Ross Scott

I posted your questions on Reddit and got a reply. Here are the links.

 

 

Doesn't quite solve the problem, but he definitely gives me some more stuff I can try for experiments, thanks.

it was actually ross' choice of using vegas for his videos that initially got me to try it

I've only tried Vegas once or twice, I've been using Premiere since pretty much the second episode of Civil Protection. I just know it's a decent contender in video editing.

 

Ross, I know that you probably have plenty of games to cover, but are you willing to accept donations to purchase new games? Or maybe gifts? Some deals in Steam offer licenses pack to offer as gift to friend. I'd love to play CS with the real voice of the original fake Freeman.

 

It's either that or give me your mailing address so I can sent you cookies or some other gift. I'm not a stalker. I promise

Sure, I take gifts, though please don't send me a box of live bugs like your link or something equally awful. As for games, I seriously have had no time for any games besides what you see in the videos lately, so a lack of games to play is really not my problem right now.

 

I have to admit, 300GB is pretty large

Well that's the size of the final clip, the reality is I was working with 2.5TB of raw files before editing it down.

 

I'm not saying you should or should not, but weren't you going to do a follow up piece after 10 game dungeons?

Yeah I intend to, but these zombies keep coming.

The 360fps downsampled to 60fps is by far the best looking of the three. Although, I've always intensely hated motion blur. I'm interested in what Freeman's Mind would look like without it, but I know you like motion blur a lot. Besides, even with your objectively terrible taste in video production, Freeman's Mind is just too good to not watch.

I actually don't like motion blur in many games when I'm actually playing (with racing ones being an exception), but for video watching, I definitely prefer it. And yeah, as others have suggested, I think you mean "subjectively." Again, we see motion blur in REALITY because of how our eyes process things. I'm trying to aim for what looks more real without causing motion sickness. Having a high framerate with no motion blur is good for a lot of games, though it also creates a sort of "hyper real" effect since you're looking at something that doesn't exist in the real world.

 

Would have been more interesting to present the comparison as file A and file B without saying which is which and ask people which they prefer, both to eliminate expectation bias (although you could easily check the file details if you wanted) and to bring the focus away from the number itself and more to the effect the number actually has on the video.

It's too obvious which one is 30 v 60fps, I don't think that would have accomplished much.

 

With that i vehemently disagree.

On a big screen movies are often painful to watch in 24FPS - you can see individual frames when there is much motion (i.e. camera is panned), a flicker that scraps on the nerves and destroys immersion.

Multiply that by 10 if the screen is IMAX (and the movie shown isn't at IMAX's 100FPS).

While the "live video" impression fades away an hour into the movie and never comes back (in my case).

I do hear you in that 24fps is a little too low. When I make my movie, I was intending on aiming for 30fps. For me the "live actor" thing never really fades, though for wide panning shots / action sequences, I agree that there a lot of situations that can benefit from a high framerate.

But Ross, I have a question. If, in the future, YouTube adds options for 720p and up to be either 30 or 60 fps, instead of locking it at the framerate it was uploaded at, would you once again consider 60fps? That way, anyone who gets nauseous from 60fps, or certain things about it, could just (hopefully) toggle an option to lock all videos at 30fps, like I have my general resolution locked at 720p whenever it's available.

I haven't made a decision on Game Dungeon yet, I'll just have to see.

 

I personally like the look of the 180/60, but I would like to see another 2-3 blur frames if possible... 360/60 shouldn't even need motion blur.

Another 2-3 blur frames IS 300-360fps and that's there too. As for no blur required at 60, you kind of have to question what we're aiming for then. It would be smooth motion, but real life has motion blur, so it would become less real and more smooth, if that makes sense.

 

Usually 60fps is better for, well, everything really.

 

However, you tend to make a lot of fast and hectic motions, so I think the video being downsampled to 30fps is much easier on the eyes.

 

You should also consider that only google's botnet browser supports 60fps on YT right now.

