Half-Life

I bought the PS2 port of this game sometime in early '04. The game itself was released in 1998 and was certainly already considered a classic even back then. Not only did I never beat it, but I never even got past the second of eighteen levels before putting it down for what turned out to be six years. I think the root of the problem was the maturity level I needed to appreciate the game. I'm not talking about content, but the scope of the story itself was something I just don't think 15-year-old me appreciated. Flash forward. I finally beat this game over the course of the past two weeks (the second half coming today after a hellish year-long engineering project finally ended on Friday). It comes in at eighteen levels long and, in my case, twelve to fifteen hours. And sadly, it could not hide its age at all. Blocky graphics rendered this one as jagged as any Nintendo 64 game and some too-responsive controls made the movement jerky and dizzying. Two separate people watching me play even complained of slight motion sickness as I turned corners, jumped, and whirled around. Four or five levels into the game, I just wasn't feeling it, and was ready to call the game overrated. Then, things kind of settled into a groove. By the second "quarter" of the game I was actually enjoying traversing the environments and dealing with the hazards. Levels ten through thirteen were enjoyable as well. Then, for the final five levels, the game changes dramatically in terms of atmosphere (I'll rehash the whole plot soon) and ends on a somewhat bizarre note. All in all, I'd call the game enjoyable and worth playing, but I won't tell anyone they need to play it. Fellow blogger Sweeney calls Half-Life 2 one of his favorite games of all time, yet he's never even played the first one; clearly, doing so is not a prerequisite for the series. With a small graphical update (say, a remake that is true to the original but with all-new models and graphics), I'm sure this would have been one of my favorite FPS games ever. Sadly, the clunky late '90s graphics did dampen my spirits and though I have no faults with the game's story or the way it unfolded, the overall presentation - and granted, it's twelve years later as I'm bitching about it - was just not up to par. So, about this great story: I'm just going to briefly summarize it because it's something simple and classic. Spoilers? Sure, but even I knew the gist of the story going into the game. It's a classic. The story is worth knowing even if you've never played it and never will. Skip what follows if you'd like. Anyway, you play as Gordon Freeman, a scientist at a top secret research complex in the middle of the New Mexico desert. One day, a teleportation experiment goes completely wrong and the facility is suddenly overrun by hostile alien lifeforms. The game's immediate purpose becomes "escape to the surface." Once you do so, you realize that the military has shown up to kill all the aliens. Good news, right? Wrong. Because they're also there to take out all the survivors (just you and a handful of security guards and scientists) in order to cover up the story. You're eventually captured and thrown in a garbage compacter to die. But then, channeling your inner Millennium Falcon crew, you escape before the closing walls can compress you into nothingness. The game's ultimate purpose now becomes to seek out the "Lambda Complex" where some of the top scientists in the facility may be able to help you. Now, you spend time trying to get back underground; the surface has turned into a full war zone between the military and the aliens, and the military is losing. When you finally reach the heart of the Lambda Complex, the scientists there decide to send you through a giant portal to "Xen," the world from which the aliens are coming from. This is where the game takes the aforementioned gigantic turn. To this point, you've been running around in a gigantic science facility on Earth filled with humans both hostile and helpful. Suddenly, you're on a floating rock in outer space with low gravity. The game gets a lot less 007 and a lot more Metroid. The shift isn't necessarily a negative one, but it really does make the final few levels contrast with the rest of the game. It's here that the only two true boss battles occur, too. Once both are dispatched, you've beaten the game. But wait! There's more. Suddenly, a man with a briefcase appears (yeah, in the middle of outer space and all) and congratulates you on all the shit you've accomplished. He then says that his employer is very impressed with you and decides to offer you a job. Wait, what? All along, Half-Life was certainly a story rooted in science-fiction, but only as far as the alien lifeforms and teleportation were concerned, Now, at the very end, some omnipresent power is introduced and you start to wonder if the events of the game were nothing more than a test staged by this... being. Absurd. I wasn't upset by the game's abrupt and anti-climactic ending, but I do suppose I was confused. I'm sure all of this will be cleared up in Half-Life 2. Sweeney? Am I right? At any rate, Half-Life was a memorable game with a dated look but a timeless feel. Oh, and one more thing. Since I own the PS2 version of Half-Life, I also own the expansion pack known as Half-Life: Decay. Technically, it is a separate game entirely different from Half-Life. Since I need to beat every game on my compilation discs, I asked myself if I needed to beat Decay. My answer? No. And here's why not. Decay never came out as a stand-alone title. The other two Half-Life expansions, Opposing Force and Blue Shift, received their own releases and were games you could own independent of others. But that's not the case for Decay. Hell, it hasn't ever even come out as an online download or Xbox Live Arcade game. There's no cover or box art to speak of, either - how could I make a respectable Back-Blogged post out of it? So, no - Decay is not a game I must beat because it is not a "game" at all, strictly speaking. This sets a precedent for me that similarly eliminates Blue Sphere and three "Knuckles in..." games from the Sonic Mega Collection from my backlog. (These were all games you could only play by plugging other games into the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge.) I never even considered these games part of my backlog anyway; my new rule just gives an official precedent for their omission. Now, should Valve ever go ahead and release Decay as a stand-alone game, even if only for download on the Xbox Live Arcade or something, it will immediately backlogify itself and be counted as one of the many games I still need to beat. Until that happens though, I've got real games to deal with. Vamanos!