Finished replaying Half-Life
I first got into PC gaming shortly after the release of Half-Life 2, and a lot of my early experiences on the platform were with the shooters of that era. When I went back to Half-Life 1, I was blown away. I liked it better than 2, and thought it was the best single-player FPS I'd played.
Fast forward a few years, and I fell into retro-shooters. Classic Doom, Build engine games, the growing wave of indie takes on the retro shooter. I love 'em. After playing all of those games and coming back to Half-Life, I'm realizing that what I loved about it had less to do with what Half-Life brought to the table, and more to do with the design elements from older games that it was still holding onto, like its fast movement, huge arsenal, and gamey platforming sequences.
Playing it now, my biggest takeaway is that the game is brimming with bullshit. You've got ambushes and traps that force trial-and-error gameplay (I remembered quite a few of them and still found it irritrating). Enemies screw you over with stuff like grunt bees hitting through walls, or vortigaunts placed to blast you with huge hitscan damage as you reach the top of an elevator. For all of their fancy AI, the thing that really makes the soldiers scary is how they are huge bullet sponges. Then there's all of Xen, just generally. Putting up with all of that was easier when I was still impressed by how great the guns and movement felt. In the wake of playing games like Doom, Quake, and Blood, Half-Life just doesn't feel that great anymore. It makes it harder to ignore the game's problems. Starting around Apprehension, the fun started to slip, and I found myself frustrated more regularly.
All that complaining aside, I still had a good time with it. With how few games commit to an unbroken experience, that aspect holds up. It really goes a long way to making Black Mesa feel more like a place than a series of levels, which is quite the accomplishment with how absurdly gamey Black Mesa's design is. While I'm not as impressed with the whole aresenal as I used to be, the Tau Cannon and Gluon Gun are still phenomenal. I was also surprised by how well the trip-mines functioned. I didn't remember using them much in the past, but they're great for dealing with Grunts, and I think that makes them the best mines in any single-player shooter I've played, since they have some utility. A lot of the levels are a ton of fun, especially early on, when the bullshit hasn't fully ramped up. Office Complex -> On a Rail is just a brilliant stretch of levels (and I still don't understand why people dislike On a Rail, I love that level).
It's still a great game, but I just can't see it as an unblemished masterpiece anymore. Its flaws are too obvious to me now.
I first got into PC gaming shortly after the release of Half-Life 2, and a lot of my early experiences on the platform were with the shooters of that era. When I went back to Half-Life 1, I was blown away. I liked it better than 2, and thought it was the best single-player FPS I'd played.
Fast forward a few years, and I fell into retro-shooters. Classic Doom, Build engine games, the growing wave of indie takes on the retro shooter. I love 'em. After playing all of those games and coming back to Half-Life, I'm realizing that what I loved about it had less to do with what Half-Life brought to the table, and more to do with the design elements from older games that it was still holding onto, like its fast movement, huge arsenal, and gamey platforming sequences.
Playing it now, my biggest takeaway is that the game is brimming with bullshit. You've got ambushes and traps that force trial-and-error gameplay (I remembered quite a few of them and still found it irritrating). Enemies screw you over with stuff like grunt bees hitting through walls, or vortigaunts placed to blast you with huge hitscan damage as you reach the top of an elevator. For all of their fancy AI, the thing that really makes the soldiers scary is how they are huge bullet sponges. Then there's all of Xen, just generally. Putting up with all of that was easier when I was still impressed by how great the guns and movement felt. In the wake of playing games like Doom, Quake, and Blood, Half-Life just doesn't feel that great anymore. It makes it harder to ignore the game's problems. Starting around Apprehension, the fun started to slip, and I found myself frustrated more regularly.
All that complaining aside, I still had a good time with it. With how few games commit to an unbroken experience, that aspect holds up. It really goes a long way to making Black Mesa feel more like a place than a series of levels, which is quite the accomplishment with how absurdly gamey Black Mesa's design is. While I'm not as impressed with the whole aresenal as I used to be, the Tau Cannon and Gluon Gun are still phenomenal. I was also surprised by how well the trip-mines functioned. I didn't remember using them much in the past, but they're great for dealing with Grunts, and I think that makes them the best mines in any single-player shooter I've played, since they have some utility. A lot of the levels are a ton of fun, especially early on, when the bullshit hasn't fully ramped up. Office Complex -> On a Rail is just a brilliant stretch of levels (and I still don't understand why people dislike On a Rail, I love that level).
It's still a great game, but I just can't see it as an unblemished masterpiece anymore. Its flaws are too obvious to me now.