When I walked into my science lesson the other day, they were talking about how radioactive decay can affect and make an unstable atomic nucleus. When they mentioned that half-life was involved, I eagerly put my hand up. The teacher, quite surprised I actually cared about the subject, let me ask the question.

“Surely half-life can only happen twice?”

Well before we got the great game that was, half-life 2, and then nothing after it except for 2 episodes. We got half-life, the original fps adventure all the way on pc. It was developed by valve, a company formed from ex-Microsoft workers. They thought: ‘well why don’t we just make a game company and make some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time’. And that’s exactly what they did. Unfortunately, due to a freak accident, they lost that ability to count over 2. So that was a mini history lesson about half-life and its creators. But the real question is, 25 years later, does it still hold up?

You play as Gordon freeman. Just an average scientist going to his day work. That is until he does an experiment and it goes terribly wrong. He accidentally ends up creating a portal to another dimension known as xen, which then unleashes its creatures. Gordon is forced to try and find a way to close the portal and get out unharmed. However things get more dangerous once the HECU get involved. They are forced to kill every single black mesa employee and any xen creatures they find, in an attempt to cover up the incident. The story is pretty simple for what it is but I also quite like how simple it is. With Gordon eventually finding that the portal is being forced open by a creature from the other side. But before we tackle what happens near the ending, let’s talk about the gameplay.

The gameplay is pretty similar to most standard fps games. You cover and shoot, picking up health upgrades and armour upgrades on your way. You also have quite the arsenal. For a simple day to day scientist he sure knows his way around a gun or two. The weapon selection includes: the classic crowbar, pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, hornet gun, and others. There are quite a wide range of weapons and they each function in different ways. The weapons also get more powerful as you go along. The weapons feel pretty weak once you get to later parts of the game but are still very usable. There are also parkour sections and puzzle sections. These puzzles aren’t too mind blowing, mainly just being using boxing to build a staircase up to an area, navigating conveyor belts, and things such as that. Later on you even get a little extra manoeuvrability with the fact you can long jump. The gameplay is pretty simple but also has that slight level of complexity which makes it so interesting.

After everything, Gordon finally goes into xen. The world where all of the creatures have been coming out of. It’s almost a miserable world yet it’s also quite interesting at the same time. It has hev suits from previous researchers. It kind of adds to that cold atmosphere that it’s trying to set up. After that though, Gordon finally tackles his final xen monster and then, it’s over, it’s finally over…or so we thought. A mysterious man who has been following you through out finally reveals himself. His name is G-Man. He gives him a choice: to come work with him or be teleported to a bunch of alien soldiers where he dies. If it was me I would’ve let Gordon die because I’m silly like that but…everyone knows the canon ending is that Gordon accepts G-Man’s offer.

And that’s half-life! It still holds up pretty well today and it still has the same level of respect it did all those years ago. Sure there are some parts that make me question the design but it’s still excellently put together and you can tell. If you ask me, it’s a shame that half-life 3 may never happen. This is clearly a series with lots and lots of love put into it and it’s almost a shame that they won’t continue it any further. But I still find it respectable that even today, they clearly care about half-life, and so does the community. I’m so happy to have finally tried one of the most respected fps games of all time.

Great story, good gameplay, wonderful level design…most of the time, excellent weapon selection, great 90’s vibe, I’m sorry to all the scientists and security that died due to my silly ass

Con el tiempo terminé perdiéndole el encanto al juego. Nadie puede negar que su tecnología era puntera para 1998 y que eso permitió lograr escenas de acción espectaculares como nunca se habían visto en juego de disparos. También es remarcable como a través de una introducción lenta que caracterizaba al personaje que controlamos intenta desmarcarse de todos sus homólogos de disparos más desenfadados.

Sin perjuicio de todo lo anterior, parece que cuando se alaba a este título, sólo se hace considerando la impresión de las primeras horas, no considerando la longitud real del juego. Es decir, si olvidamos que este es un "juego de disparos" y nos centramos en su principal propuesta, dígase la inmersión en este mundo ficticio, no parece que el juego se mantenga leal a su propuesta "contracorriente". La plausibilidad de quién controlamos se ve cada vez más sofocada por el compromiso de hacernos matar cantidades absurdas de enemigos. Y ni siquiera el combate es tan profundo, complejo o satisfactorio como para que justifique tal prominencia. Todo lo anterior lo combinas a un diseño de niveles que oscila constantemente entre lo "bueno" a lo derechamente "malo" y resulta en una experiencia que realmente no es tan atrapante: Ni un producto tan inmersivo como otros de su época, ni tan buen shooter como los que abundaban en el mercado.

