There's relatively few games where I'll occasionally feel the need to just go back to 'em and play through every single one in the series just to refresh myself on them, but for whatever reason a couple of weeks ago I got it into my head to play through the entirety of the Half-Life series. To me, it's sort of a given that everyone owns these things and has played them, so I'm always a little surprised when someone says they haven't. It's like hearing someone say they haven't seen the Lord of the Rings movies. It usually immediately pegs you as old or hopelessly behind in terms of pop culture.
The most common story is that someone probably had them way back when but lost the discs, or never played one of the installments because they couldn't find it, or whatever. Which, I admit, applies to me too. I've got my original HL1 disc floating around somewhere, but I'll be damned if I know where.
Luckily, in the past couple years we've moved away from physical distribution of -- well, I was going to say games, but really it's pretty much everything. If it's something physical, you can have it delivered, and more often than not the selection is impossibly huge. If it's digital, though? Like computer games?
There's pretty much no reason to use an actual DVD to deliver content ever again: Use Steam.
Consoles have their versions of digital distribution as well, of course. If you're a 360 owner with any taste whatsoever then it's a given that you use XBLA, Wii users have the Virtual Console, and PS3 folks have PSN and even Home. Clearly, this is an idea whose time has not only come, but arrived with relatively little fanfare and a very high acceptance rate...Among console users.
PC Gamers are weirdly opposed to Steam in some subcultures, and I can't for the life of me figure out why, except for either collector's value or shelf appearance (which are sort of the same thing anyway). If it's shelf appearance you want, well, shit, you can still do that: Check me out.
For me, the nice bit about Steam is twofold. You can never lose the games, and you get them immediately. They also install themselves while you can do other things, which is nice.
Common misconceptions I might as well lay to rest: No, you do not have to be online to play the games (obviously you do have to be online to download them initially but I mean duh). You can burn backup copies of your games and then re-install them off your backups in case the internet shuts off forever tomorrow. Much like iTunes, you may delete and re-download your purchases as much as you wish. Basically, purchasing the game just gives you the right to download it at will from Valve's servers.
Generally this is the part where ownership-rights freaks begin having grand mal seizures over the fact that they technically don't own the actual copies of the games, only the right to download and use them, which is admittedly true, so let me address them directly here: So?
You get to play the game at will, you can make as many hard copies as you want, and for all intents and purposes it is, indeed, your game. The only thing this prevents you from doing is selling your copy back to the store. I'm too lazy to actually wade through Apple's fine print and check, but I'd bet iTunes works on exactly the same principle. I know MMO's do the same thing. Actually, on that note, if it gets down to it, there's not much Valve could do to stop you from selling your account if you suddenly decide to give it all up, so yeah. All the pissing in the wind over ephemeral ownership rights is really just inhaling your own farts about either being a phenomenal cheapskate hypocrite (since you're likely cool with downloading games when you don't have to pay for them, overtly or not) or an OCD-having box collector with no friends (in which case you'd fit right in with Sealed Game Heaven if they didn't apparently stop existing).
The damn thing is basically perfect, stop being such a ponce and just use it.
Anyway, back to Half-Life. In all seriousness, the game ranks as one of those must-have-played level experiences for anyone making any moves towards being considered literate in gaming. Pretty much, if you've never gone through Half-Life, you're missing a sizable chunk of the picture. Set aside a good solid weekend, and using the above-mentioned Steam service, snag the games and take your shot at them.
If you're looking to just get to the cream of the crop, then buy The Orange Box. That includes the better-realized chapters of the games to date, plus you get Portal and Team Fortress 2. Which you hopefully already know about.
If you wanna do what I did and get nice and cracked out on the whole thing, also buy this thing for an extra $15. It's the original Half-Life, plus the Opposing Force and Blue Shift expansion packs. While not made by Valve, they're still considered story canon and fill in some interesting bits here and there -- and really, they're cheap as dirt so there's no compelling reason not to get them.
This is about as good of a single-player gaming session as you can probably expect, particularly if you're interested in the history of that singularly American creation, the much-maligned-for-various-reasons First Person Shooter. If you're one of those freaks who refuses to play anything that doesn't include a bunch of bug-eyed teenagers with angst problems saving the world using turn-based magic spells and an assload of other clichés, then yeah, there may not be a whole lot for you here, but you're probably beyond help at this point anyway so whatever.
For the record, I'd only beaten Half-Life 1 once before this, and that was when I first got it back in 1998. I'm pretty sure I cheated that time, too. I'd never played either expansion prior to this. Half-Life 2 and both extra episodes were completed on normal when they first came out.
This time around, all games were finished on Hard, using a mouse and keyboard, with no cheats, mods, or other shenanigans present. So basically, this is how the games were meant to be played when they were developed.
Half-Life
First, a bit of history.
While Half-Life remains a pretty excellent game to play through, what really makes the story come full circle is when you consider when it came out in addition to how.
