strike and other shooters I was rotten at. Come back, I implored them. Let me bask just one more day in the glow of toilet-related deaths.
There wasn’t anything particularly special about Half-Life 2: Deathmatch: it was just a bunch of arenas built from hunks of Half-Life 2 campaign maps with a few weapons scattered around them. The secret to my success was simple, though: forget the weapons. Forget all the weapons. You spawn with the deadliest tool ever invented: the gravity gun. That’s all you need.
While just about everyone else dashed around looking for an MP7 or pulse rifle or rocket launcher, I ran around looking for a file cabinet or a radiator to pick up and throw. And since the levels were filled with physics props, it wasn’t more than a second or two before I’d have something heavy hovering in front of me, which gave me two advantages. First, it would act as a shield to stop any bullets being fired at me, and second, it was a one-hit-kill projectile. I’d spot someone, block their fire while running toward them to get into range, then knock them into the next life with a metal bedframe or an office chair.
A metal desk, when flung from a gravity gun, is basically an AoE attack: anyone even close to it is getting murked.
It was perfect for someone with relatively few skills, because you need good aim to kill someone with a gun but you don’t need any aim at all to kill someone with a hotel sign the size of a diving board. A metal desk, when flung from a gravity gun, is basically an AoE attack: anyone even close to it is getting murked. Plus, physics props are reusable. As long as an object wasn’t made of wood, like a crate, it would never break. I could carry the same radiator around with me for most of the match, fling it to kill someone, grab it back up, and fling it at someone else. To my mind, there were no traditional guns at all in Half-Life 2: Deathmatch.
The gravity gun-only strategy wasn’t perfect, of course. I’m pretty sure a rocket hitting whatever you were carrying would still usually kill you, and while I did manage every now and then to hit a rocket out of the air by flinging my projectile at just the right moment, it was usually too late to do anything if someone launched one at you. There’s another problem with only using objects: it’s not all that easy to see when you’re running around with a file cabinet hovering a few inches in front of your face.
Another issue was that in moments of desperation I’d try to suck up some object to throw and only find something ineffective, like an ammo box (which didn’t help me because I had no weapons) or a health kit. If I was at full health, I wouldn’t absorb the kit, so I’d reflexively fire it at another player. If they were at full health it’d bonk off them harmlessly, but if they were wounded it would heal them. Not a great move, throwing hit points at enemies. Funny, though!
And I obviously wasn’t the only one using the gravity gun in a match. But I found that if most people flung something at me and missed, or I’d caught the item they’d thrown, they’d switch to one of their other weapons. Always a mistake. If you’d had your gravity gun out you could have caught the spare tire I just bonked you to death with!
On the plus side, unlike a startling number of less-than-popular multiplayer games these days, Valve never mothballed Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. I don’t have to just sit here reminiscing about my glory days, because there are still people playing it. (Just not my friends.) Maybe to celebrate Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary, I’ll hop into a few matches this weekend, chuck some toilets around, and see if I still wind up at the top of the leaderboard.