Half-Life

The Good
id Software rose to stardom in the Nineties when it released its highly successful Wolfenstein 3-D to the masses. If you see the id logo on the front cover, you know that you will be taking home with you an awesome first-person shooter. Hits such as Doom, Heretic, and Quake were being churned out every year. In 1998, Valve, a small company headed by a former Microsoft employee, released Half-Life, and in my opinion, it is a classic. A review I read in PC PowerPlay gave the game a whopping 98%. The only negative thing they said about this game was a connection between hunger and African children. It was Half-Life itself that revolutionized first-person shooters on the PC even further.

Right from the start of the game, I was surprised to find out that instead of a long cinematic showing Gordon Freeman traveling to the Sector C Test Labs on a train, you are free to move around the train yourself. You can even look out the windows to discover construction areas and security offices. Then, once you reach Sector C, you can either explore the area fully or go find your HEV suit. Freeman’s HEV suit is fantastic. Besides telling you how much health and ammo you have, it displays different warnings depending on the environment you are in. It even talks to you, too. With the suit in place, it’s time to enter the test chambers. There are no cinematics in the game; Valve wants you to be immersed in the game world as much as possible.

Eventually, there is a resonance cascade, which is caused when Freeman pushes a specimen in a scanning beam. A portal opens up between Earth and an alien world called Xen. As you progress through the game, you will hear aliens teleporting in your vicinity. The first of these are headcrabs, vortigaunts, and houndeyes. The player will encounter more aliens as they progress, and these can be dealt with using the variety of weapons on offer. They are divided into groups, with the basic ones such as the crowbar on the left, followed by military-grade weapons, then alien weapons and, finally, grenades and other explosives. Different weapons can be selected by using the mouse wheel or pressing one to five on the keyboard.

The security guards and scientists walking around at the start of the game are non-playable characters you have to deal with later. They can help you get into locked areas if you lure them to the door locks. What they won’t do is climb ladders, follow you through vents, or enter very dangerous areas. Both characters have little conversations with themselves if they get bored. You can call their services any time throughout the game, just not before you enter the test chamber. The earliest game I know that introduced the concept of NPCs was CyberMage: Darklight Awakening, but this was an overlooked game back in the day, and you can only talk to them, that’s all.

Another plus of Half-Life is the level design. There are many areas to explore, including offices, rail tunnels, control centers, outposts, and even Xen itself. They are interconnected with each other, and – unlike first-person shooters before it – they don’t require you to press a button to access them first. Some of the areas are littered with puzzles. My favorite is trying to launch an airstrike on the Gargantua. There are bosses you need to defeat from time to time, but it is not just a matter of “shoot to kill”.

In most chapters, the environments in which the player explores look amazing, especially the exterior in “Surface Tension”. For example, the player has to fight HECU soldiers along a cliff. The view of the New Mexico desert is breathtaking, with a little stream at the bottom and huge rocks surrounding it. “Xen” and “Interloper” are outside scenes, and the view looks really good. I enjoyed exploring the planet, shooting alien grunts in the process. In earlier chapters, offices and computer rooms can be entered while players are walking around Black Mesa. I was amazed at how much technology got crammed in the computer rooms, and how good it looks. Furthermore, the offices are clean and haven't got trash lying on the floor. They look better than my bedroom.

Like many games released on CD-ROM, the music is stored as audio tracks. The music in Half-Life is well composed, and what’s unique about each piece of music is that they don’t loop back to the beginning, and each piece only lasts for only two or three minutes. I like how some of them have that beat to them, such as the one played after you don your HEV suit. As for the sound effects, they are quite impressive. My favorite sounds come from the houndeye. When this cute creature sees you with its one huge eye, it sounds as if a door is opening. And as it emits shock waves you can almost hear Freeman screaming even though he is supposed to be silent.

If you’re new to first-person shooters, you want to compete on a hazard course before you start a new game. You will be assisted by a holographic image of a woman who teaches you how to run, jump, duck, shoot, perform long jumps, and climb ladders. It will take you about thirty minutes, given that you may fail at completing a task. You will also learn how to accomplish new tasks such as performing high jumps, using ladders, recharging your HEV suit and health at wall stations, and going around in the dark with a flashlight.

The Bad
I noticed a few bugs in the game, mainly concerning the non-player characters. In some situations, when they finish walking to wherever they want to go, they tend to do a little tap dance. I even remember, in the chapter “Office Complex”, one of the NPCs was walking around and died of a heart attack. Also, I remember in “Blast Pit”, when I opened a door, it seemed to drift out into space as long as it remained open.

The Bottom Line
Half-Life is a fantastic game. There is so much to do here - destroying aliens; restoring power to some areas; and interacting with both scientists and security guards, to make them get you access to locked areas. Most of the graphics are breathtaking, and an excellent soundtrack is heard while you play. There are certain aspects of the game that the player might enjoy doing.