'Cause here's the thing. The original Half-Life has been safely ensconced in the annals of gaming history at this point as not only the victor of, but the paradigm shifter for all late-90's FPS development. It pretty much goes Doom, Half-Life, Halo. You can add Quake and Duke Nukem 3D in there as footnotes, though I assure you there were much bigger deals at the time. The Big Three are all anyone pretty much remembers at this point though, and Halo's biggest contribution was to take the genre to consoles in force, something Goldeneye had paved the way for but not really managed on the same scale.
At the time Half-Life was slated to be released, though, most PC Magazines were yelling in bold about it, SiN, and Prey, which were the next generation of FPS games. Of the three, Half-Life was the most conservative, with it appearing to just be a standard pretty shooter, and Prey was the most mysterious, with very little known about it besides that it had good lightning and was going to attempt to pull off some clever things that couldn't be talked about. Most screenshots of Prey just showed some blank stages with no enemies. Eventually the game would drop off the face of the earth and everyone would assume it was dead, only to resurface in 2006 as a finished title and be released to moderately positive reviews. Where had it been all this time? The history of Prey is actually pretty interesting but that's another article entirely.
SiN was probably pegged as the forerunner at the time -- there were big 19-page spreads in magazines, screenshots galore, all kinds of PR frippery that, adjusting for game-popularity inflation and the fact that this was a PC-only release, was roughly the equivalent of the Halo 2 fanfare for its time. The game was the spiritual sequel to the exceedingly popular Duke Nukem 3D, and promised an epic sci-fi storyline, ridiculous amounts of interactivity, strong narrative and characters, and a level design that removed the "levels" and allowed for a big, cohesive world, which was a new concept at the time.
It was then released on Halloween in '98 and pretty much instantly forgotten after the holiday season had wrapped up.
Two reasons for this.
One, the game was buggy as hell, had minute-long load times for everything (including player death), and had fairly ridiculous system requirements for the time. The load times in particular were the real killer. Imagine if, every time you died in Halo, you had to wait a minute to a minute and a half. Really. Sit there and count off 90 seconds. That's a long time. That'll single-handedly kill a game right there. The very first Penny Arcade comic is, in fact, about this problem with SiN.
Two, Half-Life was released right after SiN.
When this sucker landed in review offices, several magazines had to invent new tiers of quality to express how good it was. I remember PCXL giving it an 11/10 and the entire review was basically them talking in stunned tones about how nothing was going to be the same now (and hey, they were right).
If you've never seen it, Half-Life 1 starts with a long train ride as your character, a Theoretical Physicist named Gordon Freeman, goes to work.
That in and of itself blew some minds right there. Nearly every FPS up to this point had just cut straight to the explody bits, often before the player even knew what was going on. Plot in an FPS game was sort of viewed the same way one might view the plot to a porno. You had your overall themes to choose from, and it was expected to fit loosely in that theme (sci-fi, horror, naughty nurses, whatever) but the actual script wasn't supposed to get in the way of the action. It was just there to give a rough rationale for what was going on and move things from one set piece to another.
Half-Life took gun porn and gave it purpose.
The entire half-hour introduction to the game sets the stage. You, as Gordon, head in to work, chat with your co-workers, and find out that you're to take part in some kind of experiment today that the other higher-up scientists speak in hushed tones about, mentioning that today's sample is particularly pure, that the administrator went through "some lengths to get it". Once you're in the chamber, you begin activating a huge, impressive looking machine that's going to emit some rays through a sample of what appears to be some kind of huge gemstone (see the bottom right here).
As you might imagine, as soon as the gem hits the beam, all hell breaks loose.
Thus begins the game proper, but the long introduction and continually changing landscape from that point forward thrusts the player into one of the coolest interactive action movies ever made. You don't have any clear-cut objectives; you're just trying to get out of there, as other scientists you meet mention trying to get out of the lab and back up to the surface. It quickly becomes clear that your experiment ripped a hole through which assorted bad things are pouring out, everything from what appear to be alien soldiers to the memorable headcrabs, little tan-colored parasites that leap on people's heads and transform them into something else. And so it goes from there.
As you move towards the surface, you eventually discover that the military has been called in, but with strict shoot-on-sight orders for everyone involved. So, not only are you fighting against the incoming aliens, but against human opponents as well looking to close down everything and eliminate all witnesses -- human opponents with really good aim and an irritating-if-impressive tendency to throw grenades to flush you out of hiding, displaying an AI level that was unique for its time.
Eventually, you fight your way through the aliens and the military and find that the scientists in another section of the lab have a teleporter of their own, and have been sending people into this alternate world (dubbed Xen) for quite some time now; this is simply the first time the aliens have managed to open a hole back in to earth. One guess where you're headed for the endgame!
While the plot is honestly pretty juvenile and straightforward by the standards of pretty much any other medium, it worked (and continues to work) here because of how weirdly reserved it manages to be. Most games in the 90's were prone to really overblown, ridiculous storylines. It's a bit like how movies from countries without a long-established moviemaking industry tend to churn out films far more ridiculous than their Hollywood/West European/Japanese/Chinese counterparts.
