Retro|Spective 043: Half-Life

[Neon Ignition]

The king of fan sequel wishing baiting finally finds itself under out spotlight:





Mainline Entry 01 - Half-Life
Formats: PC and Playstation 2
Reworked by fans and expanded by mods and expansions that would create other Valve series, Half Life sits at the heart of the Valve empire and remains a cornerstone in narrative FPS games. The tale of Gordon Freeman and his attempt to escape the remains of Black Mesa became a genre phenomenon on its release and also created a rabid fanbase who remained deeply attached the series for years. Plaudits and success both met the first entry hand in hand and the later PS2 port reworks some elements of the title. The cancelled Dreamcast version would have added some content too but it never saw release, though was later leaked and much of the planned additions were moved to the PS2 version. The Blue Shift expansion from the DC version made its way to PC gamers and Gearbox added expansions which along with Counterstrike kept fans engaged as they waited for more. It was more recently reaired with the still incomplete Black Mesa remake.



Mainline Entry 02 - Half-Life 2
Formats: PC, Xbox, Xbox 360 and PC
Six years later and the sequel, despite being undermined by a leak, wowed fans with its much improved visuals and addition of the Gravity Gun that made use of in game physics to manipulate objects and encounters. As Freeman, you learnt more about the surviving characters of the world and stepped out beyond the Black Mesa labs. In essence the game marked a perfect evolution of the first games foundations and fans gobbled it up driving demand for more. An additional level called Lost Coast was later released but instead of the expansions and mods the first game received, Valve had something that would stir fans even more so up its sleeves.



Spin Off Entry 01 - Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Formats: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC
Spin Off Entry 02 - Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Formats: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC
Instead of a third game, Valve intended to release a three part continuation of the plot with the Episode games. Despite its name Valve considered the trilogy to be a standalone release and the first Episode broadly continued in the same mould as the sequel but with some lighting and AI improvements. The second episode brought with it more open environments and was seen as an improvement over the first episode which was considered to be too brief. Fans were now at fever pitch level for the closing entry but it never came. Junction Point and Arkane Studios both worked on what would potentially have been considered to be Episodes 4 and 5 but they too were dropped by Valve and the franchise has remained dormant ever since with more and more fans taking the view that Valve is finished with it on Episode 2's cliffhanger. The Portal games could be considered spin-offs as they're in the same universe but equally they're their own series.



Share your thoughts and memories of the Half-Life series

[QualityChimp]

Half-Life is amazing.


It was such a fantastic experience and genuinely thrilling. Like starring in your own sci-fi action movie or an interactive theme park ride.
It's quite interesting turning on noclip and look at how they constructed some of the on-rails bits like the opening section as you enter the Black Mesa facility.


I first heard about the game in Arcade magazine that gave it a glowing review talking about how people who had played it had a glazed stare of PTSD!


There are some lovely set-pieces like the bit where you finally get a crowbar and those headcrabs start tasting some punishment.
Hooray! The marines have arrived! They'll save us! Why are they shooting at me?!


Level starts, you're in an underground car park. Two soldiers stand next to a car. They don't notice you and are instead distracted by something and start emptying their guns at whatever it is. They scream as they get crushed between the wall and car being pushed by a GIANT alien. The screaming stops and the alien turns to face you... then chases you! Bullets don't hurt it so you ruuuun.
You escape up the exit ramp into a fenced off area and manage to close the gate and see a raised control platform. When you get there, the radio crackles to life and says the team are pulling out, but to mark the last few targets for a bombing run.
A wicked smile spreads across your face as you realise you can mark out on the map where to drop bombs and carefully mark where the alien is stomping around trying to reach you. BOOOOOM!


There are so many great moments like this where you solve a puzzle or get past a block or get a new weapon.


Some people don't like the end sections, but I liked that Gordan took the battle to them.


I've also got to mention the brilliant modding scene around the game. Long after I'd completed the main game, I was hammering away at loads of mods that I'd either downloaded or installed from the PC Gamer cover disc.
They Hunger was a zombie game in several parts, there was an AI mod for the multiplayer (the level with the nuclear bomb shelter was best!), Opposing Force, Uplink, Blue Shift was an official release and there were loads of mods, some of which were almost as big as the main game.


I loved how they made all the tools available for free, allowing bedroom gamers to make their own levels, something that seemed only possible for developers to do at that time. I made a model of my workplace at the time!


Half-Life 2 I'm less enamoured with. There seemed to be massive sections where you were driving around in a car or wandering around zombietown decapitating people with the gravity gun.


Portal was very, very good.
I keep meaning to replay it with my son watching and then trying Portal 2.


