Half Life: Is it fun or a chore?

I gave a presentation in a college class about Half Life, explaining how through its engine, it not only stood out among the competition, but innovated the FPS genre by implementing new features and working around the limitations they couldn't fix. Although I was shaky at first, not having fully prepared for it, I grew to have fun with it, getting laughs from the audience. Improving my speech abilities wasn't the only thing I got out of this, as I've gained interest in Half Life itself. I had only played through around 30 minutes of the game, using my sources to understand and explain the claim I was presenting, so I hadn't gotten the full experience. I want to see if this innovative father of modern FPS games has stood the test of time or has only nostalgia to prop itself up. However, before diving into it myself, I must call upon knowledge from before my time, in the ancient era of the late 90s.

Also, I plan to have fun with this, so expect things to get a little silly.

Reception in the 90s

Before reviewers degraded in quality from Capitalism's unending chase towards profit, chasing after clicks and sucking at simple platforming, they gave intellectual reviews that had an aura of genuine interest in video games. Luckily for this section of my review, Half Life was released before this dark era of Capitalistic Corruption. One thing I noticed first about all the reviews is how they all exclaim that Half Life is innovative and revolutionary. The fact that so many reviews, all unrelated mind you, state at the start that this game was groundbreaking gives an impression of an experience unmatched at the time. Sure, they say that in different ways, but their reasons all come to this one view.

For Jason Bates of IGN, he puts it as "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." From GameSpot, Ron Dulin says that "Through a series of subtle and artistic design decisions, Half-Life creates a reality that is self-contained, believable, and thoroughly engaging." Finally, from Computer Gaming World, Jeff Green wrote "It's one of the best games of any year, an instant classic that is miles better than any of its immediate competition, and— in its single-player form — is the best shooter since the original DOOM," All these intros have one thing in common; Half Life had left the FPS genre in a different and better place than it had found it.

At first, this can certainly be taken as mindless glazing, but they all give good reasons for their sweet words. They all express facination and excitment over Half Life's first person cutscenes, the Scripted Sequences. They loved how it was a smooth continous experience with no interruption other than you pausing and/or exiting to play another time. Other FPS games at the time, such as Daikatana and SIN, only had third-person cutscenes that either cut your gameplay off and/or made you wait decades by giving you long exposition, so this is an understandable aspect to be joyous about. Another aspect they expressed great acclaim about was also the level transitions, or more accurately, the lack of level transitions. To these reviewers, they see it as helping the continous experience by making everything feel connected.

There are critques here and there, such as Dulin stating the brief loading time breaks the continuity and Bates complaining about some enemies being too close to level transitions where you may accidentally trigger it, but over all, these reviews express an admiration for this game and how, at the time it was released, it reinvigorated the FPS genre and gave it more depth than it had before. I do hope that when I finish my playthrough, it is just as good as all of them are making it out to be.

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