Better Half-Life than no life at all.

In my opinion, many things can retain their grandeur despite their age. Everyone still loves the Mona Lisa, The Godfather is still revered as the best movie ever, and as far as this list is concerned, the Half-Life series raises the bar on all video games. This is a small dissertation on why.

Let’s start with Half-Life (the first one, released in 1998). Half-Life was based on the GoldSrc engine, a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. The graphics were stunning to me, and it utterly taxed my little 233 MHz laptop. I remember the first time I played it. I was a sophomore in high school, and I had just started the storyline of the game in hopes that I might improve my LAN battle strategy, which at the time was pretty much, "run straight forward with guns blazing at everything which moves." This was the first lesson I garnered from Half-Life. NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE SHOT! No sooner had Barney started speaking than I had finished blowing a hole in his skull. It was some comment about the zombies, of which he had just taken care for my ungrateful ass.

Another game-changing moment was when I had to figure out my first “puzzle.” For once I wasn’t just running through corridors shooting everything which moved. This was my second lesson from Half-Life. It’s not all going to be about getting bigger guns for bigger baddies anymore. This time I had to figure out where I was going to go and what I was going to do in order to NOT die. It was like being in Mario brothers all over again. Only this time I got to use quicksaves and quickloads. At any rate, we go onto the best thing of all. The Storytelling.

Storytelling in Half-life was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my limited catalogue of gaming. I had played a couple of the Ultima games, and even played through all of Quake, but to have the story directly delivered to me in play, and not through some text screen or in a hidden manuscript was world-changing for me. In fact, a lot of the tale was lost to me. In order to actually get any of the yarn, you have to infer a lot from your surroundings and environment. This “resonance cascade” had supposedly just happened 48 hours ago, how could they possibly have built specimen examination rooms for the monsters in such short time? Unless? The point I’m making is, I was still just shooting everything. I was murdering, not thinking. As soon as I learned my third lesson, to stop and look around, everything started making more sense. After all, VALVe had made it a point to build (mostly) realistic worlds, who was I to ignore it?

Characters are a bit lackluster at times, but at other times, they are inescapably enigmatic. The G-Man is the only real character with whom you make any lasting contact. His involvement with everything is curious, but never forgotten. One might think he’s calling the shots in everything, others may say he is simply observing. Barney (the security guard) is met time and again, and even killed multiple times. I think Black Mesa may have been a cloning facility in addition to a hypothetical physics think tank. At any rate, the main character, Dr. Gordon Freeman, never speaks but is always central. I like that. You control him, and you can choose to save others or save your own ass. You can progress through the game as fast as you want, making a mad dash to whichever way “Out” is, or you can really explore the map, and find some extra goodies. Dr. Freeman can be a free-running murderer, or a thinking fighter. It is this ambiguity that allows him to have such a strong following. Master Chief is the gaming world’s Chuck Norris, steering a bomb through space on pure baddass alone, as in Halo 2. Dr. Freeman is just a scientist who apparently reads Guns and Ammo magazine and was the right man in the wrong place. That makes all the diffffference, in the world.

Whereas this has gotten to be a very long post, be it resolved that we’ll go ahead and close up here. I'll carry on this babble into HL2 sometime soon, before the end of the month. Which means you’ll probably be reading it in August, 2010.

Oh, in case you need to be warned, this post has spoilers. Figured I'd at least mention it somewhere.

-The0