Half-Life is 10, on Steam for $1

Best Game Evah!

Apart from the crappy Zen levels.

Xen

Len

Pen

Ken?

Men

/debates over whether to continue – ah, got it:

The en.

D.

That’s not going to work is it.

Fin

I only played this last year. It was alright. I suppose. It’s not nearly as good as you all think it is.

How good do you think it was a whole 9 years before that?

well you didnt played it 10 years ago.. it was epic

I started to play it ten years ago and got bored after a few hours and quit. I only played it the whole way through last year.

The first level is super-awesome. After that the story sort of fizzles out and it’s all a bit… boring.

Gameplay depreciation…

Now there’s an interesting subject.

“The first level is super-awesome. After that the story sort of fizzles out and it’s all a bit… boring.”

I couldn’t agree more, Blerk. I always wondered what the fuss was about with Half-Life. I understand that the protagonist is a Scientist, but that really is forgotten after the first level, isn’t it? The first level in Black Mesa seems to embrace the fact, but after that Gordon just becomes another faceless man, with a gun.

I actually had exactly the same play experience as you, for the long and short of it. I loved the lead in to the game, but in the later Black Mesa stuff, and especially when Black Mesa was left behind, it just became incredibly boring. And the expansion packs where one actually took control of an army bloke were the worst of the lot.

I’d rather see something like Blood or Stryfe have a renaissance, they were PC FPS games that really broke the mold.

There were a few things that made Half-Life unforgettable for me.

- The set pieces. The intro on the train, the chamber accident at the beginning, the falling lift, and so on. It was lightyears ahead of its time in that respect. It petered out after the beginning, but it was still awesome.
- The spatial puzzles. The fan that blows you up vertically, the blocks in the green goo, the platforming on Zen, etc, etc, etc. It made you think without frustrating you. Again, I’d never played anything like it.
- The sound effects. I can still here that fucking whirring noise when you switch over weapons. And the suit’s voice. They definitely did the right thing pulling them over into Half-Life 2.
- The combat against the soldiers. This was groudbreaking. Everything about it was thrilling. Multiple paths through sections, the grating voices of the soldiers, the way they flanked you and worked in packs, the secondary grenades on the SMG. Very cool.
- The epic nature of it. It went on and on and on. I’m not sure I ever got bored of it. I must have booted up Half-Life single-player 10 times since it launched.

I loved it. I admit it. It was amazing. Half-Life 2 was nowhere near as good, in my opinion.

Yeah, I remember staying late in the office night after night playing it. Loads of people were at it. “Have you got to the … yet?” Plenty of surprised “Fucking hell!”s. Jumpers for goalposts, etc etc.

I had to stay in the office to play it because I didn’t have a computer at home. All we did when the boss was away was play multiplayer over 26k modems because our PCs weren’t even networked

Damn good editor too. I made a fair few ‘monster rooms’, with aliens and soldiers and played them many times. I even made a DM level with… ‘adequate’ lighting and sound modifier things so that air ducts sounded like air ducts and so on. It also ran at a fair lick as I tried to make it optimised from the start. I even figured out how to do a railing you could shoot through by myself, it’s a good tool for beginners.

I’d buy it again if I didn’t have 300 games to play, to be honest.

pat, I’m behind you 101%. HL was great for all the reasons you mentioned and more.

The feeling of relief, as you safely reach ground level, turning into doubt and betrayal, as you are greeted by the bullets of the cover-up soldiers, is still unparalleled.

It’s true. I really want to play it again now.

I remember reading the review in PC Gamer making a huge deal about the advanced ai – I was really looking foreword to it but didn’t notice anything that special. Fortunately mucking about with the level editor, co-op lan sessions and bots made it still worth while but not the masterpiece it is to most people.