6. Every Game Is Riddled With Mistakes (That Valve Left In)
For games that spend so long in development, you'd think Valve would have the time to indulge in some quality assurance testing. And yet every Half-Life title to date has been riddled with bugs, albeit not ones that you might've noticed - but the developers certainly did. And they enjoyed these little mistakes so much, they just decided to leave them in. Which is kinda crazy, but also kinda charming? Basically any time something really bizarre has happened to you in a Half-Life game - besides all the obvious crazy stuff, like opening a portal to another dimension - it's been one of these accepted bugs. D0g shaking his had when Alyx said she'd done the calculations about throwing you all into the Citadel in Episode One? Unintentional, but hilarious, so they left it in. The zombie who tosses back grenades you throw at it in the Freeman Pontifex level of Half-Life 2? The result of a misfiring script that was too good to fix. Helicopters especially benefit from these happy accidents: the Combine Gunships weren't supposed to target rockets you fired at them, and the Hunter-Chopper wasn't supposed to drop so many mines, but Valve liked the extra challenge and left them as they were.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
