This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of articles, where we here at Dice of Doom look at old games, and see if they are really as good as we once thought.
Warning: this is a pretty long post. If you don’t want to read everything, just scroll through, scan the pretty pictures, and go to the Conclusions at the bottom.
Half-Life 1 was, indeed, a great move forwards in the First Person Shooter genre. But how does the gameplay hold up these days? I unearthed my copy, jumped through hoops to install it on 64 bit Vista, and started a new game.
Now, comparing graphics to more recent games, such as Half-Life 2 (which is beautiful beyond belief) is unfair; I don’t even have the Half-Life 1 HD pack, which greatly improved the graphics. Thus, unless there’s something specifically terrible or good, I completely ignored any graphical issues. I will particularly focus on highlighting game design issues which don’t occur in modern games because, well, the designers learnt from their mistakes and got better.
So, we begin. As a hardened gamer, capable of playing Halo on Legendary, I naturally chose Hard. My experience with Hard in Half-Life 2 has been good, so, why not? As a side note, you may notice that some screenshots have me with impossible amounts of health. Due to a technical difficulty, I started the game under a mod; I later resolved this, and restarted the game, but I still had some decent screenshots which I decided to use anyway.
As anyone who’s played Half-Life knows… I had to sit through a boring tram sequence. *sigh*. I won’t bore you with screenshots of it. I mean, sure, it shows off a few things, but was it really necessary? Half-Life 2 starts similarly, but they learned, and made it shorter, and gave you people to talk to. So, I ran around the tram, experimenting with how jumping didn’t keep your momentum from the tram.
Blah, blah, get HEV suit, blow up something in the microwave (an event referred to in HL2: Episode 2!), and create a world-shattering resonance cascade.
Eek. No, wait, I promised I wouldn’t comment on the graphics.
Okay. Some typical reasonably fun laser-dodging laser, and I run into a guy who tells me to run to the surface. HL2 later reveals him to be Dr Eli Vance. Anyway, I go forth, find a crowbar, and find…
AHH ZOMBIE! The first time I played Half-Life, I didn’t associate the thing on their head with the little mini aliens (the Headcrabs), and so I was very confused as to how they came to be. Fortunately, I know better, now.
Battling Half-Life zombies is pretty fun, as long as you don’t have to do it too much. They’ve got a fairly predictable attack pattern (which is different in HL2! I got hit a few times because of that), and it’s a nice little melee dance. Fun fun fun. Game’s going well so far.
So, I keep advancing. Then:
Jumping puzzle. Yeah. Okay. Fine. I started to remember that the end of the game also had tons of jumping puzzles. It’s really irritating: jumping is hard in First Person games because, well, you can’t see your feet. I remember HL2 has a few jumping puzzles, but nowhere near as cruel. *sigh* One day we’ll see an end to these silly things in First Person Shooters.
Anyway, past that, things are going fine. Then I run into something which is pet hate of mine. The very first time I encountered this in Half-Life, I thought it was a rope, to jump to and swing on. Big mistake.
AAAAAHHHHH. It’s a Barnacle! These things seriously scare me. In HL2, the improved graphics make them even scarier, so if I get caught, I literally CLOSE MY EYES, mash a button for a suitable weapon, aim up, and click fire as fast as I can.
Anyway, few actual problems with the gameplay so far. No sign of any good AI yet, but that’s to be expected: I haven’t come to the marines. As an aside, Vortigaunts (the green lightning-shooting aliens) do way too much damage on Hard, and they can’t miss. More on that later, though.
Things are going fine. I grab some more weapons, and marines start coming in to kill everyone. Yay! Then, I get confused. Look, it’s a trip mine! Scary scary! Pow pow pow!
Oh. Wait. That’s confusing. Strange laser coming out of the wall… oh, I remember! It activates sentry guns! I thought it was one of these:
Way to go on confusing design, people.
On the subject of trip mines, there’s at least one time in the game where setting off a single laser is instant death, due to, say, a room of explosives. This leads to an insanely hard jumping and dodging puzzle, and it doesn’t even make any sense for the mines to be placed like that. This hasn’t been solved in Half-Life 2: there’s a room of trip mine death, and it’s way too hard.
Nevertheless, I continue, to evaluate the AI. Heralded as fantastically awesome, the AI was meant to create intelligent enemies who worked together against you. It was nice at the time, but now, it’s not all it lived up to be. I was actually a bit disappointed.
The AI of the Marines is very predictable. If you can see them, they’ll duck in/out of cover, shooting, and occasionally throw a grenade. As soon as you duck behind cover, some of them will run straight for you, trying to get up close. If they’re injured enough, but not dead, then they will extremely frequently plant a grenade on the ground and run for it. Some gamers have never even seen this, because if you play differently they never hit the threshold Health value: if I used Pistol + Shotgun, I never saw it (they were either Alive or Dead), but if I used the SMG, it happened a LOT, because the small damage packets made it more likely they would be Nearly Dead. It was a bit difficult to get a screenshot, but here’s my best:
Planting:
Planted:
And that’s the AI. Really, that’s it. The marines also had a lot of trouble detecting if I was killing their buddies, even when I wasn’t very far away. To be fair, AI needs a lot of processing power, but the fact is, is HL AI is simply not as good as we thought at the time. Fortunately, the game doesn’t have an issue where the enemies simply don’t spawn before you reach a certain point (*cough*Call of Duty 4*cough).
On the bright side, there were a few neat scripted bits, which are pretty cool. Even today, games realise that scripted stuff is always going to be better than AI, so there’s tons in good modern games.