Originally released for Windows in 1998, Half-Life also made its way onto Mac and Linux thanks to Valve themselves. This version - distributed on the Steam platform - is the same as the original retail version but without the flashy menu screens. There is also an updated Source port which I recommend you avoid; it contains too many bugs Valve couldn't be bothered fixing. If you love first-person shooters and you want to do something new, other than blast enemies all the time, give Half-Life a go.

The Good
Half-Life represents another chain in the link that started in 1993, when Doom shipped without any sort of "High Scores" table.

Basically, the trend of shooter games towards realism, away from gimmickiness and "arcadeness", and into the a future where games get compared to movies as works of art and you don't wait for the punchline.

Immersion is the altar this game worships at. Not just great graphics or great sound or lots of polygons - immersion. Every aspect of Half-Life is engineered to create a world you can get lost in, from the level design, to the audio, to the overall concept of the game. It's still a shooter with the same fundamental rules as Doom - the way out of these elaborately crafted environments is still generally "shoot the crap out of everything" - but with various subtle touches that seem like nothing yet add up to everything.

It's hard to overstate how successful Half-Life is at what it does. Black Mesa is never anything less than a real place, filled with vending machines, garbage cans, querulous scientists, etc. Within the first few minutes, you get to see a locker room. Open the locker marked GORDON FREEMAN, and you see some of the main character's personal effects - including some books he's reading. The main character in this game reads books! A tiny detail, yet a complete paradigm shift.

You don't find weapons and ammo lying in the middle of the hallway in Half-Life, you find it in a place that makes sense (like a gun locker or a weapons cabinet). You don't open doors with brightly colored keys, you actually have to find a scientist or soldier and ask them to grant you access (which sometimes entails an argument). In one incident a guard started helping me in a gunfight, and yelled "got another one!" as he plugged a headcrab. Despite Half-Life's datedness, scripted moments like this still have an eerie power. For just a second, he's the player and you're an NPC in his game.

Half-Life is masterful in keeping the ugly, clunky machinery of videogaming off-screen. The game seamlessly transitions from level to level. No load screens. No cutscenes. The game just doesn't cut away. It keeps you locked inside the experience, like a movie. Again, the effect is subtle, but you definitely feel it. It's like an orchestra that effortlessly segues from section to section, versus one that has to stop and re-tune their instruments at the end of each movement.

The game has barely any story, but it gives you the ineluctable sense that there probably is a story, you just aren't around to witness it unfold. Not so much "this is a plotless game" as "gee, I wonder what I'm missing out on, wandering around empty hallways with my crowbar." The widely parodied, widely mocked decision to not have Gordon Freeman speak works really well, as you imagine your own voice and your own words flowing into silences in conversation.

The Bad
Half-Life is so overpowering as an experience that it took a while to sink in that I wasn't having that much fun.

A goofy, arcadey FPS like Quake kills Half-Life in enjoyment factor - and Quake's hardly an FPS benchmark par excellence.

Half-Life is just too clever for itself. It's filled with inventive ideas that just plain don't work in an FPS game. Too many times when you have to perform Lara Croft-esque jumps without seeing your feet. Too many places where you have to navigate instant-death tripwires with only a hazy idea of your proximal surroundings. Too many places where you're trying to push boxes around and they go unhelpfully skidding off in the wrong direction. It's like the game gets bored with being a groundbreaking FPS, and also wants to be a shitty version of Rayman.

And what's with the several million miles of air ducts you have to crawl through? Why? What's meant to be fun or enjoyable about that? I swear that half the game is spent hobbling through air ducts. Go fuck yourself for that one, guys.

Looking at Half Life in hindsight, You can see a real "cool stuff overload" coupled with a neglect to the basic principles that make gaming fun. Hit detection is seriously wonky. You're reaction when shooting isn't so much "eat death, hellscum!" as "man, I hope that last shot did damage". Overall, this game's action just isn't satisfying. The entire dynamic of the gameplay and weapons feels "off", like you're just slightly out of control of everything. And the game depends such ridiculous levels of mid-air finesse - I lost count of how many times I had to jump while crouching to fit into a tiny air duct - that it feels like you're playing a third person game hastily reprogrammed for first.

Gradually the illusion wears away, like a woman's makeup tearing. You'll see how facile and shallow much of the game is - how the bosses can be beaten by a chess-playing computer, how the enemy AI is full of holes, how the game has a tiny number of character models and keeps reusing them. It's like Being John Malkovich: The Game.

Half-Life pushed the FPS genre in directions it probably wasn't ready to go. It's an impressive exercise if you value games as artistry, or as visual experiences.

But if you value games as games? I'm not so sure.

The Bottom Line
It's an old, perhaps apocryphal story. Grigory Potempkin, lover of the Russian queen, was given the task of rebuilding the devastated towns along the river Dneiper. Rather than do this, he built a series of beautiful fake towns, with his own men playing the part of happy, well-fed peasants. They would smile and wave as the Empress passed by, and then rush on to populate the next fake town.

Half-Life is amazing to look at, even now. But don't look too hard, or too long. You'll notice the parts held together with duct tape and silly string.

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!"