Graphics: HL had fantastic graphics for when it came out. But then I don't give a shit about graphics.

What's boring about the gameplay? Explain yourself further.

Sound: Explain yourself further.

One big thing that HL brought to the table was strong mod support. Suddenly it opened up the opportunity for people to create whole new worlds. Yes other games (primarily iD games, such as DooM and Quake, off which HL was mostly derived) had such support, but not to the same extent. Truth be told though, Counterstrike was a 'killer ap'. Were it not for CS, HL would not have the recognition it does today.

Why do we all like it so much. Guess what! Different people are different!

Okay, I'm going off on a wild tangent here, but read on:

Me? I can't get enough of Looking Glass Studios games. You've probably never heard of them. They made games that scored rave reviews and provided inspiration for the rest of the industry for years afterwards, but did the market ever reward them with success? Hell no. Never mind that they had fantastic storylines, groundbreaking physics, and emergent gameplay like you wouldn't believe. In the end, LG was rewarded with financial collapse.

Ultima Underworld: This game was probably the first ever first-person 3D RPG! It predated Wolfenstein 3D, yet had design features that DUKE NUKEM 3D got credited for introducing four years later!

System Shock: If Half-Life is the thinking man's Quake, then System Shock is the thinking man's DooM, but to twice the degree. I bought this game for a few dollars over four years ago. One of the best purchases I ever made. I never knew true evil till I knew of SHODAN. This game perfected the feeling of being so terribly, terribly alone, much more than anything, even HL.

System Shock II: Made by LG and LG offshoot Irrational. iD's DooM III was a piss poor attempt at making a 'spiritual successor' to this game.

Terra Nova - Strike Force Centauri: Took a page out of Robert Heinleins' Starship Troopers (the book, not that shitty movie). First person, squad based combat, outdoors, over rolling hills, reflective water, massive terrain. IN 1995, FFS!

Thief: Looking Glass CREATED the First Person Sneaker genre, for crying out aloud! Note: The most recent one, Deadly Shadows, isn't a worthy addition to the series, and was not made by LG.

Flight Unlimited: An aerobatics flight sim. Probably the first ever home flight sim to take consideration of how air flows over a planes surface. Think like what ragdoll physics and per-poly hit detection has done for FPS's, only more so. Realism took a great leap when this came out.

Flight Unlimited II: Instead of doing like all the other major flight sims like Microsoft Flight Simulator were doing in '97, and recreating the entire globe in shit detail, LG recreated the entire San Francisco Bay Area, in incredible detail.

You played Deus Ex? The first one, not that dumbed down "Invisible War". Made primarily by Looking Glass alumni. A game that can't be described with mere words.

And yet, while I've played games smarter than HL, and much smarter than anything iD ever put out, I still love to play DooM, Quake, Quake II, HL, etc.

Different people are different.

the graphics dont matter...the gameplay is addictive....graphics dont make a great game....

half-life is one of the best FPS to date.....also, counterstrike

I got this game off a friend when this game was just new.

The graphics arent really that good... I mean not alot of detail is put into the textures, but for the time, they were good enough... But as you say, graphics dont hugely matter.

The sound is only alright... The Doom games were much older than this but they had good sound compared to this...

The gameplay is what makes this game poor in my eyes. It is so boring. Its steady, but the gameplay gets repeditive. The game would have been so much better if the game was a little quicker.

I never said HL was a bad game, I just said it wasnt a great game like most people make it out to be.

nahh, depends on people how they perceive it.....

overall, half-life was a great idea...first time i heard a scientisti with a crobar...

the main character is not glorified like master chief, just good old gordon freeman

nahh, depends on people how they perceive it.....

overall, half-life was a great idea...first time i heard a scientist with a crobar...

the main character is not glorified like master chief, just good old gordon freeman

Gordon could have been made better and cooler by:

a) Not being called Gordon

b) Not wearing nerdy glasses (Should have gone to Specsavers!)

He should have been glorified a little...

