Half-Life 2
There I stood. On the edge of an incomparably steep and seemingly bottomless cliffside, I stood. I stood in pause over the surreal reality that led me to this point. I stood in deep ponderance of the remaining three magnum rounds and rusted crowbar at my disposal the only comfort offered in this moment of time in my plight. I stood in a thundering roar of looming transport choppers as they released their load of rappelling grunts in the uneasy distance. I am Gordon Freeman, and there I stood. Then I ran like hell! While many can claim to have played through Half-Life in its entirety once to several times, the unheard of longevity even MMOs have a tough time maintaining such a length of playability was something no one, even the developers, could have predicted or hoped for. The MOD community was, and still is in large responsible for this, as no other game has seen so many different creations built upon a singular technology. Valve took note of this trend early on, and offered previously unmatched support to the community, and as a result, turbo-charged the respirator keeping the original Quake engine alive. I'm sure I don't need to go into great detail on the popularity of such MODS as Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Natural Selection, Firearms, Opera, and so many more, and how some have even become actual retail products. These are the staples of PC gaming history. Counter-Strike alone has been compared to the online population of Italy, in that more internet traffic is generated from this game than that whole nation! Insane. Familiar faces from the original return, though with quite the facelift; the mysterious G-Man, the lovable Barney Calhoun, Dr. Eli Vance and Dr. Isaac Kleiner, and of course, the headcrab. New faces include the unforgettable Alyx Vance daughter of Eli, Dr. Wallace Breen City 17 Administrator, Dr. Judith Mossman fellow researcher to Vance, Father Grigori priest of the damned, and a slew of other substantially less important characters. As before, the story is told through a balanced helping of in-game dialogue, scripted events, and in your face face-humping (I did mention the headcrabs are back right?). Gordon has returned, or been placed rather, to aid the human resistance against the Combine forces in, possibly, mankind's last hope for freedom. Valve has since ditched hardware acceleration to handle such duties in favor of a more readily available API DirectSound. While this does place more load on the CPU, the effect is the same. I can't stress enough how important it is, in this day and age, to have a surround sound setup for gaming. Whether it be a full blown 5.1 (or even 7.1) or at the minimal, a quad speaker setup, this is an absolute must if you want to benefit from the painstaking process the audio engineers endured. Like any good story, the plot involves a few twists and turns, and is anything but straight-forward. Only enough information is given from one point to the next to keep the player emotionally committed to progressing through this fantastic world. Becoming aloof to key characters is near impossible; each possess their own attractive back-story and present idiosyncrasies though not defined to the point of boredom. Half-Life 2 offers up roughly 16-20 hours of gameplay for the average dawdler. If absolutely rushed through, I imagine it would still take at least eight hours, but why in the hell would anyone want to do that? Even on my second tour through City 17, it took at least 15 hours, as I found many more points of interest worth my consideration. I am fairly confident I have seen it all now, or at least 95% of it, so perhaps my next run will be one of speed. The second pass through of the game in its entirety still offered a great deal of enjoyment, which most FPSs have a difficulty with. Half-Life and now, Half-Life 2 represent the only shooters that I felt warranted a second (or third) run through. Go figure.
Obligatory History
To say that Half-Life, originally released in late 1998, single-handedly re-shaped the PC gaming front would be a bit naοve, though not entirely untrue. For me, this statement is 100% true, due to the unequivocal fact that I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in PC gaming prior to what would become a six year pastime. I was quite content in the world of console gaming, getting my blood thirst fill primarily with Rare's GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64. I suppose it was a good enough introduction to a then somewhat new genre, first-person shooter (FPS), preparing me for what was to soon be unleashed to the world as, still arguably, the best shooter ever.
