Half-Life Video Game Review (About In Description)

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Half-Life
Game:
Half-Life (1998)
Category:
Review
Duration: 0:04
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Nothing half-assed about it--this has to be the finest shooter ever crafted.

You've got to hand it to these guys. Valve Software is a start-up, a relative unknown, with no track and, really, no business making such a mighty game. But mighty it is, the best single player shooter I've ever played.
It will be hard for some--mainly those who haven't played the game--to put their finger on exactly what everyone is raving about. There's nothing exceptional about the engine--it's a heavily modified version of Id Software's Quake. Its genre, the first-person shooter, has nearly been beaten to death. Its design couldn't be simpler: get some guns, run, shoot, jump; no laborious cutscenes or misplaced RPG elements here.

The weapons aren't spectacular either, just your usual array of realistic modern firearms and a few alien gadgets with some new twists. The creatures in some respects are fairly standard, and many of the levels have been done before. Taken separately, no particular element in Half-Life shines above the rest, nothing makes or breaks the game.

No, the real secret is that Half-Life is truly the sum of its parts. It takes every element in this oh-so-predictable genre, re-examines it, improves it, and then meshes it with the rest to create a constantly surprising, internally consistent, and always entertaining game.

Here are some examples. How many games have you played where health packs, armor, ammo and guns are simply lying around as if some Power-Up Santa Claus had emptied the contents of his pack on the floor? You can almost hear the level designers saying to themselves, "Okay, a health pack would be a good item to put in this otherwise empty room."

In Half-Life, weapons and ammo are taken from dead soldiers or other logical places, like a weapons locker. Armor isn't lying around in the form of glowing icons or leather helmets--instead, you're wearing a battery-powered hazard suit, but since it's a fairly standard bit of equipment in this secret base, power outlets are conveniently scattered throughout the complex. Doing this makes the game world feel all that much more real. The more real it feels, the more the player is sucked into the game. This is called suspension of disbelief, and while few game developers seem to be aware of it, Valve is and they make it work for them, over and over.

How many times have you shot at a monster only to have it either grimace at you blankly, perhaps firing off a few tepid shots, or slouch and drool while you pick off his comrades? Well, not here. The teams of soldiers you'll fight in Half-Life have to be the toughest, most convincing enemies yet seen in an action game. Where other opponents grunt incomprehensibly, these guys actually yell stuff relevant to the combat, such as "Fire in the Hole!" or "Look out!" as the grenades go flying. Then they actually try to get away from your grenades. And what's more, they also throw grenades at you.

Grenades might sound like a simple little thing to add to a game, and perhaps it is, but it adds such an extra dimension to the monsters' combat ability that it's almost like playing a whole new genre. Strafe, fire, strafe, fire just simply doesn't work every time. But in every other game, monsters either attack hand to hand, with area affects, or most commonly, with linear shots. It doesn't matter if they're shooting lasers, M-16s, or dollops of hot blue manna, it all comes in a straight line, and it all can be dodged. But change the angle of attack, and it's a whole new game. One little detail--one huge difference.

But that's just part of the appeal of Half-Life's enemies; unlike other games, they also cooperate. Teamwork, for monsters in other games, is if they all happen to be in the same room shooting in the same direction. Here, the infantry squads will split up, trying to hit you from several sides while one guy keeps you pinned or lobs grenades. It's surprising how entertaining well-implemented artificial intelligence can be, and it's probably worth it to play Half-Life just to fight its infantry. There could be a whole game based on nothing but fighting Half-Life's infantry.

Wait, there's more. How many times have you cleaned out one filthy, gory techno-dungeon, only to find yourself at a door that obviously leads to yet another, even filthier, techno-dungeon? How realistic is it to have obvious entrances and exits to levels--and what is a "level" anyway? An archaic holdover from Dungeons & Dragons? A convenient way of breaking up the game world so it can be loaded into memory?

Half-Life does away with the arbitrary concept of levels. Instead the world feels like a continuous whole, with small pauses and loads when you move from one area to another. This does create some problems when monsters are placed too close to the transition between mini-levels and you inadvertently strafe from one area to the other, accidentally triggering a load screen. But this problem aside, Half-Life's mini-levels create a more flow




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