I'm gutted there's never been a Half-Life 3.

[Golgo]

I'm with Chimp. HL1 was awesome. HL2 less so. I never even finished the main campaign as I got bored of driving and boating around the place, and the endless 'boss-battles' (helicopter gunship after helicopter gunship, picked out of the sky with gravity gun + barrels) were tiresome. The 2 episodes I really enjoyed, though. Portal 2 was amazing. Playing that coop - using only gestural comms of the two bots - is easily one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.

[Neon Ignition]

I think with HL2, I never understood the appeal of Ravenholme. It always stood out as the games least appealing area but beyond that it was all good and the Eps are a natural extension. I did miss HL1's setting though, for some reason Black Mesa was just more appealing than the streets and sewers of the City. Looking back, it's bad they didn't knock out Ep3.

[Dogg Thang]

Over the years, HL2 has grown in my estimation in my memory. No idea why. I know I was very critical of it at the time. I felt constantly funnelled, like most of the game was a single corridor (there was only one exception to this that I can remember), it felt bloated with too many repeating sections and I felt the storytelling was incredibly poor, giving me no sense of what I was doing or why.

And yet I have found myself wanting to revisit it. I have found myself remembering bits I liked. The overall experience has blurred into a more positive memory with time. And I think I will revisit it at some point. I just know it's long... longer than it should be.

I loved the first one but, oddly, I have more memories of HL2. It might be that my memory of the expansions (Blue Shift and Opposing Force) has merged with the main game, leading to confusing half memories.

[Team Andromeda]

HL was off the scale amazing and made me buy a 3DFX card back in the day. It's the only game where I enjoyed PC gaming more than on a console. Still remember me and my best mate (and his brother) playing the game for hours and hours on end . Just being amazing at the AI, the storytelling and the endless set-piece moments like the lift crashing (after you press the button) or the bullet holes coming through the air vent before you are sent crashing to the floor.


Just an awesome game and gaming experience, from start to finish

I

[replicashooter]

Never played any of them but was looking at the orange box for 360 the other day for a fiver.

[QualityChimp]

That's the thing, HL1 seemed like loads of amazing set-pieces.
The tram ride, experiment gone wrong, traversing the tanks of glowing green goo, bulletholes in the vents, the tentacle monster that follows sound in the blast pit, the tanks, every time you get a new weapon, those invisible ninjas, the alien trampolines and so on.
It may be a scattergun approach, but nothing felt like it outstayed its welcome.

HL2 had some sections that seemed to go on forever. The boat, Ravenholm, the car, shooting gunships.

It's nice to go back to a time when having an amazing experience was the primary goal of the developer, rather than lootboxes, shiny shiny graphics and DLC.

There are mods still coming out!

https://kotaku.com/ex-valve-employees-new-mod-is-some-of-the-best-half-lif-1818847147

[QualityChimp]

Here are a couple of nice articles about the creation of Half-Life.

This one dates to 1999 when the game came out about Valve's design process:

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131815/the_cabal_valves_design_process_.php?page=1

"By late September 1997, nearing the end of our original schedule, a whole lot of work had been done, but there was one major problem — the game wasn’t any fun.


Yes, we had some cool monsters, but if you didn’t fight them exactly the way we had planned they did really stupid things. We had some cool levels, but they didn’t fit together well. We had some cool technology, but for the most part it only showed up in one or two spots. So you couldn’t play the game all the way through, none of the levels tied together well, and there were serious technical problems with most of the game. There were some really wonderful individual pieces, but as a whole the game just wasn’t working.


The obvious answer was to work a few more months, gloss over the worst of the problems and ship what we had. For companies who live and die at the whim of their publishers, this is usually the route taken — with predictable results. Since Valve is fairly independent, and since none of us believed that we were getting any closer to making a game we could all like, we couldn’t see how a month or two would make any significant difference. At this point we had to make a very painful decision — we decided to start over and rework every stage of the game.


Fortunately, the game had some things in it we liked. We set up a small group of people to take every silly idea, every cool trick, everything interesting that existed in any kind of working state somewhere in the game and put them into a single prototype level. When the level started to get fun, they added more variations of the fun things. If an idea wasn’t fun, they cut it. When they needed a software feature, they simplified it until it was something that could be written in a few days. They all worked together on this one small level for a month while the rest of us basically did nothing. When they were done, we all played it. It was great. It was Die Hard meets Evil Dead. It was the vision. It was going to be our game. It was huge and scary and going to take a lot of work, but after seeing it we weren’t going to be satisfied with anything less. All that we needed to do was to create about 100 more levels that were just as fun.

No problem."

