Little Rocket Man (Getting All Achievements in HL2: Episode Two)

Yesterday I wrote about the Lambda Locator in Half-Life 2, which was the last achievement I needed to get all of them in the game. However, since the episodes are bundled in with the original game, for it to show that I got 100% in my profile I have to get all of the ones from them as well!

Because of that I've been working on them too, and today I have finally completed that quest, as I have completed the two final achievements I was missing in Episode Two: Neighborhood Watch and Little Rocket Man!

Although technically Neighborhood Watch was the final achievement I got for this, I really wanna focus on Little Rocket Man, but I will talk a bit about it first I guess.

This achievement is for making it through the final section of the game without letting any buildings get destroyed. This is kinda challenging but in the sense that you have to know what will happen ahead of time, but it isn't that hard to execute aside from that! (I used this guide from Pandallax)

Also it was actually pretty fun! As the Combine offensive is one of the most fun parts of the game, especially once you get the hang of it. Interestingly enough, it's actually the second rarest achievement in the game, only behind — of course — Get Some Grub. Even Little Rocket Man is more common!

But now for the star of the show, Little Rocket Man! This game's achievement that takes place across almost its entirety, similar to Lambda Locator and The One Free Bullet from the previous games. This time you have to carry a garden gnome all the way from the start of the game up to the end at White Forest, and put him inside of the rocket.

This is the achievement people dread from this game, and I knew it was gonna be hard at some moments, but in the end it didn't end up being as bad as I thought, and actually quite fun at times! Though still challenging.

Originally I tried to start this playthrough while I was doing Get Some Grub, during the call with a friend, however I did it with the Jalopy's Gnome Attachment add-on by A Paint Bucket Named Huey, which is good for making the part with the car easier (which is almost all of the achievement).

However, I completely missed the part where it said it replaced the entity with what is functionally a Magnusson Device (a weapon for taking out Striders), and so at the start when I tried punting it at an Antlion it started glowing an extremely bright blue. I guess that was good for locating it? But it made it impossible for me to see anything when I held it, so I stopped LOL.

(The mod is actually very good, but I decided to do it the vanilla way.)

Yesterday I officially started going for the achievement again, and I expected it to be a lot more demanding than it actually was, at least in some parts. The thing with this achievement, though, is that you actually have a lot of moments where you can just leave the gnome in places and return to it later.

For example, in the antlion mines you can actually leave it behind at the resistance outpost once you get there, so it's basically a non-factor for the entirety of This Vortal Coil. A similar thing happens in Freeman Pontifex, where you carry it around from place to place for a bit, stop when you have to fight stuff, and then continue.

There was one section with a bit of a dilemma, however, as the majority of Freeman Pontifex is going through a zombie-infested outpost outside of the mines to get a car, and here you can either carry the gnome the whole way, or punt it over to the other side and hope it doesn't fall. I ended up punting it over, retrying a few times until I could know for sure it was retrievable, and I went on regularly!

So far the sections where we needed to carry the gnome were relatively simple, and a lot of them could simply be skipped. After this is when the real difficulty with the achievement happens, though. For the chapters Riding Shotgun and Under The Radar you have to carry the gnome in the car, and this is where it really gets hard.

Since I decided to do this without the attachment mod, the gnome constantly fell over, so I had to resort to constantly punting it ahead of me as I drove, often losing it and having to spend time finding it. I could generally drive with it on straight-ish sections, but otherwise, it would just drop off. Fortunately, whenever we had to stop I could just leave it in the car.

The worst part of this challenge was absolutely the Hunter Chopper, which is actively chasing you, shooting at you, and dropping bombs on you. Really, the best thing I could do here was just bare through the damage and just get through it.

By the end of that driving section, when I could finally start attacking the chopper itself, I was at just 15 health. One bad hit from a bomb and I'd die immediately. Fortunately in that section there was a lot of medkits and suit energy, but it was still extremely intense.

(I was too stressed to take any screenshots or even hard save the game at the time, so this is the best image I can get).

Fortunately, after that it was just the usual case of punting it ahead, driving, punting it ahead, driving, so on and so on. But this section wasn't actually that long, at least compared to the previous one, and after the big standoff against the Combine midway through, it was completely safe from danger! I just had to look out for the gnome.

So, after about 6 total hours of gameplay, I got to White Forest, put Gnome Chompski in the rocket, and finally got the achievement.

And so with this, I have finally 100% completed Half-Life 2 and its episodes! After playing it for so long this is undoubtedly one of my favourite games of all time, I mean I wouldn't have played it this for over 140 hours if it wasn't. However it is always nice for me to have something marked off as complete.

So even though this definitely will not be the last time I pop this game on, or even talk about it here on this blog, it marks the end of my completionist quest of the game.

In conclusion: OMG he just like me fr fr (https://xkcd.com/606/)

Btw, I always forget that White Forest is meant to be the opposite of Black Mesa until I start talking about the game again.

Oh also shoutout to my mom for her moral support today! She watched me play through the achievement from Freeman Pontifex until the end lol