Hitting people/mutants with a crowbar should be fun... Its just boring. :P

It's perfect.

That minor point aside, picture a pissed-off nerd flailing the skin off your face with it. Would you back up and run, or what?

I would kick that nerds ass...

WTF has this to do with the review?

Keep your language G-rated or it may well be removed.

Also, I don't know why you didn't name who you were addressing.

--

" Hitting people/mutants with a crowbar should be fun... Its just boring. "

If your last comment was directed at me and that comment is supposed to be a part of your review, I'm hardly off-topic.

In any case, I'm free to say just about whatever I want on this board (look up) without anyone retorting with a less than intelligent "wtf". K?

Damn!!! You are a total foo!

"Keep your language G-rated or it may well be removed"

Are you talkin about ass or WTF? WTF isnt a curse.

" Hitting people/mutants with a crowbar should be fun... Its just boring. "

" Hitting people/mutants with a crowbar should be fun... Its just boring. "

"If your last comment was directed at me and that comment is supposed to be a part of your review, I'm hardly off-topic."

ACTUALLY, HITTING MUTANTS/PEOPLE IS ON-TOPIC!!!

ps: Explain why this game is perfect. What do you disagree with on my review and why?

Didnt think ya had the balls to reply!

Wait.. wait.. you call this bitching and moaning a REVIEW?? Thats.. thats.. I'm sorry to say but that's just frikkin' sad.. really..

But since you asked..

The game was brilliant simply because it had (gasps) a coherant storyline. Yes. And not, like so many other FPS out there, a story revolving around some adrenaline fix but one with a start, a middle, and end. A story with an actual plot besides "kill 'em all" HalfLife was never ment to be rushed through. It was more of a thriller then a full-blown action movie. More like 'Seven' then 'Die hard'.

Also, it's easy to talk about 'medicore' graphics now we're five/six years in the future. Remember, we're talking Quake 1 period here. When I first played it, way back when, I was completely blown away. The resonance-cascade disaster, for instance, was unparalelled for it's time.

Then there was this whole cooperative NPC thing (scientists/barneys), that was not done before. And neither the whole multiple factions thing (you and the science team vs aliens vs gouvernment troops). Drat has a point when he brings up SystemShock. I think that's the only comparative game out there, taking in account age and type of game. Part of me is completely stumped why this game never got the wide attention Half-Life got, but somehow I think they suffered from wanting too much for that time. The world just wasn't ready for it I guess (FPS-RPG cross over with too many interface features).. oh and drat, there's a HL2 mod (www.hostile-planet.com) out there which is pretty much inspired by SS2 and IIRC part of the original SS2 team is currently working on a (drumroll) SS3..

As for Gordon being too dorkey, how believable would the story be if the main character would've been some gung-ho schwartzenegger type? With a Phd in quantum physics? Working as a research assistant? That just would've been beyond corney.. And should they have called him John? Michael? George? Bif? I found 'Gordon' pretty much fit the person.. I also think whining about the name is pretty much the lamest argument EVER..

And in closing, I do not agree with the whole "if it weren't for counterstrike HL would've never bla bla yadda yadda...". HL broke all records before CS was even conceived and though CS and a whole heap of other class-a mods out there indeed ensured HL's long-livety (sp?) HL managed to get all that recognition pretty much by itself. The CS gameplay is SO totally different from HL itself that both can have their own place in the hall-of-fame woithout one actually needing to 'steal' limelight from the other. HL is a novel, CS is a sport. Can two things be more different from each other then that?

Oh, but there's more.. Venuz, you talk about repetitive.. HL was IIRC the first game which actually brought more to the FPS genre then the whole "pull lever, kill N baddies, push button, cross bridge, kill N baddies, throw switch 1 through 5, kill N baddies"-routine. Talk about repetitive. Actually, and this is funny, your statement pretty much would NOT have been made if it weren't for HL. HL pretty much defined the genre to what it is today (yes drat, I know, Looking glass,

non-linear storytelling etc etc etc.. HL pretty much opened that door, or at least gets the credits for that. Hence the apparent hype you're not understanding.