In gaming, I would agree. In movies, it really depends. Moving to high framerates makes things seem more real, but the "cinematic effect" people talk about really isn't bullshit. For instance, for The Hobbit, at 24fps, I thought "that's Gandalf telling a story, this is interesting" at 48fps "that's Ian McKellen wearing a robe putting on a performance for the camera." You lose that "larger than life" aspect to some cinema if the framerate is very high. It stops feeling like a movie and starts feeling more like watching actors perform live. Even for my own movie, I doubt I'll make it at higher than 30fps, but who knows. That's not an issue for Game Dungeon however, for there my main concern will just be making sure things don't feel nauseating. I'll look into it later, I plan for my next game to cover to be a 3D game actually where 60fps should be an option.

 

As for Chrome, I hear you, I actually can't run Chrome with my custom UI because it's REQUIRED to hook into explorer.exe. If you don't have that running as your shell, Chrome won't work. Kind of insane since Google tries to be platform-independent and that's strictly a Windows UI thing, all I can figure is they're using it to track how you use your own computer.

I've just recently managed to move and have internet, but I'm still getting my room set up for recording, so it may be another day or two before work resumes on Freeman's Mind, but I plan to get on it ASAP. In the meantime, I've received a bunch of messages asking whether I'll be moving Freeman's Mind and Ross's Game Dungeon to 60fps now that Youtube supports it. The short answer is no for Freeman's Mind and I don't know yet for Game Dungeon. While doubling my framerate adds more time to making the videos and things more of a hassle all-round, I'm not trying to fight progress if the end results are truly better. I did some tests with 60fps and motion blur however and you can see the results yourself:

 

1. 180fps downsampled to 30fps (this is how Freeman's Mind appears normally)

1280x720 MKV 30fps (7MB)

 

2. 360fps downsampled to 60fps (same technique as before, but with a higher framerate)

1280x720 MKV 60fps (8MB)

 

3. 180fps downsampled to 60fps (experimental mode using the same data as the original, but to a higher framerate)

1280x720 MKV 60fps (8MB)

 

I recommend watching all these videos in FULL SCREEN mode. While people will have different opinions on this, my take on 60fps is that it looks very cool in some situations, and is vomit-inducing in others. I'm someone who gets carsick easily, and the part where Freeman is spinning in this short test triggered a bit of nausea for me watching it at 60fps. It doesn't help that Valve's demo recording isn't perfect and sometimes adds some twitchiness to the motion that wasn't in the original gameplay. 60fps only amplifies that effect. It's for these reasons that I don't think moving Freeman's Mind to 60fps would be a good idea, since Freeman isn't known for having calm and controlled camera angles. It would make some sections look cooler, but would also make other sections look worse.

 

As for Game Dungeon, I haven't decided yet and will have to do more experiments later. I think racing games might show the most benefit from running at 60fps, but anything involving twitchy camera motion I think could be a bad idea. Also, it could be the motion blur amplifies the nausea effect and games without it may look fine at 60fps. I think 60fps has potential, but for passive viewing, more care is needed with the camerawork in order for it to look good. For the record, this doesn't mean I think GAMES don't benefit from having 60fps or more, don't believe any company that tells you that 30fps is better for gaming than 60fps unless it's a special-case situation (like cutscenes). I have never played a GAME that felt worse at 60fps than at 30fps; but just like how I can get carsick riding in a car, I never get sick if I'm the one driving. It's the same thing for games, you're the one in control. With video watching, it's not always a pleasing effect, and depends a lot on how the camerawork is being handled. Sorry if this disappoints anyone, but I have to go with what I think creates the best impact.

 

- - -

 

ADHD version: Ross is not moving Freeman's Mind to 60fps because it will make too many people barf. He did experiments and used science to determine this.

