Gigachad simulator 2004

Vortigordon Ramsay underutilized

Excellence in all things

I wish I'd enjoyed this more. It goes without saying that playing a 25 year old game isn't exactly going to yield the same experience as a more modern one, and the games of the 90s in particular haven't aged all that well across the board in comparison to say, the mid 2000s, but I was hoping that Half-Life would somehow be an exception.

And it's not like it entirely wasn't. There is still plenty about this thing to enjoy, there's just also a lot of utter dogshit in here as well. It feels mildly sacrilegious to say that about one of the most influential and near-universally beloved games ever made, but I personally don't really subscribe to the notion that old games should be given all that much slack when it comes to critique simply on the basis that their issues didn't seem like issues at the time of their release.

Still, on the topic of that influence, it's definitely what appealed to me most about Half-Life. I've wanted to go back and see the root of the DNA of many games I've loved over the years for a good while now, and it was apparent right from the beginning just how many games of all genres, especially but not limited to shooters, have borrowed from the ground rules that Valve set a quarter of a century ago. Everything from Bioshock to Call of Duty has Half-Life to thank for revolutionizing the medium and paving the way toward greener pastures.

But again, that doesn't necessarily mean it's still good. Movement feels pretty awful, combat feels limp, puzzles are obtuse and uninteresting to solve, I even found the oft-praised narrative to be mostly uninteresting. I don't want to go on for too long about everything that I'd consider less than stellar about Half-Life, as pretty much all its drawbacks can be attributed to its aforementioned age, but I just find it a tad unbelievable how many people look back at this thing through rose-coloured glasses and completely ignore all the aspects that make it a consistently frustrating and annoying game to play through in modern times.

I'm sure it was insane in 1998 to play an FPS where enemies did anything other than just blindly bumrush you, or where you had the freedom to violently murder any random scientist or security guard you come across, etc. And I have to give the game its flowers for opening people's eyes to the possibilities of video games in a way that had never been done prior. But in the year of our lord 2023, it's just not that novel or fun anymore.

That Doom 2016 game design be hitting different here.

The only reasons I could think of not to call this thing a masterpiece are: 1) how little investment I initially had into the story and 2) evil/emo Timothée Chalamet's moveset being oodles less fun than either Nero's or especially Dante's (my king). The former isn't really the game's fault at all since this was my first foray into the DmC games, and honestly by the end I was pretty invested into this story in particular. In all its over the top gooberiness and tongue in cheek wisecrackery, there is a certain heart here that you just don't find all that often. And the latter is honestly just an afterthought that I got over very quickly, made even more moot by the fact that the developers were clearly aware of V's inferiority in the fun department and kept his sections to a minimum.

So yeah, fuck it. It's a masterpiece. This is some of the most fun I've had playing video games in a long, long time.