I knew little to nothing about computers in actuality, nor did I own one of my own, though I did know that for the cost of a 12-pack of Mountain Dew, I could sit at the spare PC of fellow console to PC convert Pachoey, and deathmatch till my eyes bled. After about a month of soda/game time bartering, I rationalized the potential enjoyment increase in being able to play Half-Life, both the single-player experience (which up till then I was in the dark about) and online deathmatch (which was ever threatening in swallowing up every speck of time not spent working) in the comfort of my own home, and in my underwear. I opted to acquire my first PC. None of that "off the shelf" HP, Compaq, or heaven forbid, eMachine crap for me though. I would custom build a machine from the ground up for the sole purpose of playing Half-Life. I would buy the biggest hard drive I could find, insuring that every custom HL map and model ever made or merely imagined would have a comfy home, go all out nuts on the memory which at that time I believe was 128MB, and get the (I've argued this one till I couldn't speak) best videocard available, the Voodoo 3 3000. How hard could it be?
Two motherboards later, my Half-Life PC was complete.
Come for the Story, Stay for the Deathmatch
Half-Life raised the bar in both story-telling and action pace. It didn't sport the best graphics of the time, easily paling in comparison to Unreal which was released several months prior, though the overall quality of the game easily surfaced as was proven by sales figures and longevity. Built atop the already aging Quake (1 not 2) engine, new development house Valve Software set out on an overly ambitious project, and unlike so many other attempts, succeeded to extents beyond their imagination and belief. The gripping sci-fi story, clever in-game scripted sequences, memorable cast, and irresolute conclusion all added up to an experience that gamers were not expecting nor ready for. October 1998 was undoubtedly one of the most defining moments in PC gaming.
All this is not to detract from the sole initial intention of Half-Life as Valve envisioned it. It would be impossible to lay a roadmap encompassing all things that have come to pass on the Half-Life engine beforehand. Though even without the extended life given to the game by the community, Half-Life would have still reigned supreme, though probably with a lot less whining, bitching, uber-133t 13-year olds.
16 Cities Unfit for Habitation
Welcome to the Black Mesa Research Facility or what's left of it. Ten years ago, a catastrophic event ripped a whole in the fabric of time and space, unleashing beings of another world, into this unequipped and unprepared Arizona facility. Though not entirely innocent, the experiments performed here were not designed to, nor imagined to, have such costly repercussions. Damage control was dealt out through military, secret-agent, and local security action, though of most importance, through the heroic actions of one scientist, Dr. Gordon Freeman. Alien monstrosities quickly overran the lab, threatening life as you and I know or knew it rather beyond the boundaries of the isolated facility. Without regard for his own life and safety, the Freeman set out to reverse this experimental mistake, single-handedly turning the tide of alien hostile takeover. Or so it seemed
Present day: Welcome to City 17. The deathbed of mankind. One of the last surviving human cities. Much has occurred over the previous years, though none to the benefit of man. Perhaps the battle of Black Mesa merely delayed the inevitable. Perhaps all was for naught. Perhaps, it is time for the Freeman to come to the aid of mankind once again. Wake-up Mr. Freeman. Wake-up.
Unexplained ideas have leaked into the long-coming sequel, though most have still been left unanswered. The last face you see at the conclusion of Half-Life is the very first face you see in Half-Life 2 the G-Man. Who he is, or exactly what it is he does, and how or what power he has over "The Free-Man" is a mystery, and remains so even at the conclusion of the sequel. What is explained, through bits of spoken dialogue and clues scattered abroad, is what happened after Black Mesa. Man has lost the war against a newcomer threat, the Combine, with the only promise of life secured through a bargain made between the alien race and City 17 "Administrator" Dr. Wallace Breen. How this man came to power, and exactly what the bargain is, or how he has leveraged himself into a space of authority is unclear, though what is clear is that the deal made insures his and only his long-term survival.
