So, Half-Life. If you’ve been around gaming at the end of the 90s, the beginning of 00s chances are you know what Half-Life is and you don’t need explanation. For those of you who weren’t, and ignored the recent 25th anniversary, the freebie, and documentary from Valve, then I’m not even sure I have to explain. I mean, you’re clearly not interested and chances are my input won’t change a thing.
I’ll say that Half-Life is like Doom. Doom basically created the FPS genre, but Half-Life redefined it. Half-Life expanded where Doom wasn’t. It added story; it added dynamic narrative; it added atmosphere and made you part of something bigger than you expected.
You’re playing as Gordon Freeman (ironic surname, ain’t it? I mean, he’s a free man, but you basically control everything he does… and I believe at least 500,000 different YouTube videos already made this observation before me), and thanks to your input the Earth is getting fucked by the race of space jerks who conquer everything within their nearest proximity. I’m putting it very mildly, ignoring a lot of things that indicate that you’re nothing but an intermediary who made things happen a bit faster than planned. And the Earth was doomed long before Freeman even made a step into the test chamber.
It doesn’t matter. What matters the most is that this game wasn’t my introduction to Half-Life universe. And what I mean by that is that I played a different Half-Life first without understanding what was going on and why everything was fucked. And who was this Freeman dude everyone was so afraid of.
What I mean is that I started with Half-Life Opposing Force. Now, I know that Opposing Force is not a canon. And all that crap, but I don’t give a shit. Because for me, long before Freeman, there was Adrian Shepherd.
And, eh, yeah. I started playing as the bad guy. Well, I didn’t know that I was a bad guy at the moment. I don’t even remember receiving orders to kill scientists on sight and cover up all the fuck-up that took place there. I mean, I was playing as a fucking special ops doing fucking special ops stuff. Like killing zombies with my wrench with precision strikes on the head, shooting shit up with my handgun, going ballistic on enemies with a fucking machine-gun and a sniper rifle. I mean, I was raised by Doom; I knew what to do. And Half-Life Opposing Force was like Doom 2.0 in my books. I even saw some parallels to Doom. I think that Zen was similar to hell. And headcrabs were like flying skulls. And zombies were like zombies in Doom. And you got the idea, you can say that every FPS is like Doom if you try hard enough.
So, that’s my story. Short and boring as it is. The only fun moment that I can say is that when you first play Opposing Force, Freeman looks like an enemy. And they I was kind of surprised that you’re playing as Freeman in original game and he’s actually the good guy here (still a murder machine, though). Probably it’s a good allegory for the way we tend to see and perceive things. Or maybe I’m looking at it too much.
This is it. Not much, but come on, there’s a whole hour length documentary from Valve on YouTube. If you want to know more about the game, you should just watch it instead of reading some dude who played the game more than twenty years ago.