 

COMMENTS

http://cache.armorgames.com/files/games/the-last-stand-union-12009.swf?v=1414886848 This might help with the full screen problem since it's only the .swf of the flash game and I "think" you can get the browser to go into full screen with it. I have no experience with screen recording so I don't know if full screen browsers won't work for you as well.

This gets you the yellow screen bug you saw in the video. This game seriously fights you from going full screen.

Ross, I'll take a shot at some of the technical questions.

I already use pr

-My scratch disk has already been pointing to the SSD, my GPU is overkill for Premiere, the previews aren't the problem, it's the streaming of the sheer amount of data. For example, the last episode was around 330GB uncompressed to open in Premiere. It loads completely fine off the SSD, but then I don't have a lot of extra room for additional capturing with that, it's a real juggling act. I don't know anything about speedgrade, I'm not sure that exists in CS5.

 

Beyond that, I don't see what's wrong with my answer to the second question? I mean, if YouTube reencodes all non-RGB video to RGB, you're using YUV, and their encoding process is pretty rough, wouldn't you have problems?

Literally the opposite. I use RGB (as do computer monitors), Youtube uses YUV and maybe does something in ADDITION to that.

 

If I'm understanding the issues correctly (I think I am), Premiere Pro is having stability problems with compressed AVI files, and when you upload videos to YouTube the colors are slightly off because they change the colorspace during the compression and re-encoding phase of uploading, and the result is a slightly off-color video.

Yes, this is right. I have two basic goals here:

 

1. Keep the filesize down as much as possible in recording / editing without losing image quality.

 

2. Get the end color on Youtube to look as close as possible to look like what it looks like on my screen when I play the game. This may involve artificially modifying the colors in a bizarre way to overcompensate for what Youtube is doinf.

 

 

Speaking of the video itself: another good, solid episode of the Game Dungeon, with sufficient amounts of review material and a perfect blend of offhand funny comments. For some reason, the part that had me laughing the hardest was "Really? Look at them. Look at this guy!". So, in short, it was pretty much a standard episode of this show.

That was my favorite part in editing also. Sometimes the way I envision something isn't always how it turns out, but that's one instance where it was exactly as I wanted it.

 

As for zombies, the "empowerment" games you're describing generally aren't my favorite, although they probably do appeal to a lot of people. I'm not the biggest fan of Left 4 Dead for example, which I feel like appeals to more the type you're describing.

 

This was enjoyable epiosde but it felt darker than previous Halloween GD. And I didn't expect that feeling while hearing Ross recording some parts of it. Darker as Halloween episodes should be, I think....

I plan for the next RGD to be much lighter in tone and almost no violence. I kind of like to cycle the variety in the episodes, I didn't really mean to have Revenant and The Last Stand back to back, it just turned out that way.

 

ersonally I'd love to throw a few bucks his way, but considering I'm a minor, I can't exactly go pulling money out of my parents' wallets without permission, and there's no way they'd be up for donating to someone who's not technically in a worse financial position than us.

Man, don't feel any guilt about that, I'm still sustaining myself from the previous donation money and I agree with your parents view on not having to donate to people with more money than them, it doesn't make any sense. Right now my income is hovering right around what someone would earn working full time minimum-wage, but I don't have to support 3+ people either. I never want people to send me money who are worse off than I am, I take a utilitarian view on most things.

To start off with part one, I have something that may interest you, Ross. You can have the Source Engine output a bunch of .TIFF files, then compile them using VirtualDub. (I can't give you a link right now; I'm not at home.) There's a larger (total) file size, but no 4GB limit. AFAIK, Sony Vegas can use Lagarith, but support can be iffy at times. Not sure about HUffyUV. What I would do is get one of those new 8 (Or 10) TB HDDs and store the AVI files, demos and TIFFS (Should you choose to use them). I can't imagine the rest of FM taking more than 10TB, and you can still use the SSD, so there's no bottleneck.

