Tomorrow night, GameSpot editors will have a game night to remember the days of Half-Life, which is a part of Video Game History Month! This will be a live webcast, so if you don’t own the game, or you’re too lazy to play, feel free to drop by at 4pm PT.
The first time I heard Half-life would be different than most shooters, was while I was driving in a car with an old clanmate, XP-Kiljoy. Half-Life hadn’t been released yet, and at this point there were no screenshots or video. A gamer was left to their own imagination. XP-Kiljoy told me with great accuracy, the visuals, gameplay, and AI interaction, players would later experience in Half-Life.
Half-life was said to be a shooter that would be set in an interactive environment, and being a Quake 1 girl that primarily enjoyed multiplayer matches, I didn’t grasp what the press or Valve shared early on, so Half-Life was completely off my radar. That day, XP-Kiljoy asked if I had been watching Half-Life. He explained why he was so impressed with the concept, and walked me through every single visual aspect on what players might experience. But, he also went the extra mile to experience a comparison on what a player would experience in Quake 1 or 2. So, he went on and on about how you could be walking to one area of the map, but if you didn’t take that route, and went another way, you wouldn’t encounter the same conversation happening at that time. As you can tell, he was definitely interested in the way the artificial intelligence would react, because he came from a background where Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake always had the same encounters.
Time passes on for what seemed a year or so, and I’m obviously interested in what Half-Life will have to offer. Then, I visit the Gamers Extreme office (known as Gamers.com these days) and guess what they have a couple of days before it’s release? Half-Life. One of them told me he was playing it for the review they were going to have at their sister site, The Firingsquad, and I watched for a bit and was super curious about what these sticky things were that took him up to the ceiling if he stepped nearby. I asked him if he was going up to the ceiling on purpose, and he explained it was an enemy giving him some damage. At some point he let me play the game, and reset the game entirely, so I experienced the singlerplaying from the beginning, and pretty much described that the train-like thing reminded me of the Disneyland Rail. I do recall feeling awkward about the gameplay movement when walking around because it didn’t feel like Quake, even if it was the same engine.
For memory’s sake, I found my first impressions not long after playing Half-Life back in 1998:
Spear asked me if I had the chance to play Half-life. I told him I didn’t and he let me play Half-life on his PC. The game was fascinating. I played it for about 2 hours and realized it was getting pretty late.
Half-life Weapons
The things I noticed in the Half-life game was, the different weapons. The grenade seemed to be much more powerful than your typical hand grenade and regular grenade in Quake & Quake II.
Half-life Enemies
The enemies in the game were pretty nice too. One enemy that was really creepy was the critters that chase after you. Along with the enemy that looked like a rope for a tongue. I thought I jumped on a rope and it was moving upwards, I then looked up and I was going to be eaten by a creature of some sort. That wasn’t a very nice sight. The tongue was like it was sticky so it was sort of hard to jump off, I did succeed in getting away from it though. Overall the game was very addicting and it felt refreshing to play a new game. I really enjoyed checking the game out.
I hope you can join us tomorrow, to see what kind of background, Justin Calvert, Tom McShea, Carolyn Petis, and Chris Watters have with the game! 😉
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UPDATE: I hope you all had fun playing! I sure wish I played HL DM lots in the day because I’m sure I would have been a bit better with the funky weapons. But hey, a woman without her favorite rocket launcher is often handicapped by other weapo