Half-Life

aka: Bantiao Ming, HL, Hλlf-Life, Quiver
Moby ID: 155
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

The Black Mesa Research Facility is an ultra-secret laboratory under a government contract to conduct top-secret and extremely volatile experiments. The scientist Gordon Freeman is a Black Mesa employee. One morning, as usual, he pits his way to the research facility for a run-of-the-mill experiment. However, Gordon comes to realize that it might not be as ordinary as he thought. Odd things happen as he makes his way to one of the Black Mesa test chambers. Even stranger things happen when he begins to move the test sample towards the anti-mass spectrometer.

At that moment, everything goes horribly wrong. Aliens from the dimension Xen suddenly invade the facility, injuring or killing many of the employees. Soon afterwards, marines arrive to contain the situation by killing the aliens as well as the surviving human witnesses. Gordon understands what that means: he will have to fight his way through both aliens and marines to get to the top of the Black Mesa complex and to freedom.

The story of Half-Life is told entirely in-game: everything is seen through the eyes of the protagonist. Most story elements unfold via scripted sequences, triggered by the player reaching a certain area. If other characters have information to reveal, they address Gordon directly. The Black Mesa complex in the game is made up of both distinct levels which progress in a linear fashion as well as hubs where backtracking may be required to unlock further areas.

The game's weapon arsenal mostly consists of realistic weapons like pistols, machine guns and explosives, but there are also futuristic energy weapons developed at Black Mesa as well as organic weapons acquired from the invading aliens. Most weapons feature an alternate firing mode.

Enemies fall into two categories: aliens and human soldiers. While most of the aliens are not very bright, the humans display some relatively advanced artificial intelligence: they seek cover, retreat when hit and try to drive the player from his cover by throwing grenades. Some of the alien enemies cannot be killed by normal means. The environment must be used against them instead, going with a general tendency of the game to alternate the combat with environmental puzzles.

As of the 25th Anniversary Update from 17 November 2023, the Steam version of Half-Life includes content from Half-Life: Uplink as well as sprays and maps from Half-Life: Further Data V.1.

Spellings

  • 半条命 - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • 戰慄時空 - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

80 People (58 developers, 22 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 94% (based on 59 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.3 out of 5 (based on 537 ratings with 30 reviews)

The best PC game of all time. Period.

The Good
Everything. AI is quite possibly the smartest to ever grace a computer game; the marines and aliens, run from you, take cover, speak and are very smart. Also, you get fellow scientists and security guards help you along the way without being a pain. The storyline is about government cover-ups and experiments gone horribly wrong...Basically a fantastic sci-fi story that should be made into a movie sooner or later. Levels are excellent, always throwing something new at you when you least expect it. No more are you searching for keycards, HL has gameplay that makes you think of what to do next, and strategies to defeat a squad of grunts, or the huge alien Gargantua. All the weapons are very interesting and all have a very good use. For example, sometimes when you see a squad of grunts, unaware of you, but always kill you when you enter where they are you always get killed until you bounce a grenade in there. You can't just go in there and kill everything right away like you would in DOOM...HL is much more of a challenge. Basically the game has nothing wrong with it, and it not only fits all the criteria for a great game, it exceeds it and creates an experience like none other, with many innovative features added to an overcrowded genre...the one of the best FPS and games of all time.

The Bad
Multiplayer Half-Life is not that good, with some heavy lag sometimes, although maps and weapons are very good...fortunately, HL has some great mods that improve this downside, namely the tactical Team Fortress Classic. In other words, one player is the meat of the game. Sometimes it got VERY difficult, but usually you would just keep playing anyway, no matter how fustrating it was, just so you could see what happens next...Half-Life is that good.

The Bottom Line
Think of the tactics of Rainbow Six strategy, combined with a fantastic sci-fi story containing the elements of the movie ALIENS, but not with all the mindless action of DOOM. One of the few games you could get someone like a real time strategy gamer to actually play and get interested into.

Windows · by Dragoon (106) · 2000

One of the best/worst games I've ever played. Ambivalent? Damn right.

The Good
Half-Life is an odd breed. It is widely hailed as the best first person shooter ever, if not the best game to ever grace the PC. Being the first-person shooter fanatic that I am, I just had to give it a try. I write this review with mixed feelings; you will soon find out why.