RUN. THINK. SHOOT. LIVE.

this has been a very hard review to write - I think the most difficult part of doing a writeup on a game is making sure you don't let your thoughts and impressions escape you, getting them all on a page before you inevitably forget what you want to say, and that's what happened with Half-Life. it's a game I love, but even so when I wanted to type this up, my mind would just blank. got maybe a paragraph or two in and I couldn't go further. so - fuck that. scrapped the entire thing. reinstalled the game and played through all of it. and now here I am, memory refreshed - the steel corridors of Black Mesa etched into my mind.

RUN

you are not a demon fighting space marine, or a hardened bubble gum chewing badass. you are a nerdy theoretical physicist - you have probably never even held a gun in your life before, and you are late to work, so play like one. Half-Life's combat is deceiving, for lack of a better term. I remember the first time I was thrown into the midst of its gunplay. up to this point I recognized the Quake movement, the early 3D visuals, I mean shit - this is literally a 90s shooter. surely it plays like one? so I RUN into the face of an HECU soldier, shotgun in hand, blast him point blank and he tanks it. doesn't even flinch. and then I'm dead.

the game is a lot smarter than it lets on. a lot of people I watch play the game fall for the same thing - it's in that boomer shooter bubble so there's a lot of stuff you would think you can get away with, but that's where Half Life draws the line between itself and its predecessors. Its combat is much more tactical, forcing you to think much harder about your position in a firefight. the enemies are far too aggressive for you to take cover in one spot and duck and shoot, but conversely leaving yourself out in the open will almost certainly result in certain death. nearly every encounter in the campaign is designed to sandwich you between those dilemmas. ultimately the gunplay isn't something a player will master the first time, or even the second or third, but do end up achieving that complete control over your arsenal, it feels slick as all hell.

you shouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight, but you can bring a crowbar.

THINK

half life's levels are fairly linear compared to other shooters of its time, no longer do you have to run around the map looking for keys to progress, there's only one way to go and it's forward. in spite of that fact though, these levels feel far more in depth than anything else before it - why is that? perhaps it's the larger reliance on player intuition, a deeper emphasis on environmental design, you're taught very early on to THINK and use your surroundings to progress, at some point you just see a vent cover and immediately you think "oh, crowbar." ranging from tiny things like that to more involved environmental puzzles, like pushing boxes to make your own platforms, calling airstrikes to clear the path, and so on, and so forth.

interestingly, a lot of these principles are thrown out near the game's finale as we dive into xen, a part of the game a lot of players - myself included, at one point found frustrating, but I find now to be bold and exhilarating, it inverts the design philosophy up to this point completely, alien in every way… both visually, with it's fleshy terrain and murky waters, but also alien to the game itself, as the player now finds themselves in an area that they cannot interact with the same way they did black mesa... perhaps it goes too far on this front, regardless of intention, xen suffers a lot from its overambition, but in a weird way, I enjoy it for that. valve weren't afraid to get weird to deliver their point, for better - or for worse. maybe that's just me fresh on the copium hot off the heels of my 8th replay, though.

SHOOT

BLACK MESA RESEARCH FACILITY - BLACK MESA, NEW MEXICO

from the moment you start half-life, you know this game is different. instead of being thrusted immediately into the action, you begin on a tram. there's someone speaking, not someone you know, and yet this all seems so… casual. you can't leave the tram, you have no gun, you can't even see your own health. instead there's scientists everywhere, security guards, all moving and working without even noticing you. the train sometimes stops for the facility to catch up and let you through, there's a robot handling power tools - you get a brief glimpse at the exterior of the facility as you witness a helicopter take off, a lot of this goes by rather quickly, you're still a bit lost on what exactly is going on… and then it hits you.

