HALF-LIFE

Genre	FPS
System
Year	1999
Developer

Working out why this is one of the greats isn’t that easy. It’s a shooter, based on an old engine (Quake2), the weapons are pretty basic (you start with a crowbar for heaven’s sake) and it’s linear to a fault. So what cuts it out from the crowd? Something certainly does, because most PC games journalists rated this as game of the year by a mile (though many punters preferred the less taxing Unreal Tournament) and I would have played it from start to finish in one sitting had food, nature and sleep not claimed their share of my attention.

THE STORY

This is the first part of the whatever-it-is that makes the game so good. The story is all. The game opens with you, a scientist called Norman Freeman, arriving at the Black Mesa Research Facility, to start your day’s work. As you ride in on the monorail you are regaled with safety and procedural instructions from the train’s speakers, all the while looking out at the establishment going about its daily, and more than somewhat arcane routines. Arriving at the office, the second of Half-life’s main features presents itself; interaction with other people. In this case you must conduct a short conversation with the security guard on the desk, to find out what you are supposed to do next.

Following his directions, you get suited up in your environment gear and proceed to the lab’, where you are briefed by the two other scientists conducting that morning’s experiment. You go into the test chamber, do as you are bid from the control room and wait, but not for long. Surprise, surprise, the experiment goes for a ball of chalk. Cue explosions, falling masonry and flash views of somewhere very definitely other than the test chamber.

Escaping from the disaster, you find the two chaps you had been speaking to a few minutes earlier very much the worse for wear. The less damaged of the two tells you that you must get to the surface, to alert the authorities, or whomever, to the problems now facing the facility and with that, he opens the coded door for you and you are on your own, with just the vague instruction "to get to the surface" to guide you.

THE ACTION

Without giving too much away, it becomes clear from the state of the establishment that the disaster was not confined to the laboratory, but seems to have affected the whole place. Damaged equipment and injured (or dead) personnel are everywhere. Doors and lifts that would have sped you to the surface are blocked off or inoperative. Only by asking for help from security guards and scientists are you able to progress, albeit in a rather haphazard way. And then you run into the bad guys.

What your experiment did was to rend a hole in the continuum, allowing creatures from another reality into our world, with the result that they are now scattered throughout the Black Mesa, laying waste to the facility and your comrades alike. By this stage, you probably think things can’t get any worse, only to run into the Marines who have been sent in to clean up the mess. And that includes you!

THE MISSION

There aren’t levels as such in Half-life. The play isn’t quite seamless, though, as you have to move from one area to the next, occasionally crossing backwards and forwards several times on your way to completing the current task. These are given to you mostly by scientists you find dotted around the place and may involve switching something off, getting something to work, realigning a transmitter dish or firing a rocket motor to kill a monster. At various points in your adventures, you can get guards or scientists to join and aid you, with the guards even helping you eliminate the baddies, as well as letting you through security doors and the like.

For the most part, the tasks are self-explanatory or else pretty obvious. For instance, in one you have to fire up a rocket and the switches under "fuel" and "oxygen" suggest that you need to find a way of getting some pumps working. Likewise restoring power to the train system, which incidentally leads on to probably the best part of the game. Occasionally, however, things aren’t so obvious and may even seem to have reached the impossible stage, only for a bit of reflection and/or lateral thinking to suddenly show you the way.

This is where the game really begins to score, I think. The balance between difficulty and satisfaction is probably the most difficult to achieve and is utterly vital if a game is going to be a success. Make it too easy and people breeze through it. Too difficult and frustration can set in, quickly followed by boredom and the Uninstall thing. Half-life hits the motherlode in this department, keeping you both interested and challenged and hardly ever pissing you off.

SUMMARY

Half-life demonstrates yet again that gameplay will always triumph over fancy graphics. It looks fair to middling (all security guards look the same and there are only two varieties of scientist), but there aren’t the whizzo effects we are coming to expect in this age of the 3D card. It simply doesn’t matter though, as the gameplay is spot on. From start to finish, with the possible exception of the level set in the aliens’ universe, you want to see Norman Freeman through his trials, against all the odds.

A WORD ON MULTIPLAYER

Half-life has spawned a mutliplayer version called Team Fortress Classic. If you buy the game today, it should have TFC on the disc as well, otherwise it is a 20 MB-ish free download from the Net. TFC is, as the name suggests, a team game, with capture the flag and area control modes, but with the difference that you can select to be one of a number of specialists, such as sniper, engineer (for opening doors and stuff), grunt or medic. Judging from the number of servers up and running whenever I run the game, it is still incredibly popular, even after 18 months or so. Well worth a look.

THE SEQUEL

Half-life has already spawned an official add-on pack, in which you play the role of one of the poor bloody Marines dropped into the Black Mesa in the wake of the accident. It’s about half the length of the original game and essentially very similar, just seen from a different viewpoint. If you enjoy the game as much as I did, don’t hesitate to get Opposing Force.