So first, the good.

  • Game engine. The first thing to look at in a first-person shooter is its 3D engine. For a 1998 game, Half-Life certainly doesn't fail. I wouldn't say it brings unprecedented levels of visual fidelity to computer games (that title is reserved to Unreal), but with its modified Quake 2 engine, Half-Life certainly is nothing to sneeze at; the Research Centre looks exactly as it should: gray walls and red lighting where needed. Luckily Valve's engineers didn't skimp on the colours and lighting, so this game looks for the most part terrific (with some really amazing scenes, such as right at the beginning where there is a room with a scientist who's been taken over by an alien, right next to the locker room). I would say that visually the game is stunning.
  • Audio: the game features one of the best audio engines I've ever heard (although I haven't had the chance to play Thief yet). The "regular" audio implementation, that is without any positional audio extensions, is relatively good (for the most part it's easy to pinpoint from which direction voices are coming from and at what distance), but with audio acceleration it excels: despite generally lacking EAX implementation, the A3D 2.0-enabled engine is incredible and adds a sense of depth to the game I've never experienced before. This is very notable from the beginning (especially in the test chamber) and becomes very useful as the game progresses, since you can hear exactly where your enemies are, and with reflections coming from all around it's just as easy to pinponit where in the corridor you should aim. The audio reproduction is terrific, and the voice quality isn't lousy either (unlike a lot of other games).
  • The music, where there is any, is great; admittedly most of the ingame background music consists of short, atmospheric tracks, but it's good enough as it is.
  • The atmosphere in this game is one of the heaviest I've ever experienced, especially at the early levels. The suspense is incredible: things fall and blow up, catching the player surprised; an elevator with screaming scientists falling down and exploding on the bottom of the shaft... Half-Life heightens the sensations to points never experienced before. Unfortunately, this feeling doesn't last too long, and before reaching the middle of the game one becomes so accustomed to everything that it's difficult to be surprised again.
  • Half-Life's plot, while not deserving a Nebula award-winning book, is easily one of the best in any computer game to date. The only similar game I can think of off-handedly that has a better plot is the masterpiece System Shock. Half-Life's story evolves quite well (not as well as I would like though) and is executed to a science in the game, something that is missing in most other computer games (and is the main reason why Half-Life is considered such a good game).
  • Some things in Half-Life are incredible: the "dragon" monster (the big one with three heads) part is a stroke of sheer genius. The guy with the suitcase helps heighten what could've been boring-out-of-your-mind levels to interesting plot elements. That rocks.
  • I have to give credit where credit is due; although I do not necessarily agree with most people that say that the enemy AI in Half-Life is amazing, I will say that the marines are certainly the most challenging "monster" in a first person shooter game I've encountered so far. People say that they really act like marines; I disagree, as what chance does some science fellow have against squads of trained marines? I will, however, agree that they are much more intelligent than a typical enemy, what with them running around for cover and throwing grenades at you. Also, the little guys that run around real fast, shoot you and run again for cover are fairly challenging. But still, I don't think what a lot of people say regarding Half-Life's AI holds true.

Unfortunately, Half-Life's fantastic qualities are severely crippled by it's less appealing ones. Read on.

The Bad
I guess the single thing that bothers me the most in Half-Life is the poor execution of great ideas; the level design is incredible, but at times I almost tore out my hairs in frustration because of such stupid design mistakes that should've never been. Seriously: Half-Life is the single most frustrating game I've ever played to date. Playing Half-Life is not a pleasurable endeavour at all. Moving along the game is, for the most part, not a test of wits, not even a test of sheer playing ability, but rather a completely frustrating trial-and-error ordeal.

I do not enjoy having to play something over and over again until I can figure out what I did wrong and fix it, and unfortunately Half-Life fails miserably in that area. Want examples? Alright. For one: the dragon monster I mentioned in the previous section. Once you get past the terrific concept, you will find that this part is utterly frustrating! I had to load a game at least a dozen times just to complete this part, because: 1. There is no gurantee that walking slowly around the monster will make it ignore you; it happened many times that I walked slowly around the wall, and still got killed. And it only takes one or two blows for the bloody thing to kill you! 2. Once you DO get across the monster, it happens twice I think that the bridge under you will collapse. Of course that in retrospect it was obvious that it will happen, but how the hell are you supposed to know that the first time you play?!