SUBJECT: GORDON FREEMAN. MALE, AGE 27

this all might seem rather rudimentary today, nowadays long opening cinematics in shooters especially are equally a staple and meme of the genre, but I can't think of many that are as endearingly cool as half-life's opening. this applies to it's narrative as a whole, it's weaved so effortlessly into the gameplay, not often does it actually have to stop you dead in your tracks to catch you up on what's going on, a lot of that is communicated through the levels themselves, talk amongst scientists and security guards that the military is coming to rescue you, which is great! then you start seeing claymores and turrets laid around the place, a bit strange… but they're probably fighting through the alien invasion as much as we are. and then finally, you see a soldier. expecting them to behave like the friendly AI security guards, you approach, only for them to kill the scientist nearby, and immediately start firing at you. no pause, no dialogue, you're being killed, so just SHOOT. suddenly it becomes very clear that this is no rescue mission and there's nothing to do but move on with your escape, with something new to watch out for. beautiful.

LIVE

half-life's 25th anniversary is next year, and with each day we inch closer to that milestone it becomes a bigger franchise of why this game kicks ass, and will forever kick ass. every year that passes by it becomes a bigger "fuck you" to the notion of video games aging, it's design not only transcending it's own time period but still gliding over so many releases to this day. I love half-life, I love its sequels a little less, but at the end of the day I love these games. it's a shame that the future of the series is so uncertain, even in spite of Alyx's release two years ago. it's a complete dice roll on whether we'll ever see the next installment, whether or not this franchise even has the means to LIVE. valve has moved onto different things now, which stings a little, but even if we never see the conclusion to all of this, I can die happy knowing we at least got this out of it all. I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way too. just recently at the time of writing this review, the game broke its concurrent player record on Steam, reaching 12,000 people playing at once, and I think that's special. it's a fraction of the player count games like Dota 2 or CSGO pull on a bad day, but it feels good that all these years later this game and its fans are still kicking. I can't find a way to put it more eloquently, so let me just say it outright. this game fucking slaps.

Valve releasing the 25 anniversary update was the perfect time to do another replay of this classic. Sadly, the new update is broken as of the time I'm writing this. Scripted events didn't trigger, and object collision seems to be wonky at best. The game becomes a nightmare from Surface Tension onwards.

As for the game in general: Half-Life remains one of the best shooters of all time. Exceptional paced, including Xen in my opinion. Its combat loop is so good, almost never repeating the same encounters. All packed up in a sci-fi story that allows depth to be brought into it by the player, but never forces anyone to ever stop playing the game. It's my ideal way to tell Video Game Story's: Those who want to stop and soak in the details can do that just as well as people who just want the action. I never get tired of doing both depending on wich mood strikes me and Gordon Freemans journey through Black Mesa never gets old for me.

Alien, The Thing, Doom and Quake all had a baby with each other.

The legendary immortal classic that influenced the First Person Shooter genre was probably one of my very first games as a toddler without me knowing about playing it before. I never made it back when the Aliens attack and for some reason never played it until know.

As the headline suggests its easy to say that games like Doom and Quake had some influence on this games plot along with Ridley Scotts Alien and John Carpenters The Thing. The headcrab monster pretty much seems to be inspired by the facehugger from Alien, while the infected Zombies reminist on the humans that the Thing from the movie The Thing took over.

What sets this apart from other FPS games from its time is the way the game tells its story. The story itself is rather simple yet its the way the game used the gaming world and its environment to tell the story is what makes it.

The gameplay is pretty solid as it uses your typical FPS combat along with some puzzle solving. Enemy variety is pretty good but I will say that we had FPS games with better monsters before and after. What kinda baffles me that the human soldiers you fight are mostly a bigger threat than the Alien enemies which is kinda weird since monsters normally should be more dangerous. The shotgun is also kinda lame to use against humans. Firstly because of the low damage it does and second because you can't blow enemies heads away, yet you can explode them into pieces. Other than that the game has good weapon variety. The game can also become kinda frustrating at points but that might be more of a skill thing rather than the games own quality. At least you can save whenever you want and the game still uses checkpoints.

The sound design is pretty amazing. Never was it more fun to smack a crowbar into a wall. Amazing noises. The headcrabs also sound kinda adorable lol.

I wouldn't call Half-Life a masterpiece like some others do but its still a pretty damn good game and a must play for every FPS fan.

8/10 Resonance Cascades.

