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I think every male is good at some kind of numbers.

• “34D” (Women)
• “220HP V6″ (Cars)
• “1400×1050, 4X Antialiasing, 4X Anisotropic Filtering, 60 frames per second” (Computer Games)

I’m the last guy.

If I had to play Half-Life now like I played it 10 years ago, I’d probably decline. But with all those juicy image quality enhancements I can have now with the modern PC, it’s just sooooo clean, so crisp. (Look at the screenshots at the end of the post).

And all I had to do was wait 10 years!

I’ve been going on runs the last 6 months, doing things in sets, like watching the Indiana Jones trilogy in preparation for watching Crystal Skull, watching the original Star Wars movies in a row, playing FFVII and then watching FFVII Advent Children, and so on.

My current thing is Half-Life. I own the Orange Box with Half-Life 2 and all the other episodes, but wanted to revisit the original game before trying the sequel.

It’s been at least 5 or 6 years since I last played Half-Life, and I probably had gone through the expansions, Opposing Force and Blue Shift (originally developed for the never released Dreamcast version of Half-Life), before too, nonetheless I wanted to play all the Half-Life games sequentially in a short amount of time to basically live out one complete experience.

Half-Life is: (drumroll)

Stressful. Heart attack, cold sweat stressful.

Half-Life’s graphics, if you’re playing with antialiasing, are not so bad. Also, I played with the the hi-res texture pack that Valve developed for the Half-Life games in 2001, so I guess I’m really only playing a 7 year old game.

Today, however, you can still be impressed with how Half-Life looks depending on your computer video card settings:

• High-resolution- while PS3 and XBox think 720p is so wonderful, PC gamers can go way higher. This means cleaner, crisper graphics reducing the jagged edge effect (jaggies)
• Anti-aliasing- makes images even crisper, and kicks in when your monitor isn’t high-res enough (mine’s 1400 x1050 but even then, AA makes a big difference)
• Anisotropic filtering-  look at old games and notice specifically the ground textures. Then run straight and watch how the ground textures pop in or the textures very far away look fuzzy compared to the ones up close. Anisotropic filtering will help so all your textures look more natural, more crisp.
• 60 FPS- 60 FPS is way different from 30 FPS. In fact 60 frames per second (fps), especially in a first person shooter (also called fps) is more important than resolution. You just feel more in control, and you’ll feel like you’re a more skilled player as well.

As for the gameplay, what was revolutionary back then, it isn’t so special now and yet the feeling of stress and tension involved when you play is still there. After 10 years though, it’s still easy to see why Half-Life is so highly considered. It’s still very enjoyable, but in a lot of ways, it feels shallow.

The story for the games are all told to you in a way, you never hear yourself speak and you don’t interact with anyone. People talk at you, rather than to you, and so the character in the game really isn’t a reflection of you, nor is it a reflection of the person you’re supposed to be. Whether you play Half-Life, Opposition Force, or Blue Shift, when you finish, you wouldn’t be able to tell me anything about the characters you’re plying other than simple facts like “he’s a solider, “he went to MIT”, and so on.

In Half-Life, you’re Gordon Freeman, a scientist at the Black Mesa government research facility who unluckily gets caught up in a failed experiment that opens up a portal into another dimension (that means aliens coming to get you sucker!), you basically just need to survive. Who cares about saving the world when there are face huggers everywhere!

Monsters, get away from me!

Stop looking at you weirdo freaks!

The main part of the stress comes from the game’s speed. You run fast, you shoot fast. The problem is, the enemies are pretty fast themselves, especially when attacking. You may shoot quickly, but not powerfully- a shotgun to the head isn’t enough to kill most enemies, and sometimes two isn’t enough. You can bet however, during the time it takes you to fire two to three rounds, you’re being messed up in your own right. Add all that to excellent event scripting, and Half-Life keeps you feeling anxious at all times.

Opposing Force and Blue Shift, however, don’t quite stack up so well.

In Opposing Force, you’re Adrian Shepherd, one the soldiers who was sent in to cover-up the Black Mesa mess, including “handling” Freeman. The unique things about this campaign is that you can fight with legit help in your fellow squad mates.

Opposing Force got really good review scores 10 years ago, but I guess that’s a sign of how things have changed. What was once called outstanding AI, I call retarded jackass AI today.

From Gamepsot almost ten years ago:

Instead of limiting you to fighting alongside no more than two of Half-Life’s weakling scientists or security guards, you can now recruit a squad of up to eight marines. The marines have the same advanced artificial intelligence as when they were your enemies in Half-Life, so that some of the large-scale battles staged in Opposing Force are simply phenomenal. Even though the game doesn’t require you to do so, you’ll want to replay such combat sequences just to try out different strategies in an effort to reduce friendly casualties.However, although the game lets you lead so many companions, you’ll likely never have more than four at a time thanks to the AI’s finicky following behavior. Opposing Force’s only significant flaw is that it’s often difficult to keep your followers in line. In some instances they simply appear to become confused, and at other times there is an invisible line they will not cross. It’s usually unclear which of these two reasons keeps your squad from moving forward, so you’ll spend too much time trying in vain to keep it assembled. This is a shame, as the rest of the game is of such high quality.

I, however, felt better off playing alone- I definitely didn’t feel any kind of sense of “real” soldiers helping me. Overall, this expansion pack is just ok. It’s fun in the sense that it fleshes out more of the Half-Life universe. Other than some nice new weapons however, it feels like Opposing Force and Blue Shift are just bonus levels for Half-Life, and by that I mean it doesn’t feel like you’re really doing anything different or taking the role of different characters- it’s more like playing as Gordon Freeman with a new skin.

Blue Shift is….well, bleh?

It’s definitely the worst part of the 3 games. In Opposing Force, you’re a soldier who is trying to take down Gordon Freeman and all the other Black Mesa staff after the experiment, but in Blue Shift, you’re a security guard (Barney Calhoun) at Black Mesa during those events.

Sound exciting?

I thought not.

And it’s not.

In the training mission for Blue Shift, you see one of your security guard buddies eating a donut at a shooting range. Sure, it’s supposed to be funny, but that’s what I think of when I think of how to describe the Blue Shift levels.

Feels lazy.

In the end, the expansion packs are worth going through if you finish Half-Life and still want more. For those people, they will satisfy that need, but if you take them as stand-alone experiences, on their own they’re not worth going through.

Screenshots (avoid clicking to see the galleries if you want to avoid screenshot spoilers) from Half-Life, Blue Shift and Opposing Force. Check out the high-res goodness!

Half-Life:

Opposing Force:

Blue Shift:

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