Half-Life (1998)

la cantidad de veces que tuve buscar en youtube por dónde ir o cómo llegar a cierto lugar fueron MUCHAS. buen juego, no puedo decir que lo disfruté al máximo pero igual me atrapó, tardé bastante en pasármelo pero creo que eso me hizo apreciar más los escenarios. una buena historia, tengo pensado jugar al 2, no sé de qué se trata pero espero ver algún beso entre Gordon y Gman

★★★☆☆ 3/5

I have a deep love for this series and have played the main entries multiple times. It's been about 10 years since I last played the first one though, and my god parts of it have not aged well.

It's still a classic, it still has that Valve trademark sense of driving you forwards and a remarkable sense of scale, but it's just so clumsy in parts. I can’t be too mad given its age but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t missing modern traversal mechanics. The first 90% has still been a blast, but now the jumping puzzles have come out I've been more frustrated than anything. I think I've hit F7 more than the left mouse button in the last hour.

Amusingly I started this off on the Steam Deck as I wanted to check it out again after they gave it Verified status for the 25th anniversary. I had to give up and move to desktop after about an hour because it was borderline impossible to actually play lol.

I've been wanting a meaning to play Black Mesa ever since that first trailer, kinda wish I'd picked that instead? Not sure if it’s the same experience though.

My partner bought me Abiotic Factor, a survival crafting game for 1 or more players which takes heavy inspiration from games like Half-Life. It suddenly occurred to me... somehow I've never played Half-Life. I have no idea what the story is about at all. I've touched on Half-Life 2 and Alyx briefly, but the original has always escaped me. It's probably because I was a console gamer up until 5 or so years ago, so I've missed out on decades of PC gaming.

I really wanted to try and understand what makes this franchise so beloved by fans with almost unanimous love across all platforms. Most people, or "gamers" seem to have been touched by Half-Life at some point in their life. So, here I am, travelling back to 1998 and launching Half-Life for the first time, and I gotta say it's pretty damn good. It's hard for me to really understand how innovative (or not) the game was for it's time when all I have to compare it to personally is my time with PS1 titles such as Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, and other titles I played back in the day.

I love the interactivity and how the game encourages the player to investigate and experiment. I think it's one of the key ingredients to a lot of games nowadays and one of the things that really grabs me. Some VR games like BoneWorks sort of tap into this realm. I like the disturbing player models and animations too, and the 8-bit wav audio files are beautifully crunchy to listen to. I'm on chapter 3 at the moment and looking forward to seeing where the game goes next.