Visually Speaking
Your mileage may vary, but generally speaking, any videocard that supports DirectX 9 should yield a playable framerate with most graphical features set medium to high. Of course, depending on your particular card, you may need to scale back the resolution to compensate for lacking. Disabling (disabled by default) anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering (both in the game menu and control panel for your vidcard) will help keep the framerate up as well, though at resolutions at or lower than 1024x768, the jaggies may get annoying. All this is to say that most PC's that handled the previous year of games should be capable of running Half-Life 2 without lowering settings to the point of looking like ass. Just as an example, I ran HL2 on a 3.2GHz system with a Radeon 9700 Pro. I set the resolution to 1280x960, set textures and models to high, and cranked anti-aliasing up to 4X (in game). The game purred along nicely above 40 frames per second for the most part and on a two-year old videocard!
Right from the get-go, provided your videocard is up to the task, the title menu (which changes as you progress through the game) shows off Valve's pride and joy engine Source, with a fully real-time rendered scene of the City 17 courtyard. This scene alone sets the tone for what's to come; dilapidated buildings married with alien technology exoskeletons, Gestapo style Combine Police and downtrodden civilians roaming the streets, black ravens and hovering Combine scanners owning the sky. The scene seems eerily viable in the not so distant future. Photo-surrealistic would be one way to put it.
Much has already been said regarding the stunning backdrops of Half-Life 2 as well as the even more stunning character models. To date, the models represent the absolute highest quality in regards to detail and realistic animation for an action game, period. Certainly there is tech on the horizon (Unreal Engine 3 for example) that will even put this current point to shame, but as of right now, it does not get any better than this. From facial animations with finally believable lip-synching (though still not quite perfect) to realistic full body movements; Source does it well beyond adequacy.
The environs of City 17, from the unsettling citizen inhabited dwellings to the underbelly and inner-workings of the Citadel, the unmatched attention to detail and furthermore, the engine's ability to realize the artists' vision makes it difficult at times to realize that these places are purely fictional. I can only imagine that the amount of man-power and time that went into research, texture acquisition, and actual construction of game to be unheard of by any game project.
The Sound of Inevitability
The original Half-Life was one of the first games to fully support directional audio through a quad speaker setup. The game's enjoyment was easily multiplied for those with either A3D or EAX setups and surround satellites though A3D (Aureal) tended to handle the positional portion of the audio slightly better, may they rest in piece. Of course this addition found even more use in multiplayer bouts, as one could almost pinpoint an enemy's location from audio alone. If you had that feeling that someone was sneaking up behind you, chances were there was! Quickly spinning your view to the sound of crunching leaves behind you generally thwarted a sneak-attack, or at least warranted a bit more caution rearward.
Much of the talent that provided the voice-overs for the first Half-Life has returned, and a few upgraded. Michael Shapiro has returned as the voice of Barney Calhoun and the ominous G-Man, as well as Harry S. Robins as Professor Isaac Kleiner. Upgrades include Robert Guillaume (Rafiki in The Lion Kin, or you may know him as tv's Benson in the 80s) as Doctor Eli Vance, and Lou Gossett Jr. (Jeriba in Enemy Mine) as the now voiced Vortigaunts. Other high-profile actors include Robert Culp as Doctor Wallace Breen, Michelle Forbes as Doctor Judith Mossman, and Merle Dandridge as Alyx Vance. All this is to say that Valve obviously put a great deal of importance on characters and how they would be represented in-game. One could probably conjecture that as a result, the 'acting' is indeed top-notch and adds a great deal of emotional and believable weight to the foreboding story. One would be correct.
Perhaps the most tethering aspect of Half-Life 2 to the original aside from the plot is the audio. Countless established sounds from Half-Life have returned; the various sounds and spoken warnings of Gordon's HEV suit, the hum and chirp of wall-mounted charging stations, to the squeaks and purrs of headcrabs. Being such a graphical opposite of its predecessor, every blip and bloop carried over from Half-Life helps remind the player, "Hey, I'm Gordon Freeman. Eat crowbar!"
Just as in the original, the audio does a fantastic job of almost requiring the use of people pampers. To this day, the hair on the back of my neck raises, and an unexplainable chill overcomes my body at the faint sound of distant headcrab garbles. Even worse is the fear invoking rattle of the black headcrabs though they tend to only make that sound once destroyed, it 'rattles' my bowels nonetheless.
