Half-Life

Before 1998 typical FPS games consisted of the player simply blasting their way through endless numbers of monsters in hellish and alien landscapes with an extremely vague plot that seemed like a 5 year old's daydream. Half-Life revolutionised FPS gaming by providing not only a story, but an excellent story that was highly immersive.

On the gameplay and graphics side of things, Half-Life uses a heavily modified version of the Quake 2 engine. However, the monsters are not Quake 2's mindless zombies, they are soldiers that work in teams to flush you out of hiding spots. This means you have to think about how you play the game. Blindly running into a room shooting will get you killed very fast! :-)

Until Deus Ex came along, I called Half-Life the best game ever, so it is only fair to give it 10/10.

As far as immersion goes, you simply couldn't have done any better than Half-Life. Half-Life pioneered many firsts in the genre when it was released in 1998. The biggest innovation is that the game NEVER shifts away from your perspective of the action. This means that there are no cutscenes, no early explanations of the backstory, and that your character cannot talk (giving you room to talk during the game, if you need to). Half-Life does NOT disappoint when it comes to fooling you into thinking that you're experiencing all of this in real life. Other innovations include seamless level transitions, having to reload your weapon occasionally, and a passable excuse for a heads-up display (since your character is a scientist, he must wear a hazard suit that comes equipped with HUD readers for health, shields, weapons, and ammo). The only thing I can think of that isn't realistic about Half-Life is the fact that you simply walk over objects to pick them up. However, since the game is pretty fast-paced, having to pick up items manually would have been quite frustrating in the heat of battle.

Of course, the gameplay isn't the only thing that Half-Life has to offer. The disturbingly realistic graphics and sound (for the time) also combine with the gameplay to further immerse you into the experience. Half-Life uses a heavily modified version of the already stunning Quake engine, which broke new ground in 1996 for creating realistic environments and characters with polygon-based true 3-D graphics. Half-Life has higher polygon counts, better lighting, and more detailed textures than in Quake, making the graphics that much more believable. To top that all off, a skeletal animation system makes for extremely realistic character animations. Overall, the graphics and animations are just so good, they even make Unreal's graphics look lame. I'm not joking around! This is as good as video games could look and sound at the time!

You've also got an excellent variety of weapons. In fact, there's probably more weapons than any other shooter at the time. You've got a crowbar (for melee combat), pistol, revolver, machinegun, shotgun, crossbow, rocket launcher, particle gun, flamethrower, alien arm (which shoots out lethal "bugs" and has an infinite ammo supply), grenades, pipebombs, laser trip mines, and a cute alien bug that runs up to enemies to bite the crap out of them. What more could you want?

But the most surprising aspect of all is that Half-Life didn't come from a high-profile developer at the time (like 3D Realms, id Software, or Raven Software). This amazing piece of work came from a newcoming developer that we didn't even know about at the time -- Kirkland, Washington-based Valve Software. But even if Valve wasn't a high-profile developer at the time, you could tell from this game that their goal was clearly to create the best game ever. You simply aren't a gamer if you don't at least try Half-Life. A definite 10 / 10 to this one!

Half-Life was breath taking. Before then we had not seen a game that put you in such an enviroment. The game was like Star Wars in many ways, it did not have much of a budget or anything and it turned out to be the best game of 1998 and still to this day does a game have to approve upon it.

You play Gordon Freeman, not a tough Marine just a scientist in quantum physics, the story unfolds when you go to work at the Black Mesa Research Facility and every thing goes bad that day. The story is told with in game cut scenes, not cintematics telling you whats happening, YOU LIVE THE STORY.

Also after the most wonderful single player game there is its multiplayer like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress 1.5, Deathmatch Clasic ( Quake all over again ) GO DM 2! Also there is some good expansion sets for Half-Life, like Half-Life: Opposing Force, made by Gearbox, as well as Blue Shift ( very short ) also made by Gearbox. But Valve did it with its master piece so lets hope they do it again.

In 1998, A software company names Valve Software released a game that would forever change the way we look at Action Games. That game was called Half-Life. Hailed by PC-Gamer as "The Best 3D action game ever made", and I couldn't agree more.

The game itself won about 45 game of the year awards from many different publications.

Play it

This game is so unbelievably amazing... it is suspenseful (I still jump when the headcrabs fly at me in the dark vents), action packed (some of the fights against the commandos are incredible), thought provoking (the ending leaves you to think... but only if you choose to live... you'll see), with a great storyline... very original.

I agree on the fact that a movie should be made... but not about Gordon Freeman unless it takes place before the game. It should be about the scientists... what were they exactly working on? It also could be about one of the guards.. or the aliens themselves.

Bottom line: One Great Game