Game Discussion of The Week: Half Life series

On the PC too

A bit of shooting mixed with somd puzzle solving will make sure you're not bored. If it's not one thing stopping you, it's another, so you'll need to be adaptive with this game.

Uglier than Quake, worse physics than Trespasser, main character more unlikeable than Lester the Unlikely yet hyped up as being the best thing ever.

Nope.

1/5

I hope 3 never comes out.

Never played it, but played games influence by it. Seems to be if you played when it came out, it was mind blowing. Now it might be hard to see it's relevance.

I played both games around the time of their releases, and here are some things I remember being REALLY impressed about them.

For the first one, the AI. It was one of the first FPS games around that time that put a focus on AI: it may be hard to tell nowadays (as we are used to it), but Half-Life enemies don't just run towards you: they search for cover, they flank you, if you hide they throw grenades to flush you out. At the time, I clearly remember it being a huge thing, and it made every encounter in the game look impressive.

Another thing is the "continuous" level design in a FPS: this is also a standard thing nowadays, but at the time, gave the impression that the entire game was showing this huge complex, with the only "level transition" being when you're sent to Xen.

Also, the idea of not only telling the entire story in-engine (which was a huge thing in 1998, just remember Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time), but also creating setpieces. In any FPS game before it, you just go exploring the mostly-static level. In Half-Life, there's always something happening that changes the scenario, with new enemies making impressive entrances or you having bits of foreshadowing just through your own exploration. Now thinking about it, Half-Life did for 3d games what Super Metroid did for 2d ones with the environmental storytelling and continuous level design. Plus that amazing AI. Think about previous FPS games: they barely have any story. Half-Life not only created a nice one, but did it through the game (instead of a text in the manual, between levels or in cutscenes).

For Half-Life 2: the first thing that impressed me was the in-engine character animation. Look at any time Alyx talks to anyone. Now compare it to any game released in 2004. Yep, not even a single game could do character animations (especially facial animations) on that level.

What Valve did with the graphics in general was just something that you could not find anywhere else; the game seemed like it was one generation ahead of every other one. The models, the textures, everything; and, of course, most of the merit goes not only to the power of the Source engine itself, but for the art design. Just play the introduction of the game: you really feel like you've been thrown inside a book like 1984; every building and enemy had a lot of thought behind their designs.

There's also a reason why the gravity gun became so famous: no game in 2004 had a physics engine like that. I can't even tell you how impressed I was in the very first minutes of the game just for the ability of taking a can from the ground and throwing it around, seeing it behave realistically. Again, this is a thing that we all got used nowadays so it doesn't seem like a big deal, but trust me: it was. It made everything believable. Most people nowadays think the physics engine in HL2 was just there for the now-outdated puzzles, but the really impressive thing about them is how realistically things reacted to your bullets and explosives. You throw a grenade near some wooden boxes and you see pieces of wood flying around; metal ricocheted on metal when thrown, enemies were sent flying after huge explosions... This is really important for a FPS game, and I think HL2 was the first one that got it right.

Also, the weapon variety. Besides standard FPS weapons that were really well made (thanks to how everything reacted to them), you get things like the Crossbow (which could be used to PIN enemies anywhere!), the Gravity Gun and the Bug Bait, which are both really fun to mess around.

Besides those things, the qualities of the first game were brought back, so you have even more impressive setpieces and a much better storytelling, with a level design that, albeit being more linear, could still do the "continuous level" thing really well.

So, in conclusion, you're all crazy and Spirit Bomb seems to be the only sane man around this thread! It seems the HL series is suffering the same destiny from games like Ocarina of Time or the classic Sonic games, with some people now saying that they were never good, that they are all overrated etc. They definitely have flaws by current standards, but, if you take the time they were released in context, these are games that deserve all the respect they get.

That said, the first HL might seem outdated in most respects, but HL2 is still a blast to play nowadays, especially since only now FPS games are getting back to that fast style of gameplay present there (no covering, no looking at sights that slow you down, just running and gunning). By the way, I really recommend playing it with mouse & keyboard, as it wasn't really intended for the slower camera movement of controllers; but if a controller is the only option, the game is still a blast to play. By the way, the console ports are also limited to 30 fps (besides lower quality graphics), so the pc version is ideal.

Here are two very good videos by Digital Foundry discussing the game, especially their technical aspects (inclusing their ports):



This Digital Foundry's Retro series is really good and deserves a watch.

I guess ACR prefers the more straight-forward shooters. Some people don't care about plot, just the action. But, progress. The days of the old school shooter were eventually going to come to an end, Armored Core Raven.