The sparse pumping techno soundtrack makes a return as well, and is just as sparse. Half-Life was far from being driven by emotional musical movements, and the same applies in the sequel. Typically the only sign of music occurs leading up to monumental moments in the game, but serve little more than a slight boost of adrenaline for the gamer. I guess there is something to be said about a story that can be told effectively without pulling on one's heart-strings with a slathering of pre-composed musical orchestration.
Six Years of Development Can't be Wrong
Thus far, everything previously stated amounts to the workings of an above average sci-fi flick. Would it be asking too much for Half-Life 2 to actually be a playable and hopefully fun game? Probably though fortunately such a request has been honored.
Starting the game literally empty-handed does little to disinterest the gamer looking for instant action. Those looking for immediate bloodshed will find themselves quickly drawn into the disorientating plot, entertained by the surrounding down-trodden people with answers to un-askable questions. Nobody knows why they are here, and nobody knows what the end result of their stay will be.
The action kicks in soon enough (depending on how much time you spend dilly-dallying) and from there, the pace is pretty constant (again, depending on how much time you spend exploring). There are the occasional dialogue and plot breaks that serve well to calm the player and allow adrenaline levels to drop to a somewhat normal level, though only momentarily. Panic is likely to be one of the first strong emotions bestowed upon the player, chased through a tight apartment complex by several Combine Police and fear of the closing and accelerating march Gordon still unarmed. This scene is eerily remisicent of a similar situation late in Roman Polansky's 'The Pianist.' I couldn't help but wonder while playing through if this was inspired by Wladyslaw Szpilman's (played to the Oscar hilt by Adrian Brody) escape from his safe-house smack in the middle of Nazi owned territory.
My Kingdom for a Crowbar
Many of the weapons familiar to the Half-Life aficionado return, though slightly altered. Back is the submachine gun complete with grenade launcher (with an unfortunate reduced grenade capacity), the pistol (which can fire as fast as you can click), the Magnum 357 (no secondary zoom this time around), the close-quarter godsend shotgun (as deadly as ever), fragmentation grenades (can be thrown or rolled, but not cooked), rocket propelled grenade (laser site cannot be disengaged as it could be in Half-Life, though the tracking is greatly improved), as well as the crossbow (apparently uses red-hot rebar instead of arrows). Did I miss anything? J
New weapons include the gravity gun, or as Alyx put it, the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator for the pretentious, the Pulse Rifle, and Pheropod (or bugbait). Of most note is the gravity gun, due to both its uniqueness and ability to create previously unthought-of ways to wreak havoc and yes, that was a pun. As most are aware, "Havok" is the underlying technology by which the physics in Half-Life 2 are handled. Most in-game props that aren't bolted down, and even some that are, can be manipulated in a realistic manner through the gravity and weight Havok provides. This feature can be limitlessly exploited through the use of the gravity gun with rewarding, if not at least, entertaining results.
The primary fire of the 'Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator' (feeling a bit pretentious at the moment) will repel objects away from it at a rate and distance dependant upon the object. The secondary will attract objects in its crosshair to it, which can then be fired or launched away from it, appropriately damaging an enemy target it comes in contact with. You can 'soda can' a combine soldier to death with numerous hits, or take one out with a single blow of a repelled oil drum. Objects that are small and light enough to be picked up with the secondary of the gravity gun can be held indefinitely, providing cover from a hail of bullets from incoming soldiers though you may find it rather difficult to see around a heating radiator held in the grasp of the gravity gun.
The usefulness of the physics engine hardly ends there. Numerous props and puzzles throughout the game rely upon it as well. One puzzle may have the player floating a few air-filled tanks under a submerged lever in order to create a ramp to another location, or knocking down a draw-bridge with a crane. The practicality of the physics engine combined with the gravity gun is nearly only limited by one's imagination. And fortunately, this marriage is far from a mere gimmick it is both fitting and great fun!