Reading your arguments I can't shake off the comparison that you've just tasted the first meal made with salt and are complaining about how bland it tastes, with taste-buds spoiled by the current culinair standards.. It's allmost like you're comparing a mute-black and white Jules Verne SF movie with, say, starwars. Ofcourse it's true that starwars completely obliterates those early B/W SF flicks in the sense of special effects but that still doesn't mean they were useless..

And saying the old doom games had better sound then HL.. well.. does the word "delusional" mean something to you? Are you aware that HL was (again) the first game out there with a build-in sound processing engine? You know, making your foodsteps sound different in relation to what kindof area you were walking in.. (and gunshots, speech and everything else).

IN relation to doom Quake 1 was defenetly a step in the right direction. But HL was a leap into the future, on ALL accounts.. That it isn't your kindof game (pace-wise) is totally okay, but that tells us more of the kindof gamer you are (and please, that wasn't ment as an offence) then that it tells us something about the overall quality of the game..

Now, if you had further stuff to add, please, feel free.. But, again, please, pretty please, try to keep it a little civilised from here on in? Behaving like a brat doesn't impress no one here and, if anything, it makes what you actually have to say sound so.. childish... And that's a shame IMO.

Nicely said, Com-Cray. However, I do have to nitpick.

A. GoldenEye 007 had helper AI (in a couple missions) in 1997. And I have a feeling it was done in FPS' before even that.

B. Duke Nukem 3D had altering sound in 1996.

Oh yeah, and what I said about CS was partially true. Keep in mind that CS was for quite some time being played online by more people than Quake III and Unreal Tournament COMBINED (when those games were still popular).

As for SS3, there won't be one. When LG collapsed, their copyrights and intellectual property went every which way. No-one has the rights to continue the SS series. Irrational are working on BioShock, which will be a spiritual successor.

a. a helper, yes, one, but no such extensive npc-interaction as in HL. The helper in Goldeneye might just as well have been a dog or a trained monkey IMO.

b. did it? I wasn't aware of that.. strange that..

as for CS. Like I said, it did a lot for the longlivety of HL but it hardly did anything for HL's reputation as a game in itself. Also, one could argue that the reason for CS's sucsess is greatly influenced by it's (lack of) pricetag.. Note that i'm not saying that'd be the ONLY reason, their game is good, but somehow I doubt that it's initial (and subsequent) sucsess would have been as big if it would've been a full retail game.. But there we get in the realm of "what if's" so I'll just shut up now ;)

Yeah, spiritual successor, and here I was hoping to make your day ;) It should be interesting though, considering the other games and gameplay these folks came up with..

Earth to Venuz. "wtf" isn't allowed to stand anywhere at GT (but for one board), if seen.

Oh jesus! Its the attack of the nerds!

Ah, no, it's the attack of those who actually know and care what they're on about..

Funny though that this is the only thing you have to say after your request for an explenaion.. It pretty much shows us what kindof mor.. person we're dealing with here.. I was going to ask you to stop trolling and call you some choice names but I wouldn't want to upset your mummy by making her little boy cry..

Dude, chill.

All I did was say that HL was overrated.

Its just a game...

you guys should all just put this to rest, half life is a very good game, but if you look back on, or replay the game, it may not look as good as when you first played it. the real thing that helped half life do so well was the engine. Just the whole way the game was set up and actually featured the closest thing to physics. ex. adjustable gravity, sound changes when you go underwater. Half Life was just a game that was different than all the other FPS's out there, you played a scientist, wielded a crowbar and had one simple task: get out of black mesa....the makers just piled more stuff on top of the premise so it could be longer. Plus: the makers of half life just made a bunch of spin off games that were downloaded, and that added to the half life empire Overall: the half life gameplay itself may not be super good, it was the detail that went into the thought of "how can we make this game better than all the other FPS's?"