I try to play games in the mindset of the year they came out in (and given how many old games I play, this tends to be pretty easy). I played this game more or less blind, and within that framework the opening sequences were mindblowing. The tram ride has plenty of cool little worldbuilding details and bits of foreshadowing - both in the sterile recorded announcements and the background events - which you're likely to miss the first time because you're too busy taking it all in, or because you're like me and are testing out the controls, having this theoretical physicist amusingly bounce around like a hyperactive puppy on his way to work. But the point is that the game doesn't force feed anything to you: this all happens in real-time instead of in a cutscene and the world keeps on spinning whether you're paying attention or not. Just a few minutes later, you can discover a ladder in an elevator shaft that leads nowhere in particular - but it's there because it makes sense for there to be a ladder there. Several hours later, you can eavesdrop on enemy conversations to get a little bit more background on the story... or you can just interrupt them mid-conversation and shoot them full of holes before they can react. It's all delightfully immersive.

...until you wander close enough to a falling elevator to trigger the NPC dialogue of the people inside, having them take time out of screaming in terror to cheerily wish you a good morning. Because of how groundbreaking this game's ideas were, and how much intricate scripting is required to make something so immersive, one gets the feeling like Half-Life, more than most games of its era, is held together by duct tape - one only need to search for early builds of the game where NPCs would randomly drop dead for no reason to find evidence of this. It feels like the devs, much like the ill-fated scientists of Black Mesa, were experimenting with something they didn't quite know how to handle yet. And you know what? In the name of progress and innovation and art, I can handle that.

What I can't handle, however, is the fact that when you take its innovations out of the question, Half-Life's gameplay just isn't good. There are small things like enemies not giving any indication when they've been hit (which sends all boss fights into "what do I do and am I even damaging them" territory) and an abundance of 'gotcha' moments, but the biggest flaw is something more fundamental: this game is a mirror image of Mirror's Edge. Where Mirror's Edge had fantastic parkour mechanics but forced the player into functional but clumsy gunfights, Half-Life does the opposite: you have satisfying gunplay and great weapon variety but you're forced into numerous platforming-heavy sections in a game where Freeman's fancy high-tech suit seems to be made of an inside-out banana peel. The iterative level design works in theory, but it's built on top of platforming mechanics that feel so slippery and inconsistent that it feels less like organically-increasing difficulty than bullshit stacked on top of bullshit.

What's that you're saying? I can somewhat read lips so it looks like you're saying "skill issue" but I can't be sure - I can't hear you over the sound of the bugs. At least half a dozen times I randomly got stuck and unable to move, and on two of those occasions it happened right at the start of a chapter which autosaved, which meant that I had to reload from a much older save.

I can't decide if Half-Life is the worst great game I've played or the greatest bad game I've played. It's brilliant and unrefined, it's exhilarating and infuriating, it's a classic and it's a relic - and as a landmark in gaming history it's also an absolute must-play even if you're someone like me who engages with games as entertainment first and art second.

Half-Life el padre de los FPS en 3D

Hear me Out... este juego es mi infancia pura asi que talvez este nublada por la nostalgia y todas esas cosas que recuerdo, nunca lo habia completado al 100% hasta hace poquito debido a que yo este juego lo jugaba en un Ciber

este juego tiene una narrativa increible que me encanta hasta dia de hoy y la amo! Narrativa que se expande con las Expansiones Oficiales y No Oficiales (las cuales estan muy buenas tambien) pensar que todo eso ocurre en lo que viene ser 1 dia

los graficos para la epoca eran increibles, la jugabilidad sin igual y hasta dia de hoy es igual de disfrutable, el multijugador tambien ESTABA bueno jsjs

en fin, un juegazo que se merece mas de 100 estrellas ♥

Good game that clearly has its fanbase for good reason. Very addicting and satisfying task and reward set up. The continuous story throughout makes the game easy to continue through, with no cutscenes, just trying to find the next spot to get to the next chapter. That layout is fine, but I wasn't the biggest fan of just moving in a straight line, shooting what I could and diddling with switches and valves to open up the next straight line, it got a little boring, but found it pretty nice to play an hour of it before work each day to keep it from getting too repetitive. The game tries to incorporate platforming when your character walks like he's on an ice rink, and slides down ladders like they're covered in grease, making all those parts incredibly annoying. If it wasn't a 90's FPS that allows you to quick save whenever, I would probably have more complaints about it, but because of that it makes it not that big of a deal to work with. Loved all the bosses, thought they were super fun and cool in design, which was great in contrast to the more regular enemies, as they didn't have too much variety. Finding scientists and security guards to work with and heal you was also a fun way to feel truly part of the game's environment.

