The Original Half-Life is Fantastic
I started a new game of Half Life a week or so ago and have been playing my way through it. I’d totally forgotten how long it takes to get to the damn surface that it is the most fantastic game on the planet.
10 reasons why this game is awesome:
10. It’s Black Mesa! I’d totally want to work there if it actually existed. I have a mug (available from the Valve store).
9. “Start the rotors” is a running joke with me (mostly just in my head). Anytime I do something that I know is going to cause catastrophe later, I say to myself “I just started the rotors, didn’t I?”
8. Watching Stephen King’s “The Mist” with my dad like a decade ago (old Claudia is old) I thought, “holy crap, this is a total rip-off of Half Life!” Turns out Half-Life itself is based partially on “The Mist.” Oops.
7. Gordon’s 27 years old and all the other scientists are geezermobiles. I just find that hilarious.
6. This game is my late childhood-early adolescence. I think my mom’s old friend got some sort of bootleg copy for me to play (‘cause that’s what he did with everything) and then we went out and got a legit copy ‘cause we thought it was so awesome.
5. I really like the fact that two expansion games to the original, Opposing Force and Blue Shift, allowed you to play the game from two perspectives other than Gordon’s—as a soldier (Opposing Force) and as one of the security guards (Blue Shift).
4. I know it’s not directly related to Half Life gameplay itself, but when I found the Half Life references while playing Portal, I had a little squee. Okay, a major squee. Good video of the “Competing with Black Mesa” slideshow.
3. Cheating. Is. Hilarious. Activate god mode, noclip, and impulse 101 when you’re going through the tram system during the opening credits and you can go screw with all the scientists in the scenes you pass. I like to throw snarks at the security guards then sprint in the opposite direction.
2. Speaking of snarks…
1. CROWBAR!!
You can have your overly-fancy graphics, intelligent enemies, experience points, and dynamic environments. Just give me Gordon Freeman.
Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system
The original Half-Life is, in my opinion, entirely underrated. I’m of the purist camp that says that the original is vastly superior to Half-Life 2 or even the earlier iterations of Blue Shift, Opposing Force, and Team Fortress Classic.
I mean hell—you get to be GORDON FREEMAN. I love Gordon Freeman. And the crowbar.
Fun fact: obviously, Half-Life is named after, well, the half-life of something. But the two other early iterations of the game are also named after scientific things. Opposing Force is named after Newton’s third law of motion; Blue Shift is named after the blueshift, a decrease in wavelength, opposite of a redshift. Snazzy, eh?
And for those poor souls who have yet to see this:
Apologies for the relatively crappy blog posts. My life has been a nightmare for the past few months and I’m basically just waiting for this phase of things to be over in a month and a half or so. Things will get better, I promise.
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.
Hooray for Half-Life 2 References
I’m only in about 20 comics, but this is still freaking great. The 5th one is especially awesome.
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