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I see what you mean. However, setting the difficulty on Easy for the last EP2 battle won't get me far if I don't use the car. I'll eventually run out of ammo and the other bad things will still happen (see )

The problem is me failing to figure out what the designers meant for me to do. It's a bit like when your weapons are taken away in M:M. Quite a few people ran around the level, looking for ways to smash the crates or to get to the locked armouries instead of riding the elevator down, dodging the soldiers and the stalkers and throwing spanners in the works.

Changing the difficulty doesn't change anything in these situations. If you don't "get" the point of the challenge, you're stuck.

Deciding whether the designers screwed up, by making the solution not obvious enough (e.g. "Run them over, Freeman. We're a bit short on ammo these days.") or whether the player had a "momentary lapse of reason" is a whole discussion in itself.

I did quite well on the other parts of EP2 on Normal, so there is no need to stick to playing on Easy for the whole game.

Ah, I see the problem. That makes sense.

Valve gave conflicting messages about how to handle the hunters. One NPC specifically says to use the AR2's alt fire to take them out. Then you don't get any extra ammo for it through the entire end battle. Though they've trained you to take out zombies with the car, that knowledge has been sort of 'over-ridden' by the energy orb idea.

I used to play games through the first time on easy, pretty quickly, then if I deemed the game worthy, come back and play through on hard. I'd then try to get through every ambush with minimal health loss or use of "special" weapons (AR2 alt-fire, grenade launcher, etc). But then with HL2, I found that hard wasn't really all that hard, and both episodes and now M:M I've simply played on hard mode the first time.

I think the last time I cheated the first time through a game was Doom2. I recall some dumb level with a maze of really narrow walkways above toxic goo, and simply got tired of falling and dying: IDDQD and IDCLIP and I was at the next level.

I personally found the run-down-the-hunters-with-the-car idea to be fairly obvious, since by that point it had been made pretty clear that blunt-force trauma seems to be the most effective against hunters (magnusson devices work pretty well too, by the way). Another mechanic that became obvious quite by accident is for a hunter to cover the Charger in flechettes, and have them do some damage once you collide with it (only really has an effect if you aren't going fast enough to kill it outright).

Once the fight got under way, I took the rebel's little AR2 speech to just mean 'If you find yourself in a tight spot, can't maneuver to take a hunter down fast enough, and you have an energy ball, use it.'

I second the "training: take out hunters on foot" thing. You'd think with all the thought they put into training the player in Portal (button = box = door, orb = catcher = platform, and the brute-force with the Weighted Companion Cube), they'd've made it clearer that you were supposed to run over the Hunters with cars.

Oh, and also the "my computer's crappy = too twitchy = miss everything I'm trying to run over" thing. ;)