Overall, Half-Life is clearly very good at what it was meant to do. It gets a little tedious and repetitive, but it still has an interesting and involved story that I really admire. I'm not the biggest fan of FPS, but had a good time playing this one! I can't give it too much flack, as I played the game enough that I started feeling immense relief just looking at the first-aid kits hanging on the walls at my work. Definitely a must play for those into sci-fi and shooters.

I love Half-Life 1, but up until this week I had never actually seen it through to the end. Am I a Hypocrite? Yes, but not because of that. I think Half Life 1 has a lot of peaks and valleys in terms of levels, but in all honesty I'd rather an excellent game which is occassionally bad than an overall ok or mediocre game; which incidentally gives away my opinion on its sequel.

The paradox of action games, is that they all live or die by their answer to one single question : "what happens when you're NOT shooting/stabbing/bludgeoning/rollerskating etc?". No great action game that I can think of can be ALL action ALL the time because it gets mind numbing. That doesn't mean that you need to load up your stylish action game with ancillary mechanics or a hybrid model until the store page can describe you as "action-adventure" but it means you need to think of something. RE4 to me is one of the most brilliant action games of all time precisely because it understood this : down time is important, in between harrowing, skin-of-your-teeth encounters with cultists and oddly accented spanish peasants there are quiet moments of both relieving and building back up the tension, scavenging for supplies, talking to the pirate merchant, a few odd puzzles.

Doom, the OG FPS (yeah yeah I know about Wolfenstein 3D but Doom was the real smash hit) knew this as well, for all its reputation would suggest, its not just an unending onslaught of cacodemons; there is hunting for secrets, an old id favourite and key hunting. Half Life kind of marks the evolutionary split in shooter design in this respect, both in the attempt at a new sort of immersive storytelling through following a single character without cutting away or through text dumps, and an emphasis on a more grounded take on similar material (i.e earth is invaded by fearsome creatures).

It owes a lot to its predecessors; one can hardly forget that its built on a heavily modified quake engine, but it goes for a decidedly different feel. It also answers the question mentioned at the beginning less with key card hunting or secrets, but with platforming sections and set pieces, as well as the odd puzzle and general ammo and health scavenging. There is an argument to be made, among those who would see the upcoming shift during 6th and 7th gen towards "realistic" shooters heralded by the likes of Halo and Medal of Honor as the death of the traditional subgenre now known as the "boomer shooter" until its eventual renaissance in the mid 2010s, that Half Life marks the turning point in that.

Spoilers for HL1 from here on out I guess, but c'mon, who hasnt played half life yet

Its kind of the missing link between those two currents, its both an attempt at realism, which starts with an unskippable non-combat section akin to most sci-fi B-Movies of old where 1 hour of scientists talking preceded any kind of monster/alien showing up, but you can bunny-hop through most of it. As much as silent protagonists seem to be out of fashion nowadays, it fit perfectly with the immersive narrative of Half-Life 1, where Gordon becomes an avatar of the player, both getting into the character of a scientist going to work at NOT area 51 but also how they react to the unfolding drama. Seeing the soldiers gunning down the scientists from my uninterrupted first person view was a lot more impactful that any amount of similar dramatic turning points in other games where they would have cut to a dramatic shot in a different aspect ration of Gordon looking shocked so you know to be shocked as well. Its half life 2 where this starts to become more incongruous, with a more fully characterised Gordon who apparently has seen the error of his ways and no longer shoots scientists in the head because its funny.

I suppose I should confess that the reason Half-Life 1's middle ground is appealing to me precisely because Im not much of a fan of its predecessors or successors. With both Doom and Quake I can appreciate their place in history but again, whenever the action stops in those I kind of lose interest.

