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The Top 25 HLDM/Op4DM Newbie Mistakes
18. Drop until you drop.
Your opponents will flay your hide fast enough--why help them? Fall damage is a great place to begin economizing. Often you can break a fall and avoid taking unnecessary fall damage. Look for a crate, a ledge,
another fragger on your way down. The idea is to not to drop a great distance without an intermediate stop. But some inverse advice: If you intend to fall from a really great height (say, out of the towers in
Gasworks to the ground), do it all in one go. Two longish drops will fetch you twice the fall damage of one very long one.
19. Go take a flying leap!
Ignoring the jump pack is huge folly. Ever wonder why some of your opponents fly around the screen with freakish, Matrix-esque impunity? Probably they fetched the jump pack, which gives you power-assisted jumps.
Ignore it at your peril. Of course, mastering the long-jump key combination can be tricky, so it's best to bind it to a key
20. Bind me up, big boy.
Not binding your keyboard or mouse for long-jumps or other complex tasks is a surefire way to die. Wouldn't it be nice to whack one key to bring up the RPG or lay a tripmine, rather than scrolling through a menu? The
code can be obscure, but we've got you covered here.
21. Lock. Load. Repeat.
Not reloading in every spare quiet second you have is flat-out foolish--snapping shells into your shotgun in the midst of a firefight is a great way to ensure you lose. Whatever the weapon--pistol, MP5,
shotgun--reload early and often, even if you've fired just a short burst or a single round. You never know when you're gonna need every last round to down your opponent.
22. Another brick in the wall (is embedded in your skull)
The tau is surely the deadliest HL weapon when it's in the right hands. And nothing makes a tau pro's saliva glands start overflowing more than when you try to take cover behind a wall from his tau blast. A tau blast
fired through a wall near you is as sure to kill you as an A-bomb detonated in your rectum. Never duck behind a wall when attacked by the tau--the best way to face a tau opponent is head-on. Make the target hit you
directly, or require him to pull off a more complex tau-spray-pattern frag. The wall just makes it bone-simple.
23. Head-off trouble.
Damage is locational in HL, and not aiming for the noggin whenever possible is poor form. Well-placed headshots save you ammo and minimize the time your opponent has to fire back at you. "In your face" is
generally the best policy! Rounds in the body can require three or four times more hits to score the same damage.
24. You wanna be a Player?
Experienced players leap with glee when they identify targets running around the screen named "Player" (in Opposing Force, "Shephard"). As a matter of fact, they will go out of their way to whip
your noob hide, because a Player/Shephard tag indicates a gamer so new to the game that he hasn't even figured out how to change his name. So give yourself a unique name, for crying out loud, even if it's
"Corpsey" or "Gort."
25. Leave it for the plumber.
Ignore the new Opposing Force hand to-hand weapons (the wrench and knife). Despite much practice, the Laten team still can't figure out why anyone would want to use these pathetic weapons. The knife, conceivably,
could be used to stage comical West Side Story-style Gordon knife ballets, but the wrench? Its pathetically slow swing time makes it hard to hit with, and the secondary-fire function is an atrocity. Save it to fix
the Lambda Core lavatory with; use the crowbar for kung-fu fighting.
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