 

For part 2: I thought YouTube used RGB, not YUV? I checked their advanced encoding documentation and I cannot find any mention of what they recommend, but I'll assume it's RGB. I mean, your AVIsynth script uses YUV, so that may be the problem. Have you tried finding any addons to Premiere Pro that increase compatibility for compressed AVI files? Sorry I'm not being too much help here.

Believe me when I say I don't mean this in a rude way whatsoever, but a lot of what you're saying either isn't applicable or else is wrong and it requires an explanation of two or more things to explain why. To give an analogy, it's like trying to get help with fixing the brake pads on a car and getting advice about anti-freeze to pour in the gas tank.

 

The part about Vegas being iffy with Lagarith is helpful information though, thanks. That means it's on similar footing as Premiere.

To everyone: I've seen all the horrors mentioned on this page

 

Carpenters best film hands down is Escape from LA which was more or less like Pink Floyds The Last Cut (Both kind of deal with the hatred towards certain politicians, Escape deals with the watergate scandal to some extent and how carpenter felt like the government cant be trusted so he created a film more or less where a renegade has to rescue the president for whom he hates, The Final Cut was more or less about Roger Waters and his frustrations with Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands war and alot of what was going on in the early 80s)

I don't know, for me The Thing just blows away everything else by him, although Big Trouble In Little China is very good in an entirely different way. I watched Escape from LA again after I left LA in 2009. My favorite line from it is "this fucking city can kill anybody!"

Hey, I did a quick search and came up with this:

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/321024-YouTube-HowTo-Lossless-unchanged-color

 

Don't know if that might be something you already have covered.

 

Edit: Also lookit this:

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/330410-Youtube-changed-my-colors!-What-to-do?p=2046743&viewfull=1#post2046743

It doesn't look like they list obvious solutions, but in the first thread it looks like somebody may have correctly identified the problem, I could maybe experiment to see if I can do anything with this data, thanks.

The answer is not mine, but from TotalBiscuit himself who wrote a post earlier today regarding encoding and file sizes:

 

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/nh4vr9

 

I found it very informative for those who are curious and it could help you

 

His youtube channel so you see the quality he aims for:

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy1Ms_5qBTawC-k7PVjHXKQ

I did some color comparison tests and here's my issue with doing it the way most people do it:

 

Videogame footage is in RGB. Recording in YUV12 leads to a small amount of color loss. Uploading it to Youtube leads to an ADDITIONAL small amount of color loss. By keep it in RGB until compression and uploading, I did some tests and the color still comes out better preserving it farther in the chain. Now granted it's not an enormous difference or it could just be with how I do it.

 

Also he mentions Dxtory, but Dxtory has a big flaw in that its framerate is absolutely horrendous for any game using true antialiasing (not FXAA, SMAA, etc.). I use Dxtory whenever I can, but games with AA it's just not a good option for.

As far as I'm aware, VirtualDub can handle it so long as you have the codec.

I use Virtualdub a lot, but it's not really a fully functoning editor (although the first episode of Civil Protection was made entirely using it!)

 

Create proxies for all the clips for which they're needed.

I've been doing this, but it has a couple problems:

 

1. This method ends up being a pain for 2D graphics that need careful line-ups

 

2. For uncompressed RGB video, I had about 2TB of uncompressed video this time spanned across two hard drives. It makes it worse that Premiere CS5 has this annoyance where it takes WAY longer to load a video that has sound muxed into it to generate "peak files."

 

3. What compression is compatible with video editors? That would solve my first problem at least of keeping the resolution the same, just with lossy compression for the proxies.

 

Ross, this isnt a "He can't do it" comment, but if you want to get it done by the deadline, why dont you make longer episodes? It seems to me that the total production time is actually less for more.

 

Or am I dead wrong?

Number of episodes doesn't make a huge difference so much as the total length. Two 5 minute episodes isn't much more time than 1 ten minute one.

 

Also if you really want to play Union City, try this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/download-flash-and-video/ To download the flash game and fullscreen that thing.