Half Life 1 is definitely frontloaded in quality, which IMO is kind of common in games. I don't hate On a Rail like most people, and even Residue Processing I think is fine. Blast Pit is, well I respect the idea more than the execution, frankly. Whilst I consider Half Life to be a timeless classic, if there is one aspect that has aged horribly its the physics, ironic considering its follow-up being almost defined by its adoption of real time physics, for all of its faults, the havok engine is such an improvement upon the non-physics of pre-HL2 3D games (okay I know HL2 didn't invent physics engines). My kingdom for the stupid seesaw puzzles of half life 2 when the alternative is this system wherein pushing crates in place feels like trying to move a magnet across an ice rink by repelling it across the ground with an oppositely charged magnet. It also seems weird how much of an emphasis HL1 puts on precision platforming ( a certain infamous section in Surface Tension springs to mind ) when you're essentially piloting a Fridge on Rollerskates, which is great for combat as you bunnyhop around shooting at monsters in the face, but even the function to slowdown by holding shift still feels kinda programmed for a different game. Deus Ex has the same issue with its non-physics, and its also the one thing I don't like about it (well, that and its shit tutorial).

On this last and most recent playthrough, I finally decided to finish the game. I'd left a previous playthrough on surface tension but I made my way through the rest of the game including the infamous Xen. I wish I could sit here and join the seeming re-evaluation of Xen being "good, actually" but I think the haters are kind of right this time. Xen isn't awful, in particular though people are referring to the whole of the last part of the game set in the Xen portal world, I think the level called Xen is pretty alright. Gonarch's lair is godawful, however, a buggy, ill-conceived set piece boss fight of the worst kind. Interloper is okay, if a bit haphazard in its design, just sending an insane amount of enemies at you but also having the slow healing chambers at every step feels rushed as hell compared to the measured encounter design of the rest of the game, probably victim of the famously short development time of Xen. Nihilanth sucks, and I will take no argument against this point, its really bad.

The thing with Xen is, it almost works. Its weirdness and shitter level design arguably helps in making it feel more alien, less designed for a human to navigate it, but in practice it never really committs to this aspect enough, with the constant ammo drops around (left by previous scientists I know, still doesn't make it feel not cheap) and the health showers which heal you as well because reasons. And well, a lot of the times its not all that alien, the confusion arising less from the geiger inspired hive being made for other creatures, and moreso that the level design has communicated or implied a path forward through its structure, only to intend a different one. That bit with the holes opening intermittently in the ground springs to mind.
Aesthetically the design is great, with a combination of industrial and biologic flavour to the architecture.

The main issue though for Xen is that it feels like a climax for a different game. Through the unfolding drama of Half Life's Black Mesa incident involving government coverups, desperate escapes, scientists playing god etc. Xen doesn't really feel like a conclusion to all of that. Indeed, the game's ending, whilst a genius sequel-hook, doesn't answer much of anything. Intentionally-so, but Valve has pulled this bullshit so many times its hard to believe they'll ever provide any kind of narratively satisfying conclusion to a half life game ever (ironically, the shittest half life game Blue Shift is the only one which does this, with Barney getting to go home, although undermined by the knowledge that almost inmediately earth got invaded by an all powerful genocidal space empire). I haven't played Black Mesa, because a fan Half Life remake sounds dumb, but I have heard they make Xen last like twice as long, which seems like it would be torturous. For all my complaints I will say, Xen is mercifully short.

At the end of the day, Half Life's later half being not as good isn't really a problem for me, I'd rather have its peaks and valleys as opposed to overall ok games that I'll forget as soon as I play it. In a way, I'd argue Xen's questionable quality has helped HL1 more than hindered it, the flaws make the good aspects shine by contrast.

Ah - This is embarrassing. I guess I hadn't played nearly as much of Half-Life 1 as I thought I had. I didn't know there was so much... Valvey stuff in it. I've always thought of it as a kind of more grown-up Quake II. It's actually much more akin to its sequel or the Portal games than I realised. The vehicle sections, giant production line conveyor belts and cliffside descent. It's full of wee sections with their own ideas. Ambitious and exciting. Well paced and varied. Much longer than I expected too.

I've had access to the PC version for about 20 years, but picking up the relatively dated Gearbox PS2 port on Saturday was what finally got me hooked. I had it in my mind that there was something uniquely interesting about the PS2 version. Given some light research, it seems its primary USP is some local co-op stuff that I can't imagine many would be willing to sit through now, given how much the thing can chug in one-player. The thing that I appreciated the most is that the controls have been somewhat idiotproofed for the console market, simplifying the crouchjump command (something I felt was never really explained to me very well on PC) and including an optional lock-on system. That lured me in, I guess. All of a sudden, this juggernaut of PC gaming started to feel like Ocarina of Time.

