Half-Life

The Good
OK, I am a late bloomer, I know it. So after about 7 years that I have the Game of the year edition of Half Life, I decided to see what the hype is all about.

I don't mind games with past graphics, what I really like about a game is a story and a good design that let me blend in the game world effortlessly.

With Half Life what I liked is the promise of a great story and great setting. The good stuff is here.

Also, the scripted events are cool and add to the atmosphere of the game.

OK, that is about it, But Half Life is like a cake that looks great from a distance and turns out to be plastic when you get closer...

The Bad
For some reason everything that I am about to say has already been said in the past but people chose to ignore it when they gave the game the final scoring. So here is the full list:

Design: Really sucks. This is a FSP, not an adventure game where you have to guess what you need to do next or what valve needs to be opened. It is not Tomb Raider where you have to jump from platform to platform. At times I had to reload 15 times to go past one of those jumping puzzles. Totally out of place.

AI: I guess for 1998 it was great, but by today's games, the AI sucks.

Weapons: Not cool, you have a crowbar, a pistol, machine gun, and some other not very exciting weapons. I have completed 40% of the game and no weapon was really cool.

Monsters: Stupid and not scary at all. Take the zombies for example, they walk slow and simply try to get to you so you should them and they are gone. Or the crab head. Totally annoying. Compare it to Doom's monsters and you get my point. I recently re-played Doom and it was 1000% more fun than this crap.

Bugs: Yes, annoying bugs that prevent you from finishing. Like the one that does not let you leave an elevator and then kills you since you can not move.

I could go on and on. But this game feels half baked and with lots of bugs. I am puzzled what all the hype was about.

The Bottom Line
Life is too short to waste on this crap, go spend time with you family or better still with Halo.

The Good
When you start the game, you find yourself on a little trolley/gondolay and that there is no opening cutscene? what? no opening cutscene? What kind of game is that? After a few seconds you find that you're actually playing the opeing cutscene. Cool huh? This is how the game plays for the entire duration. Not only do you play the game, but you also get to see the event unfold before you...awesome...the story of the game has got to be the best in FPS history. It's not the stale old "Aliens have come to conquer the earth and you're the only badass that can stop them." As you play that game you find twists in the plot that can totally suprise you. While all other FPS seem to abandon plot development about three seconds into the game, Half-Life seems to dish up something new everytime you turn the corner.

This is one of games that really scared the crap out of me...even after playing through it once...Try playing the game in the middle of the night with the lights out on the most difficult setting and you'll know what I'm talking about. Half the time you will be wandering around with only three shells left in your shot gun, your flash light batteries on low, and wondering if there are aliens around that corner that you can't handle. Roof tiles suddenly drop down bringin down pouncing aliens, walls suddenly crumble, and more aliens can come tumbling out at you.

The weapons are much more realistic, and well balanced. No more can rockets be fired continuously from your rocket launcher, you have to reload after you finish up a clip, and you can no longer carry more ammunition than a tank, as in other FPS games. Granted, you can still carry a lot of weapons, but its much more realistic than carrying the 99 rockets the way you can in Quake.

The multiplayer in this game simply rocks...you can download mods off the internet and activate them with the click of a mouse...and best of all, they are all FREE...kick ass mods like Counterstrike, and Teamfortress Classic can be downloaded for absolutely free of charge...

Level design is absolute genius, as platform jumps and puzzles are just challenging enough to keep you on your toes, but not so difficult as to make you want to tear your hair out everytime you fall off a crate...The placement of dead bodies and aliens are just in the right place to really give you a scare...

The Bad
I thought as hard as I could but I couldn't think of one bad point in Half-Life...well except the ending was not as rewarding as it should...but in this case, getting there was all the fun, and what FUN it was...so not much to complain about here...

The Bottom Line
WOW...If you are tired of the mindless FPS shooters, then Half-Life is the game for you...in fact even if you're not tired of mindless FPS gaming, get Half-Life...this game is a sure classic, and will influence games to come for a long time...