This would cause the red or yellow screen you saw in the video.

 

 

 

Happy Halloween! Here's another video that took WAY more time than I intended it to! I selected this game because I thought it would go faster than a normal full length game, but things kind of spiraled out of control, as you'll see in the video. Some of you may be disappointed I'm covering a flash game for Halloween, but I've been wanting to cover some (and newer ones for that matter) on the Game Dungeon, I just hadn't gotten around to it. I promise I gave it a full treatment for this episode, with some additional surprises. I hope to have a "real" game next year with hopefully more videos leading up to Halloween.

 

Special thanks on this episode goes to Adam Shepard, who emailed me while I was working on the video, offering to assist with some additional music. He had a very fast turnaround time despite me being a fickle bastard about the music as I tried to figure it out in the middle of deadline pressure. You can hear his music for the "safe room" music and for the in-game ending. I didn't mention the music in this episode since it was long enough already and it was either absent or unremarkable for this game. I've gotten multiple offers of music help in the past, but lately I've been overwhelmed by sorting out my email, so for any other composers wishing to help, Adam had the luck of covenience. In the future I'm happy for more music offers for Ross's Game Dungeon, but it may be a while before I can sort through everything. Without spoiling much, I really mean what I say in the video when it comes to being able to relate to this game.

 

I also want to say thanks again to everyone who donated, especially helping with the SSD. I can only imagine how much data I've written to it since I bought it, I've been giving it an absolute workout with all the video recording and processing. This episode alone I'm sure involved a few terabytes of writing at one phase or another.

 

 

* * *

TECHNICAL QUESTION FOR TECHNICAL PEOPLE

 

To any experienced video editors out there, I have a couple questions:

 

1. Are there any video editors that support WORKING with lossless compression, like HuffyUV or Lagarith? Having everything uncompressed really leads to massive file sizes, it makes me wonder how other people handle it. I use Adobe Premiere CS5 and while it will open those codecs, it is unstable and unreliable when using them.

 

2. Are there are any "tricks" with the colorspace to get Youtube to preserve more of the color when moving from RGB to YUV or whatever the hell Youtube uses? I preserve the colorspace as long as I can from recording and editing, but it gets lost in compression slightly more than I'd prefer and was trying to see if there better ways of handling it.

* * *

 

 

This is going to be last Game Dungeon until at least December, and I'm not promising anything then. All I plan to be working on from here until the end of the year is more Freeman's Mind. It's going to be an endurance test however, as I'm also moving in less than a week. I don't know if I'll have internet right away, but I intend to get a recording room set up ASAP so I can resume work with only a couple days downtime from the move.

 

Finally, I was going to include a joke about Candy Corn Oreo cookies, but found out at the last minute that South Park had also, so I decided to scrap it. This isn't the first time this has happened. I also had an idea for a Civil Protection episode involving Cthulhu and an offshore oil rig that they also beat me on.

 

- - -

 

ADHD version: Happy Halloween! More Freeman's Mind coming!

 

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

I dont know much about horror really and sort of dont understand why people like to scare themselves (maybe someone can explain the concept to me). I do remember my friend got me to watch this really damn weird "experimental horror" called Begotten though which was just this guy disemboweling himself. It wasnt scary really, just nauseating.

Yeah I'm not a huge fan of gross out horror like that, I prefer scary situations by far. As for why, I think in my mind it's kind of the same sense you get of exploration of the unknown, except that in horror, you know that what you're "exploring" via a game or movie is more hardcore and there's something with some teeth out there, heightening the experience.

 

This classic one scared me when in childhood Don't Look Now (1973)

Yeah I've seen that one. I remember it being rather dull overall, but the ending is very good. This is one of those movies that falls under the category of "this really only needs to be 30-45 minutes, but we're going to drag it out to a full-length movie instead" for me.