I find the kind of time capsule aspect of retro gaming is something that's easier to appreciate on consoles than PC. If I loaded up Half-Life on Steam now, it'd be a rose-tinted vision of 1998, boosted with high resolution options and decades of patches. On PS2, the awkward save system and pre-title screen CGI rendered logo really evoke the era of £25 DVDs in cardboard digipacks and Rex the Runt.

Half-Life 1 is Valvey, but it's the "this was made by 20 guys in a rented office" Valve. It's not terribly slick, and the ideas frequently take precedence over the player experience. Unlike Half-Life 2, moments where you feel pinned down or overpowered frequently seem accidental.

I've long understood that Xen was the result of a team all pointing towards some wild, massive conclusion, and having nothing of substance up their sleeves. Actually playing it, it's miserable. Not a misery that's unique to Half-Life - It's pretty standard 90s FPS drudgery, not unlike many sections of Perfect Dark or Turok - but a massive step down from what had been established. Gonarch is particularly awful, and I'm not confident that the PS2 port is even doing it right. I did an honest playthrough of the fight on Half-Life: Source just to test my suspicions and turned on the cheats to power through on PS2 afterwards.

A lot of Xen is only made palatable on PC due to the game's quicksaves, but you can only make one at a time on PS2. If you're not careful, you can completely fuck a playthrough by using a gun too frequently or assuming there's going to be some health pickups around the next corner. I kind of liked that though. There was a more meaningful weight to decision making, even if I did cop out and Google the Invincibility code for a shit boss.

I'm embarrassed for asking for Half-Life 3 before I'd even finished the original game. It's far more reflective of what I like about the series than I had given it credit for. Playing it in 1998 likely felt just as exciting as Half-Life 2 did for me in 2004. I'm very sorry for chucking it on the "I'm never going to actually play this" pile alongside Unreal.

remains my favorite first-person shooter experience after all this time. while there may not be as many immediate "wow" moments as a lot of single-player experiences in the genre down the line like doom eternal, modern warfare, or hell, even half-life 2 - much of what makes half-life so wonderful lies in the unspoken and understated.

as an example, think of the moment where gordon finally makes it out of the initial horror of the impact of the resonance cascade near the start of the game. the science team has been pinning their hopes on the military's black ops unit to show up and get them out of this mess; a pure accident and something the team had been trying to prevent. where half-life 2's combine is shown as a clearly benevolent and constant force within its universe, half-life 1 deals this reveal in a much more moment-to-moment manner: screams over the radio, shells ringing in the distance, and the IMMEDIATE gameplay shift to brutality upon your first eye-lock with the black ops.

this mentality is true of the game design that permeates half-life's skeleton, too. the areas feel extremely organic, not very "game-y" at all - the laboratories, the bomb shelters, the waste disposals, and those wide open red rocky mountains in which the game reveals an almost proto-snake eater confrontation with the harsh openness of nature after cooping you up in sheltering and claustrophobic areas for so long. the breadth of half-life is extremely becoming of such a short title.

the movement is quick and the second-by-second playbook is rewarding to master - where previous landmarks like doom or quake often gave you a toolkit with obvious champions, the half-life armory is a diverse kit with a dozen-so weapons each serving their own indispensable purpose throughout the entire experience. there is NO fps i've ever played that has made grenades, the starting pistol, and non-hitscan weapons feel so necessary. in tone and layout execution, i've often lovingly called half-life the "first 3d metroid" game (sans the lack of the breadth of metroid's exploration elements of course) and i still stand by that - especially true of half-life's intergalactic closing chapter.

the ending is particularly intriguing and the threads for a still unsolved quarter-century fascination with the g-man are sown within only a conversation's time. gordon's questions have no time to be answered - only a choice and a revolution awaits. all respect to half-life 2 and what it manages to achieve from every technical standpoint - but friends, it's in what half-life 1 doesn't say...

I have some amount of respect for Half-Life. The game's eye for set-pieces, and constant insistence on re-inventing itself, makes for a varied experience that seems ahead of its time in some ways. The game also did a lot for immersive storytelling in games, though this aspect of Half-Life comes across as very clunky nowadays when contrasted against what followed in its footsteps. I will also say that, despite the harsh words that are about to follow, I enjoyed playing through Half-Life quite a bit more than my rating indicates; I played through the game in the company of friends, and everyone gently mocking the game's failings throughout helped make for an enjoyable time.