That's exactly what I mean: trial-and-error gameplay. That's not the way it should be.

I decided I will finish this game out of sheer resentment for the parts that are stupid and mind-numbing, and it was not an enjoyable experience at all. I had a load of fun up until about third of the game (I would say, up until the giant robot you have to electrocute just before the rails), and afterwards the entire game was painful to play. Constant reloads were bad enough, but what truly pissed me off is the poor control system. It's fine for the most part, but for example having climb down ladders can drive you crazy. It happened at least a hundred times during gameplay that I fell off a stupid ladder because of it and had to reload. And who says you can't strafe or jump off a ladder midway? Why should you have to do it a few times just to get it right? That's frustration.

Another thing that bothers me about Half-Life, in regards to its highly acclaimed AI, is that while enemy AI is for the most part good, the AI of the guys you're supposed to work with (guards and scientists) sucks royally. They are completely impossible to work with. They walk around doing stupid things, and will constantly forget that they're supposed to follow you. The guards will shoot you at the back because you're accidentally in their way, and the scientists wlil run around you while you're furiously fighting an alien or another, getting shot in the process. Stupidity reigns.

And the final nail in the coffin: Half-Life is literally PLAUGED with bugs, beginning with small, annoying ones (a missing polygon wreaking havoc in the scene) and ending with abysmal ones that will literally hold you back from finishing the game: When I finally got to the Lambda complex and the scientist there was supposed to let me in, he simply forgot. Why do I mean by that? Well, he said what he was supposed to, agreed to come with me, and... nothing! He wouldn't touch the bloody retinal scanner, and I couldn't even kill him out of frustration because that would forfeit the game. Eventually I had to resort to the "noclip 1" cheat in order to get past that particular section. Why?!

The Bottom Line
A potentially fantastic game, marred by frustrating gameplay and far too many bugs to mention.

Windows · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 1999

Best game ever? Not any more, but still damn fine

The Good
This game, with over 50 international "Game Of The Year" awards behind it, was something of a success for Valve. The company shot from complete nobodies to superstars in one game. People have been waiting for their next game for about 5 years and nobody seems to be complaining, Valve can do no wrong it seems.

This game has only a few major tricks behind it, the rest is nothing particularly special. However these tricks are implemented so well that it doesn't really notice, and it's very strange how still no other games company has taken on board what they've done and improved it.

Firstly, the AI. The intelligence of the enemies in this game has been talked upon at length before. While the aliens are characteristically not the toughest foes to beat; the human opponents are astounding. They certainly were back in 1998. The soldiers were extremely quick, effective at working in a team, able to throw grenades at you, able to scatter when you threw one at them, able to flank and outmaneuver you, and able to take cover behind objects. They were nearly as good at playing as you were. Then the ninjas: lightning fast, cat-like, they'd shoot you from behind and run off when you found them, a team could pick you off in a second. The AI still has not been beaten.

The second major trick is the use of set-pieces and, bizarrely, no game has ever improved on this. Half-Life was so full of set-pieces that it seemed like literally anything could happen. Lifts would go out of control, whole ceilings would cave in, people would get pulled into vents and eaten before your very eyes. It was so intense and so amazing, why there isn't another game like this is a mystery to me.

Anyone can name a "moment" from Half-Life, like first encountering that incredible tentacle beast in the silo, or stepping into the suspended cage and having it plunge into the water. The fact that one of these legendary moments would happen every couple of minutes was enough to make you scream with delight. These moments were heightened with the excellent use of sound. The faint tapping you hear when you're rooms away from the tentacle beast silo, gradually getting louder the closer you get, until you finally open the silo door and see the gaming world's greatest enemy smashing it's claws against the walls looking for people. - Just terrific. The sound of the head crabs sends shivers down my spine just thinking about it. It's pretty amazing really.

The rest of the game is nothing that special. The level design is quite good, so are the graphics. That's about it. But then who cares because you know this is the only game where you could turn a corner and see a room explode, or a person being eaten alive.