I found weird than 3 people talking about horror movies and its evolutions, left outside Ed Wood. Those aren't scary, but they were made with that intention.

Yeah it was weird, the other guy on the podcast was sort of talking like horror began in the 80s, they didn't really discuss the earlier horror, I was just going with the direction he wanted to take the podcast. For me personally, I feel like horror didn't start to get actually scary by modern standards until the late 50s or early 60s. Psycho was definitely a landmark film in that regard.

 

Ross i saw the interview and you guys didn't mention sinister.So check it out. the plot it's quite simple but the creepy build up is very good.

I might have missed that one actually, I can look into it.

 

Alien, REC, Marebito, Haute Tension, Martyrs, Inside, The Uninvited Guest, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Others, Session 9, The Orphanage, Texas Chainsaw Massacre

 

Read House Of Leaves if you want to go crazy.

I've seen all the ones mentioned except the Asian ones, I've never really gotten into the Japanese or Korean horrors that much. It might just be a different presentation style, I don't know. My favorite of those mentioned would be Session 9 and REC.

 

And yes, I've seen The Mist and Candyman.

Yeah I've seen Martyrs, Man Bites Dog, and The Devil's Rejects. Martyrs is more the "torture horror" which isn't really my favorite type, though the ending helps make up for it. Man Bites Dog is an intense movie since it tries to be extremely realistic to the point where it's very disturbing. I remember my favorite scene being when they run into the other film crew. The Devil's Rejects is good, but I honestly liked House of 1000 Corpses a little better, although even that was a mixed bag. In general I thought the comic moments of House of 1000 Corpses were terrific, with the horror elements just feeling random more than anything else. My favorite parts by far were anything involving Captain Spaulding. I absolutely love the opening scene to 1000 Corpses, it's too bad it didn't maintain the level the whole way through.

Daniel: I've seen all of those, but thanks for the suggestions!

 

McFirson: I actually haven't seen that one, I can definitely check it out. Regarding satire, "Behind The Mask" falls in that vein.

Hey everyone, I was invited back to a podcast recently to talk about horror movies since I'm an avid horror fan. You can check out the discussion here:

 

8-bit life Halloween Podcast

 

This actually went online just before the latest Freeman's Mind, so I held off a few days announcing it so it wouldn't be buried immediately. This podcast isn't really an interview, but is more talking about one horror movie after another, there ended up being a lot of title dropping in the thread. If you're not into scary movies, you may not get much out of this podcast, but if you are, it's an extra bonus.

 

At the end of the podcast I ask the audience if they have any recommendations for any scary movies they've seen, specifically the truly terrifying stuff. That offer extends here also, although odds are anything you recommend I've already seen. It's questionable how much time I'll have to watch any this year, but I'm happy to add to my "to watch" list if people have recommendations for some really scary stuff.

 

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Awesome episode again Ross, good job.

 

Re Momentum and teleporters, I think Freeman has got a bit muddled. There are two types of momentum to consider here, the momentum of his centre of mass (CoM) and the momentum of his constituent parts in the frame where his CoM momentum is zero. Freeman has experience so far that teleporters don't conserve CoM momentum, but that doesn't mean they kill ALL momentum. I can't see an obvious problem with teleporters cancelling CoM momentum*, so "speedy thing goes in, stationary thing comes out", but there are some big problems with cancelling ALL momentum (someone already mentioned that motion of particles is basically temperature, so Freeman would freeze solid, but there's also the issue that it would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle...)

 

* I mean, you'd need to shunt it somewhere, but this seems the least of your worries if you were actually trying to design a teleporter...

Okay this goes back to the "multiple breakthroughs" line again. I considered that maybe it only detects motion on a certain level, but what level? At the cellular level, who knows fast your cells are moving? Hell I think sneezes are at 100mph. Nerve connections and the brain in general must move pretty damn fast as well. I guess the thing is I don't see how you would cancel one type of momentum, but not the other; additionally I don't see how there would be technology to DISTINGUISH the two or even DETECT the difference in the first place. I really tried to think this one out and I couldn't come up with any scenario where momentum is cancelled AND you come out alive on the other end short of having some positional tracking and computational system way, way beyond anything we could dream about. Let us not forget, Black Mesa still uses giant tape reels on their computers.