The problem is, for all it managed to do for the medium Half-Life has sadly aged almost impressively horrendously. The opening couple hours, which play out almost as survival horror, manage to still capture some amount of the tension they likely had a couple decades ago, but almost everything after the point where soldiers start showing ends up being some brand of frustrating with awkward enemy placement, cheap deaths, and myriad moments where I had to look up what I was even meant to do. Following this downward trend in quality to its natural conclusion fighting the final boss was an intensely unpleasant experience, all to get an ending that for me fell flat on its face.

I also deeply disliked the quick-save/quick-load feature and how the game seems very much designed with it in mind. Maybe I just suck at FPSes but there are countless moments in this game that only really make sense in a world where you assume most players are actively using quick-saving. Actually using this feature though leads to what feels like a very disjointed experience, robbing you of any feeling of genuine accomplishment and making every moment of disaster only a button press away from having never happened. Talking to friends I get the impression that a lot of PC games of this era were designed with this style of play in mind, and wow do I not get on with it at all.

Over the years, Valve has mostly shifted their focus towards selling games through Steam and enabling gambling addictions through Counter-Strike: Global Offensive rather than making new titles, but even with their reduced output, they were still responsible for some of the most iconic franchises in all of PC gaming. As a console player, though, this means that I haven't actually been able to experience most of their games, and while I do have fond memories of sinking 30-50 hours into Team Fortress 2 back in the 5th Grade, the limited capabilities of my Mother's MacBook turned every match into a PowerPoint presentation with the occasional low-res explosion of blood and gore. Like Deus Ex, my best bet to experience Valve's debut title was by emulating its PS2 port, and while I would say that I liked Half-Life overall, I also had huge issues with it that prevented me from loving it as much as everyone else apparently did.

Whenever people would talk about Half-Life, the one phrase that I would see get used the most often would be "environmental storytelling", and for good reason. After a quiet intro sequence where you spend what seems to be just another work day with your fellow scientists explaining the day's tasks to you, the game swiftly takes all of that away and leaves you to find your way out of this mess all on your lonesome. Because of how oppressive the sense of isolation is in this game, the player is able to immediately put two and two together in terms of what they're supposed to do next, as seeing things like corpses piled up beside entrances, a web of connected trip mines, and a destroyed mechanism firing electricity at a pool of water below it not only work in terms of immersing the player in the crumbling Black Mesa Research Facility, but it's also able to communicate both the story and your current objective to you without needing to actually say anything. The combination of highly interactable environments, creepy enemy design, a mostly diegetic soundscape, and a heavy use of scripted events gave the game a sense of unpredictability, and it also made exploration feel dynamic in spite of the game's clear-cut linearity. Gordon Freeman's wide arsenal of weapons made for some fun shootouts while also placing some importance on managing your ammo, and while I pretty much never used weapons like the Hive-hand or the Snark, I still liked how they looked.

Growing up, I had heard nothing but good things about Half-Life, and so I was really shocked to find out just how quickly the game nosedives in quality once it reaches its second half. After a certain point, Half-Life essentially decides to litter each of its remaining levels with traps, enemies, and obstacles that either kill you instantly or overwhelm you until you die, and so you end up abusing the quicksave feature whenever you take more than three steps or kill even one enemy just to spare you from having to deal with any of it a second time. Normally, I don't really mind savescumming if it's in a game where you can come up with your own solutions, but when Half-Life throws a tank that takes loads of ammo to destroy and can one-shot you from a mile away, it feels less like the game is testing the skills that I've acquired throughout my playthrough and more like it's expecting me to repeatedly bash my head against the wall that they've set up until one of its bricks randomly decides to loosen. Fans of this game like to single-out levels like "Xen" as the game's weaker points due to their bad low-gravity platforming (and rightfully so), but I'd argue that "Surface Tension" and everything that comes after it is just one big pile of tedium, and while I wouldn't exactly call any of it hard and the game's other strengths are still present here, this portion of the game is definitely annoying and not at all fun to play through. Half-Life is a very flawed game that didn't exactly age the best, but I still enjoyed it for what it did well, and I hope that Half-Life 2 ends up being a more consistent game than this.