This one is from last year with Marc Laidlaw:

http://www.arcadeattack.co.uk/marc-laidlaw/

Half-Life is one of the most important PC games ever made. What was it like working on it and can you explain the atmosphere at Valve when this game was being developed?


"It was thrilling, seat-of-the-pants, every day a day of discovery. There was lots of dread and anxiety and doubt, of course. Everything seemed to take forever, although in retrospect the game shipped just over a year after I joined the company. Other game companies were rising and falling all around us, groundbreaking games appearing and disappearing almost overnight. The specter of failure was always looming over us."

[ZipZap]

I often credit Half Life as the thing that got me interested in modern gaming.


I bought a PC in early 1995. Prior to that, I owned a C64 and a NES, and I didn't buy another console until the Dreamcast, so largely missed out 16/32 bit era (I have since corrected this!).


I left school and got really into music. I also became involved with the demo scene, so my computer time was more creative. I played a lot of SWOS, but I thought early 3D games looked kind of ugly (and I was probably right ).


I remember seeing Half Life on Cybernet(!) and thinking it looked pretty good. My only previous FPS experience had been an unimpressed hour of Doom. Half Life was something else.


I don't think I'd ever been really drawn into a game-world like this before. I don't ever remember playing a game that made you feel on edge, or where I was genuinely intrigued by the storyline (probably a good thing I didn't know that in 20 years time we still wouldn't really know who the guy with the briefcase was!). I even remember having dreams about Black Mesa after a few late night sessions! I particularly liked the tentacle monster. The way it reacted to sound seemed so real at the time.


I played through it in full maybe 3-4 times, as well as Opposing Forces and Blue Shift.


I'm still not really a fan of FPS games. I could probably count on one hang the ones I've really enjoyed, but I loved Half Life!


Along with Outrun 2, Half Life 2 was the reason I bought an X-Box (I tried Halo as well and thought it was boring ).


I completely agree some parts of the sequel went on a bit. I did still really like it, but but it didn't have the same impact on me. I seem to remember Episode 1 & 2 being better, but it's been around 10 years since I played them and they haven't stuck with me like the original.

[BigDeadFreak]

I remember seeing Half Life on Cybernet(!)

I'd completely forgotten about that show. I just rewatched the intro and I felt like I was having a flashback. I think every time I watched it I must have been pissed, stoned or on some other drug. It's a bit eerie seeing it now.

[Wools]

I'd completely forgotten about that show. I just rewatched the intro and I felt like I was having a flashback. I think every time I watched it I must have been pissed, stoned or on some other drug. It's a bit eerie seeing it now.

Ha, I have very different memories of it!

I was in my early teens when it was on, normally around 4am on a Thursday morning, so I set my VHS to record it with the TV+ Number in the TV Times (Remember those 2?) and as long as ITV hadn't changed the times, I was able to get my fix of new Videogame coverage over my breakfast before school.

Very fond memories of that.

[Cepp]

I played the PC demo of Half Life at a friends house and it blew my mind. That tram ride, interacting with all of the NPCs, overloading the microwave Seeing lasers cut through bodies, being able to smash glass on the lift and crawl through it to reach the other side, it was an incredible experience. I spent a good chunk of time wondering if it was justifiable to kill Barney and take his stuff since I only had a crowbar. Safety in numbers or every man for himself? Not to mention I'd have to murder him. I was so enthralled, I only snapped out of it when I realised I couldn't take his armour.

I played that game a ton over the years and still have Half Life Generations in my collection. I also really enjoyed playing the PS2 release in coop with a friend and even the leaked Dreamcast version with it's monstrous save/load issues. Black Mesa is worth a try if you're into that sort of thing, it's very well done.

I was put off by Half Life 2 needing Steam but got it eventually and struggled to run it on my garbage Semprom 2800/256MB DDR RAM/Geforce 5200fx. It took a lot of tweaking but it was worth it. Alex was a great addition, Ravenholm was fantastic and the gravity gun was immensely fun to play with. City 17 was well realised and If they were to ever release a model of Dog I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

My only complaint really would be that there are too many vehicle levels. They don't flow well and drag on.

There's a Half Life 2 de-make demo using the Half Life 1 engine that's fun to play with as well.

I've pretty much given up on ever seeing Half Life 3, I just don't see it happening but if it ever does get made I'll be there day one.

[_SD_]

I very briefly dabbled with the Dreamcast port, but I remember it kept loading far too regularly which eventually got the better of me.

[QualityChimp]

I was installing a printer for the Mother-in-law and was overjoyed to see Half-Life installed on it!
Naturally I posted it through again and it was a pleasure.