I don't Freeman grasps the fact that the Earth is screwed unless he saves it.

Well the irony is you "save" it in HL1 then in HL2 the Earth is still screwed. It's really not until Episode 2 that there's any hint that you're not involved in a futile battle.

Hey Ross, did you shorten the wait for the scientist to finish the portal? It always seemed an eternity longer from what I remember

No, that's as it appears in-game.

 

Why did you speed up the teleportation sequence?

I didn't! Maybe it seems shorter because I went up there and started talking to the scientist instead of standing around. The only other thing I can think of is Half-Life Source shortens it compared to Half-Life original.

 

If you guys want to be scientific about this, how about somebody load up Half-Life and clock it? I didn't modify the timing in this episode except small adjustments during the level loads (which occurs before you even enter the chamber), so you can use my video as a benchmark for HL:Source.

 

Ross, I know that you are not supposed to comment in extenso on the Machinima issue, but I wonder what happen with the videos on Blip.tv? At some point you were saying that the reproductions there helped you more than the ones on Youtube, in terms of money. After watching your videos there, I discovered a few web series that caught my attention. But now, you only post the Youtube links, and I no longer need to go to Blip.tv.

Oh I can talk about Machinima, just that there's a few small things I can't discuss. All the huge stuff is public anyway. As for Blip, I made a post on it a while back, but my timing couldn't have been worse essentially. I joined blip.tv JUST before Maker Studios came in and bought them out, since then, the income from them fell dramatically. I'm not removing the old links, but it's simply not worth it compared to Youtube now.

Yeah, and didn't you have some scheduling / communication problems with Robin by the time you needed his recordings?

Yeah, it took me 3 weeks to get a serviceable version of that line from Robin. There was one other take, but there simply wasn't enough force behind his voice for it to fit in with everything. In my opinion, it wouldn't have fit in well at all with everything else that was happening.

Alright this is the last I hope to say on the matter, but I really think you're giving the narration far more credit than it deserves:

 

That's not just him being up to speed, it's him being outright told everything of importance and ignoring it.

They're giving minimal reference, which doesn't result in clear communication. That's like me saying "The model will go to the limits, but you have to watch out for overheating." Yes, it gives vague instructions, but what model? What limits? What causes the overheating? Their entire briefing is like this.

 

The scientists just told him the portal went to Xen

They never explicitly say this. Seriously, go and listen to it. Give me the exact quote where they say this. They don't. Here's what they do say:

 

-They collected specimens from the border world.

-They suspect there is an immense portal over THERE, created by a being

-I must kill it

-I OWE THEM NOTHING, suggesting I have options

-I should gear up

-here is a long jump module for the world of ZEN. Yes, "Zen", seeing as how you're never given any context whatsoever to this name prior in the game and phonetically that's the only known word in English with this name. This is one of the best examples of poor communication and only reinforces Freeman's perception that the scientists don't fully know what they're talking about. He may as well have told him these weapons enhance his chi and the teleporter will modify his personal feng shui.

-There is someone waiting at the portal CONTROLS, suggesting you know, control.

 

Again, Half-Life is all about vague descriptions and withholding details. I really think you're looking at the game with many assumptions you have now instead of a blank slate. The game really doesn't fill in the gaps like you imply it does.

 

it still at least lets you know where the portal goes and why

No, see that's just it, you're assuming more than they said. It says there is a portal OVER THERE control. It says they have a portal CONTROLS. It does imply people have been sent there. It never says that's the ONLY destination and the fact that there are portals around Black Mesa is proof Freeman has seen that they can teleport on Earth as well.