The Good
I honestly don't know how everyone can be wrong about the exact same thing, but I suppose that's how you kill an American president back in the 1960's. I read over and over again that the best thing about Half-Life is the story. Well, it's a very average story: something goes wrong at a top secret facility and it's up to one guy to save the world from an alien invasion, even though the government tries to stop him. If you disagree, then what point could you make that would spoil the story? You can't , because the plot is paper thin. It's not like someone is someone's father, one someone is actually a ghost, or that someone you didn't think was a dude is actually a dude!! See, those are meaty stories, some with more meat on the bone than others.

Now, what it excels at is how to tell the story. By only using your protagonist's POV the entire story you are witness to how this common sci-fi story could play out practically in the real world. Gone are power-ups that spin around in mid-air. If you find weapons there is a reason why that weapon is there, as in being in a weapon lock up or near the body of a fallen soldier. Basically it's taking a movie and filling in all of the blanks when the camera isn't there to explain what happened. How did he get back to full health? Oh, he crawled around in back through the air ducts and so on. This idea of logic adds to the plausibility of the story, and thus our immersion into it.

Having every area bumped into smaller areas to facillitate numerous yet very short load times makes the game into basically one level that just continues on and on. But where Half-Life succeeds is in it's use of set pieces that punctuate the flow of this one, long level and makes the game memorable. So there isn't the dam level, or the commando assault on the surface level, or fighting the helicopter level; instead you remember it for the set piece and not a level, something that increases your immersion in this game greatly.

Immersion is important because the game attempts to let you experience all the things you'd ever wanted to do in games (or life, if you're really ambitious). Fight commandos, helicopters, tanks (I'm not sure, I finished the game half a lifetime ago), use homing RPG's... immersion makes the experience much more visceral, and therefore a much better gaming experience.

Another thing I found great about this game is how you identify with this guy, faceless save for the box art or any fan pic in which he is always holding the crowbar. By making him late in the beginning of the game and giving him the option of turning on the security alarm in the reception area makes him a guy like you and me; even though he works at a top secret government facility, it's crappy!

The Bad
Even though it tells the story well it really doesn't make much sense. So who is this G-Man guy? Why is he always behind bulletproof glass? How can this Gordon Freeman guy be late for work in the beginning and in the end be taking down highly trained extremely dangerous army operatives? Doesn't it cost a fortune to run (and clean) Black Mesa? Isn't it so big that you can see it from outer space, let alone at the side of the oad that borders it?

For Half-Life to be true Gordon Freeman has to be running from one coincidence to another, and in the end it's just too many: in Half-Life one guy saw/caused the beginning of the invasion, keeps running into the mysterious G-man, and in the end travels to another dimension. See, if there were cut scenes and some invisable camera was watching secret proceedings that weren't privvy to common knowledge then you can accept that. This device hurts the believability of the game, and as such the story. In that case, how can the story "rock"?

The NPC's really weren't that thrilling (unlike DOOM3, there aren't any Asians around waiting to be turned into zombies). Really they're just there to spout some exposition and then open a door. Back in the day on planethalflife there was a section called the Scientist Killing Club; this inspired me to play through the game again, only this time I would try to kill as many "innocent" NPC's as I can. You know, once they open a door you can kill anyone you want. What kind of story is that? That just means the NPC's role in Half-Life are really not that important.

It is too bad about the last third on Xen. I would have appreciated a shorter but better game. I think this is a case of making it longer just to satisy the common consumer and also making it harder just because you are getting close to the end. 2D platformers are 2D because they work well in 2D. I think with a well-thought out first and second half you're bound to be let down at the end. By the way, I've done both choices, but for what? The game ends either way.

The Bottom Line
Half-Life is worth playing but not worth worshipping. Games matured a bit with Half-Life, but this is definitely not a "thinking man's shooter" by any account. In retrospect Half-Life doesn't deserve all of the acclaim it received for its time, but then people thought Half-Life had an amazing story because people hadn't ever been told a story that well through a FPS.

It's funny that the one game that influenced Half-Life the most, DOOM, will then rip it off Half-Life in DOOM3: arriving late, being witness to the "resonance cascade", jumping through portals, and even another monorail ride!

In truth, it was unicorn b lynx who got me really thinking about games and also prompted me to get involved on this site, so it's all your fault. Myself, I got tired of reading "pwns" and "rox!" and "suks!"