The game also cleverly lets you get accustomed to this world before tearing it apart, it sounds so simple and yet no-one does it. The first 20 minutes or so of the game involve you seeing how the building is run, walking around it, and only then does it throw a spanner in the works. This makes it all the more exciting because it's happening in your new world, not some place you've never seen before. Half-Life is still the best FPS currently around at the time of writing because it introduced so many concepts that have still never been beaten. Plus it has one of the most successful mods around in the form of Counterstrike.

The Bad
There is a lot of platform jumping in between the moments of greatness. First-person platform jumping is the work of the devil. Xen is also looked upon unfavourably because it's taking the player out of the world he recognizes, and also because there is a lot of hopping about on islands. The game's trial & error philosophy is looked upon unfavourably by some, and with good reason. Although it's sometimes necessary as this game world seems so alive and it's almost a trait that anything can happen at any time, that's part of the fun.

The AI of your allies incidentally is dire, that is a bad point. The game is also pretty linear.

I also HATE head crabs. I can't play this game now because of them. They are the scariest enemy ever, and they're in an otherwise non-scary game. Which makes it pretty frustrating.

The Bottom Line
Terrific FPS. Not perfect, and not the best game ever. But it certainly might have been at the time of it's release. Introduced never-before-seen concepts as de riguer in all further shooters. It's linear, it's got scenes of platform-jumping, it's got one skin for the security guards. But it's fantastic, and in terms of pure FPS magic has still never been beaten

Windows · by Shazbut (163) · 2004

[ View all 30 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Narrative, wait what? Donatello (466) Jul 15, 2012
Sorry, Valve xroox (3895) Feb 12, 2009

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Half-Life appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

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Very early beta footage of the game, as well as interviews with some of the programmers, is available on the Diablo expansion pack Hellfire, released by Sierra a full year before the game ever shipped. Sierra already had advertisements for Half-Life in many of their products back then.

Cancelled ports

  • Half-Life, at one point, was completely finished for the Dreamcast console. Prima (the Official Strategy Guide folks) even had a Dreamcast-exclusive guide published. Unfortunately, the game wasn't published - probably due to the fact that SEGA announced that they would no longer produce new Dreamcasts. In certain circles of the Internet, a leaked copy can still be found and ran on a Dreamcast.
  • A Macintosh port was in the works from Westlake interactive and reached beta before being cancelled because of concerns about responsibility for tech support.

Development

In its first finalized form, as it would have been published if the original release date was kept, Half-Life was nothing more than a total conversion of Quake with new enemies and levels. In the one additional year spent on development the game transformed into the form that led it to critical and commercial success.

Engine

Half-Life was released a full year after Quake II and it's a common belief that it was based on the Quake II engine. This is not true. It is based on the original Quake engine and it's more than fair to say that it was modified beyond recognition by the Valve team. Amongst the additions were built-in 3D accelerator support, skeletal systems and shadow casting (the latter didn't make it into the game). Valve now refers to this engine as "GoldSrc". This is probably how the "Source" engine from Half-Life 2 got its name.

German version

There is a special German version which features robots as enemies, green blood instead of red and innocent people cannot be killed any longer. The robot design was outlined by Sierra's Germany division, then sent to Valve in Seattle, where the artists created and implemented the tin soldiers. The changes in the game's code and art, together with the text and speech localization, served to delay the German version by full four months. By then, even casual gamers had already purchased the original version, which was freely for sale up to its ban. However, Half-Life proved to be so immensely popular that the German robo-version still sold over 50,000 copies, so the venture was ultimately successful for Sierra.

On December 16, 1998, the US version of Half-Life was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Gina Freeman

Apparently, Valve had written a part for Gordon's wife, Gina, to appear in the game, this idea got scrapped but she still made it to the game, her model was the one used for the holographic trainer.

id Software

When id Software saw what Valve was doing with their engine, they were reminded of their original idea for a seamless, story-based DOOM and thought it would fail. It didn't.

Innovations

Half-Life was influential in many little ways, popularising several gameplay devices which have subsequently become standards, such as: * The between-episode text which appears, overlaid on the screen, before slowly fading out (adopted not just in other computer games, but in several different Linux windowing systems too) * A training segment which is presented as an integral part of the storyline * The practice of rendering cut-scenes with the in-game engine * Blood-splatters and other persistent stains * Semi-random NPC speech and 'interaction' in an otherwise straightforward action game * Weaponry which needs to be manually reloaded between magazine changes * Constant playflow: the levels directly connect to each other

Inspiration

According to Valve's Gabe Newell, originally Half-Life was inspired by Stephen King's novella The Mist. However the game evolved so much from the preliminary concepts that the only things that remained were the horror/technology combination and the designs for the Bull Squid and the blind tentacle.