 

Plus, aliens started pouring out of the portal the minute it started up, which should have immediately tipped Freeman off

They've been spilling out the entire game with no portals active. How do you know that's not cross interference?

 

and they have absolutely no one else to send

Except a gung-ho guard with weapons training and extra suits lying around and a scientist willing to use a shotgun.

 

On top of that, they had no reason to send him to Massachusetts, and he knows that

"You owe us nothing", again, one interpretation is they respect his decision to just leave.

 

and the last crews they sent were killed by aliens

They never said this, they said they were COLLECTED. You're assuming things again.

 

The thing is, your assumptions are correct, but you have the benefit of having played the game and been able to read about more the context after the fact. I'm operating on JUST what the game tells you, and it's highly interpretive. You can disagree, but I've already established multiple things you're ASSUMING and are not explicitly stated. If you don't explain something CLEARLY to someone, you can't expect good communication. You think it's unrealistic, I'm showing that the game is saying a lot less than you think it does, you're connecting more dots with the benefit of knowing the story after the fact.

 

When I was first playing HL1, I didn't have much of an idea of what was going on

I rest my case.

Here's the thing, though: why does Freeman think they'll do anything other than teleport him to Xen, like they said they were going to? What reason would they have for doing that? If he doesn't trust the guy apparently in charge of the Xen expeditions about the nature and number of the alien creatures, why does he trust him enough to jump into a teleporter?

"Of course, you owe us nothing." Freeman sees this as a way out of Black Mesa, which he's been trying to do this entire time. The scientist's talk sounds like the middle of a discussion he's not up to speed on and I wanted to allocate more time to explaining that he's not the person they're looking for. Since he seems to be the dominant personality, he's hoping he can just get them to send him on his way instead. It would be like if you wandered into the investor meeting for General Motors. You're not sure what's going on, but you'll be happy to get a ride home from someone. I mean the real reason of course is the game gives me no other option, this is why I prefer being able to do more original videos rather than have to shoehorn in explanations.

 

As for your analysis below, you're looking into it too much. It reminds me a quote I heard from a cop before: "Lawyers have weeks to go over decisions we have seconds to make."

He really isn't aware where the Xenians are originating from, nor does he realize that the teleportation system that has been built is specific to Xen's coordinates. In fact, I'm 99.9% sure he doesn't know what Xen is anyways, as his character clearly misidentified it in this episode. This can be explained by the fact that he doesn't typically pay attention to those he sees as the plebs, which in this case is pretty much everyone.

No, this can be explained by NOT EXPLAINING THIS ANYWHERE IN THE GAME. Freeman hasn't had ANY briefing on this, the Lambda labs were outside his security clearance. While I gloss over it for the sake of the series, Freeman would be extremely weak at this point having exhausted adrenaline, doing strenuous physical activity, and barely having any food for two days. He's not qualified for this at all aside from being a tenacious survivor. While he doesn't have faith in the military or the Black Mesa staff, I don't think I've suggested Freeman considers the entire globe to be incompetent. Freeman has no evidence this isn't a localized event confined to Black Mesa aside from one scientist saying otherwise. Keep in mind, these scientists also claimed they had to "seal off" the area when aliens were clearly teleporting inside. Freeman doesn't trust these people, but he's hoping they can teleport him AWAY FROM BLACK MESA since all hell has been broken loose, he suspects it could get nuked, and he's still lost and hungry. Even if they are telling the truth, he's in no condition to handle this and figures there would be better people for the job. I mean everybody's commenting on how selfish he is, but in this scenario, they're asking an awful lot and not telling him much at all. You'll hear some more on this topic in the next episode, I didn't work in everything I meant to say on it in this one anyway.

 

Anyway, you can't really take a game like Half-Life too seriously, it doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny, Valve masks most of this with a lack of information. The game is so outrageously sparse on details, that's the very reason a character like Freeman can even exist, they've left so much open.