So really, while Half-Life seems pretty unsophisticated in the light of what we're used to, consider the competition at the time: In SiN, your guy is an angry-looking black soldier-for-hire who's actually named "Blade", and the main antagonist of the game looks like this. Half-Life is already light-years more mature and I haven't even started to get into SiN's actual plot yet.
The plot is also surprisingly subversive in Half-Life, with lots of threads being intentionally dangled in front of the player as they move forward. Frequently, you'd see a grey-suited man standing off to the side, watching. In fact, if you look for him, he starts showing up everywhere. You can never hurt him, and he never speaks. Just watches.
Other cryptic moments come from listening to the rantings of the final boss who you meet once you reach Xen. He'll prattle on in long, droning tones about how he's not even the real threat, and by killing him you're just bringing on the wrath of some obscure others who are responsible for making him look like he does (if you look closely, his lower half is all machines).
The ending is even more bizarre. The aforementioned grey-suited man appears out of nowhere and, displaying apparently reality-warping powers, explains in halting english that you've been quite useful in the outcome of the "Black Mesa incident" and would like to offer you a job (your alternative is to be fed to a bunch of aliens). He teleports you on to a train car, similar to the first one you stepped on at the beginning of the game but this time moving through a star field with nothing else around you. The door opens, and if you step through it, the game simply ends. If you don't step through the door you get the slightly more conclusive ending of being stuck in a room with no weapons and lots of hostile aliens, so let's assume you go for option 1.
The other big thing Half-Life did here was establish something that would virtually come to define the entire genre and have the first honest-to-God in-game cutscenes. Never before (with the exception of SiN from a handful of weeks prior) had an action game had scripted, in-game events that unfolded in front of you while you were playing.
Also notable, Gordon himself never speaks (and by extension neither do you). Characters will talk to you throughout the game, but you never respond. Likewise, the "camera" as it were is never taken from you. The entire game unfolds through Gordon's eyes and that never changes throughout the entire game. All plot points, puzzles, even cutscenes are presented in real-time and the game assumes you're physically looking at them in order to see them happen.
All this was, for the time, pretty revolutionary stuff. It's easy to go back now, especially after having played Halo or Call of Duty or any other big-name FPS, and miss the fact that Half-Life was the first game to really peg down a lot of elements of what are now considered to be must-haves for the genre. It's sort of like how Star Wars pioneered special effects back in 1979. Sure, they look sort of quaint these days, but it was doing stuff you Just Didn't See before then.
The game's also held up pretty well. I went back and played it and while it stumbles a bit near the end when the difficulty suddenly takes a huge spike and the mechanics get flipped around, this also accounts for one of the more interesting parts of the game. It's worth a play through not only to see where all this stuff originated, but how little it's changed since its inception. Half-Life still basically hits all the right notes a decade later. It's a little rough in spots but still acts as something of a development milestone. Here's where the genre really took a huge step forward.
Opposing Force & Blue Shift
I forget which magazine it was from, but one of them had this line in their review which I'll paraphrase because I don't remember it exactly: "Half-Life is not only the best FPS ever made, it's one of the best games ever made, period". This was back when FPS games were considered sort of their own sub-genre with their own criteria for how good they were, sort of like Fighting Games.
The best thing I can say about the two expansions to Half-Life are that they were pretty good FPS games.
Opposing Force is the more fleshed-out of the two, and comes with a pretty interesting premise: You play as one of the soldiers sent in to silence the staff of Black Mesa and kill the aliens that are coming through. It's also quite clear early on that the game was developed by a different team, with different goals. Opposing Force is much more of a shooter in the classic sense. There's very little in the way of puzzles, the pacing is pretty much bang-bang-bang-bang and with far less attention paid to building up the environment, the weapon count is higher while at the same time being more traditional (i.e. a real sniper rifle this time instead of the crossbow), and the boss fights are more frequent and much more showy.
They also sort of bungle up the whole idea behind the Gman, the grey-suited mysterious watcher from the first game. Here, he directly intervenes in a few things, which seems rather against his M.O. and cheapens the experience somewhat. Conversely, though, you do get to see a few cool things that would not have been possible otherwise, like a third-person glimpse of Gordon as he flings himself into the Xen teleporter.
So, take Half-Life, excise the more experimental bits and crank up the adrenaline. What's interesting to note is that if this had been the first game, it never would've had the kind of breakthrough success the original did. Playing through it is a good way to illustrate that fine line to yourself.
Blue Shift is pretty much Opposing Force on a cheaper budget and with a shorter playtime. You play as Barney Calhoun, the security guard from the first game and a major character in Half-Life 2.
I'll be honest, by the time I was wrapping up Blue Shift I was pretty bored with it, though playing all three back-to-back probably had something to do with that -- bear in mind that the original Half-Life is really long. While playing Spot-the-Gordon was fun for a bit, playing the game is a bit like listening to that extra CD of B-sides your limited edition of some really great album came with. It's one of those things you experience once and then put back on the shelf. All you really need to know from this one is, Barney survives.
Anyway, next week, Half-Life 2!
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