Lambda

Half-Life's lambda symbol is not the scientific symbol for half-life, but is instead the decay constant in the differential equation for exponential decay. The actual scientific symbol used for half-life is t1/2.

Mods

Counter-Strike was not a freak occurrence. Valve made the game editor immediately available, produced the mod Team Fortress Classic as an example of a finished mod, and also sponsored "Mod Expos", events where modders could present their work to other gamers and the press.

Plot

According to planethalflife.com: "the material that makes up the three green triangles protecting Nihilanth is the same as the crystal sample which you pushed into the beams to start this whole mess in the first place. Valve Software originally intended to make this connection more obvious but never did."

References

  • The security office is in sector 7G. Homer Simpson works in a sector with the same name.
  • The Gluon Gun was nicknamed "The Egon" after the Ghostbusters Character Egon Spengler. The Gluon gun projects a plasma stream similar to the ones used by the Ghostbusters.
  • The surnames on the lockers where Gordon goes to collect his HEV suit are of people from the development team. Gordon also has a book by Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw in his locker.

References to the game

The game makes an appearance in season 1, episode 22 of Lost, a popular TV series. Some in-game action is shown, and the characters shortly discuss the use and the effectiveness of the crowbar as a weapon.

Remakes

  • In 2004, Valve released a re-mastered version using Half Life 2's Source engine, called Half-Life: Source.
  • In 2012, a group of fans released a remake of their own, called Black Mesa. The team's goal was to provide a completely new and more modern version of the original experience, since according to them, Valve's remake "didn't fully live up to the potential of a Source engine port of Half-Life". In fact, most of the game's content remained unchanged: Half-Life: Source mainly added new water and physics effects, but didn't upgrade the game's textures or character models.

Sales

As of 2007, the game sold of over eight million since its release. (source)

Shotgun

There's a minor technical error with the shotgun. It's presented in the game as a double-barreled weapon, and the alternative fire mode shoots two shells at half the speed. However, the shotgun is modeled on a single-barreled weapon, the popular Franchi SPAS-12, which appears in several computer games. What looks like a second barrel is actually the under-barrel tubular magazine, which holds the shells.

Sound engine

Half-Life was one of the first games to utilize a software-driven environmental sound engine. Effects are applied in context of room size and surfaces of reflection. Reverb effects are calculated in realtime and applied on the fly as sounds are triggered.

University of Innsbruck

In the game manual, the first two pages contain a fictional letter from the administrative offices of the Black Mesa Research Facility to Dr. Gordon Freeman, concerning his upcoming employment. The address on the letter indicates that Freeman was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Experimental Physics, University of Innsbruck, before moving to Black Mesa. In contrast to the common practice of using fictitious addresses for storytelling purposes, the listed address is actually real. As confirmed by the official university website, "Technikerstraße 25, A-6020 Innsbruck" is the real-world location of Innsbruck University's Institute for Experimental Physics.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • April 1999 (Issue #177) – Game of the Year
    • January 2001 (Issue #199) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #1 Game of All Time (Readers' Choice)
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #2 Game of All Time (Editors' Choice)
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #2 Top Game of All Time
    • 2012 – #1 Top PC Gaming Intro
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #17 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #1 in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
    • October 2001 - #1 in the "Top 50 Best Games of All Time" list
    • April 2005 - #1 in the "Top 50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • PC Player (Germany)
    • Issue 01/1999 - Best Game in 1998
    • Issue 01/1999 - Best Shooter in 1998
  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/1999 – Best Action Shooter in 1998
  • Retro Gamer
    • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #38 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by doj.

Macintosh added by Sciere. Linux added by Kabushi.

Additional contributors: Tomer Gabel, Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Zack Green, Apogee IV, Daniel Saner, Paulus18950, Cantillon, Patrick Bregger, Plok, lethal_guitar, MrFlibble, FatherJack.

Game added June 6, 1999. Last modified March 18, 2024.