Oddly enough, even with the substantial improvement of graphics and the inclusion of a physics system, Half-Life 2 feels just like Half-Life. Hardly a derogatory statement, as Half-Life offered buttery smooth gameplay, the pitch and movement of the camera of Half-Life 2 feels right at home. Yes, this is a first-person shooter, and in theory, all 'camera' movements of like-minded games should be the same, the fact is, they are not. There is a distinct difference in feel from one engine to the next. The most extreme example I can give is comparing games built on the LithTech engine (NoLF, AvP2) to those built on, say, the Quake 3 engine (just blurt out an FPS made in the last 4 years and you have a 80% chance of naming a Q3 based game). No matter how much you match the control scheme and mouse sensitivity, the engines feel different. I can only conjecture that Valve did a great deal of emulating said feel to insure cohesiveness between parts 1 and 2. Whether by accident or design, it's darn near perfect.
Beyond the story-driven single-player experience, Half-Life 2 owners can take their skills online with either Counter-Strike: Source (of which is beyond the scope of this article) and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. I have to admit; thus far HL2DM has not drawn me into the 'late night into early morning' fragfests that the original did so well. Upon initial release, only two maps were available, which could possibly be the cause of wanting, but it does show some great potential. The gravity gun is perhaps the number one reason to play Valve's version of deathmatch over any other, offering a multitude of ways to annihilate your friends and foes alike. Death by toilet is the new deathmatch humiliation. I do severely miss the gauss gun and trip mines though.
My Bucks are Bangin'
There are several different packages of Half-Life 2 available, each with an ascending feature of content. The absolute rock-bottom package includes Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source, as well as the post release Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. Other higher priced packages include Half-Life 1: Source, Day of Defeat: Source (when it is released), and various offerings of HL2 posters, postcards, soundtrack, strategy guide, Valve's back catalog available on Steam, etc. The 'back catalog' consists of old favorites such as Deathmatch Classic, Opposing Force, Team Fortress Classic, Ricochet, Day of Defeat, and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero though thankfully, Half-Life: Blue Shift is NOT present to mar the gleam of the HL franchise.
While all this adds up to far more than the sum of its parts, or at least the asking price of the package with all these inclusions, I was beyond perturbed to find that Half-Life 1: Source was little more than a touch-up with barely more than new water textures and physics. I was eagerly looking forward to a Source powered run through the Black Mesa facility, anticipating a full-on reworking of the graphics of the classic throughout. No such luck. What left me dissatisfied even more after having realized this was not what I hoped for, was that Valve did not even use the high-definition model pack from Half-Life: Blue Shift the only reason to have bought HL:BS other than Opposing Force. Instead, here I am, staring at Doctor Kleiner as he was in 1998. Blech! I suppose my disdain is my fault alone, as Valve never promised my vision. Perhaps the MOD community will step up and avenge me and my imagination.
Speaking of the MOD community, Valve has already voiced their commitment, and already numerous modifications have been announced. The longevity of Half-Life 2 is already shaping up to match that of its predecessor. The community has already pumped out a slew of remakes of classic deathmatch maps, some of the more popular HL mods of yesteryear are being reworked on the new engine, while others are finding interesting things to do with the engine such as Garry Newman with his physics playground, Gary's Mod. Friday nights don't seem so boring again.
Leaving So Soon?
I don't think the term 'hard-pressed' holds enough weight in finding a better game. Closer to accurate would be 'impossible'. Half-Life 2 pummels every point of good gaming, redefining them in its wake. The story alone is hardly a masterpiece, but the execution of it is glorious. Characters that you can actually give a rat's ass about, interesting and useful new weapons, and panic driven scurries from one safe-haven to another fueled by the unsettling nature of the god-forsaken confines of City 17 all add up to realize the seemingly insurmountable task of being the follow-up to the best PC game ever. Job well done Valve.