So, anyway, I kept going through the game. I started to realise something: there was a lot of needless repetition. For example, there are many situations where you have to backtrack through the same area, sometimes multiple times. This is a little irritating, and it also leaves you confused as to where to go next. However, the more problematic bit was the times that you had to do the same thing… for ages.
Yeah, the tram system. It’s fun at first, but this section of the game is huge! I got very sick of having to keep coming back to the bloody tram, solving problems to allow it continue.
“But wait”, you say. “Half-Life 2 has pretty long and repetitive vehicle sequences, which follow a similar concept!” Ah, well, yes. But the outdoor environment, which is constantly changing, coupled with freedom of motion and a GUN mounted on the vehicle, make these bits a lot more interesting. Plus, you get to run over people. Basically, they took the same concept, and made it good.
Lets keep going… and we find some really annoying design choices.
I got extremely lost in several sets of vents, which was just annoying. I remember getting stuck in the vents in the past.
Now this: it’s is a black ops assassin.
Note the near-invisibility: that’s Hard difficulty for you. The problem with these is they’re meant to be an intelligent battle which tests your ability to engage a skirmisher. However, it’s simply too hard. I managed to win this one with a quick crossbow shot, but there’s a similar battle later where I simply had to use explosives, and exploit my knowledge of their starting locations. They backflip away if you come too close, they’re invisible when they’re not shooting you, and when they are shooting you, they do crazy damage. Hard it good… too hard is bad. I recall these battles being much more fun on lower difficulties.
What’s worse, is what comes next.
As soon as you finish this battle, some marines knock you unconscious and steal all your weapons. Everything. The game is hard enough that I had been carefully hoarding ammo, and always making a trade-off between ammo and health in each battle. Suddenly… I have nothing.
This wouldn’t be too bad… but the next thing you have to do is run a gauntlet of hazardous waste pits, likely reducing your health to quite low. Then, before you have any access to healing, you have to climb a ladder right into a huge group of Houndeyes. I had a total of 4 bullets, and less than 30 Health. I eventually had to go back to the beginning of the chapter and try again. This time, found a couple of explosive packs hidden to the side somewhere, so I came to the fight with ~50 Health, 5 bullets, and 1 detpack. The detpack was enough to see me through: I chucked it up, ran back down the ladder, and detonated it. Moving back up, I shot my bullets then finished off the last one with my crowbar.
This was a bad encounter design. The shear fact that I had to restart the whole chapter was terrible. If they’d just placed a Health station and a few bullets before this fight, it would have solved a lot of problems.
Anyway, continuing along…
Must comment on graphics. Too terrible. Note the plane.
It went fine for a while, but then, as I approach the end of the Earth parts of the game, it got bad.
First was a huge encounter with Vortigaunt. Basically, the designers forgot one huge thing: enemies which respawn are not fun. No. Really not. Especially when they respawn, quite frequently, during a battle… and the place they’re respawning is where you have to get to. Combine this with the enemy being Vortigaunts, which, as I commented earlier, do way too much damage and never miss. Not fun.
Them, the Teleporter lab: huge gameplay offender. Basically, it’s almost completely impossible to go through the whole section without dying several times. You try a portal, die, and then work out the correct one through trial and error. Yeah. Being force to die ain’t fun.
Next one: a blocked hallway. You walk into a corridor, and you see the roof collapse.
Why is this a problem? Because the message sent to the player, through this process of tunnel-collapsing, is: “this is a puzzle, you have to find another way around”. This same concept was used earlier in the game. So what’s the problem? Well, after half an hour of wandering around, I finally noticed that you can actually get through the rubble! This is ridiculous! The poor game design just wasted half an hour of my life!
It’s not looking that good, is it? No, it’s not.
By this stage, it was kind of a tie. There were some pretty good things earlier, but the slew of irritating encounters was having an effect on me. I just wanted to hurry up and finish the game.
On to Xen, then.
OMG! Freaking unbelievable! Oh, well, sure, I knew it was coming, I remembered from last time, but that’s not the point. Half of the Xen section is jumping puzzles. On particularly annoying section forces you do a jumping puzzle whilst under fire from the Vortigaunts of green lightning doom, and took me a good half hour to get past, and it wasn’t fun. Just… no.
Still, Xen did make some very good design choices. Apart from some decent encounters, they did this:
It’s a healing pool. You sit in it… and get healed. The factory section has showers which do the same. This was fantastic: the game had stopped punishing me for making a slight mistake and getting hit by a Vortigaunt. This basically made up for the inadequate healing for the entire rest of the game. Even so, later games (HL2, for example) are overall a lot better at ensuring you get healed after each tough encounter.
Actually, once I got past the jumping puzzles, Xen was pretty fun.
One thing which caught me out the first time I played this level (years ago) was I had not stockpiled enough ammo to take down the bosses. There’s a pretty limited supply of it, you go through ammo pretty, and if you reach the final boss without enough ammo, you have to traipse through little sub-levels gathering rockets, which takes you away from the fight. Fortunately, I remembered to bring basically a full load of explosives. However, this was a bit annoying last time, and I think the game would have been better if the final boss (Nihilanth) hadn’t shot those silly teleportation balls, and the ammo had been around the extremities of it’s cave, instead of in sub-levels.
And (go go nonsensical plot):
Conclusions
Well, it was definitely an experience. So, overall, how does the game really hold up? Well, let us look at it all:
The good:
- Excellent assortment of enemies: just as you start to get bored of one, they swap them out for new foes. Foes scale nicely with your available weapons. Late-game enemies (Grunts, for example) are strong enough that you actively avoid fighting them, and try to think of ways to trap or outflank them.
- Good range of weapons: whilst a few (trip mines) are pretty useless, the Hive Gun is excellent, helping with late-game ammo problems (it has infinite ammo). Also, the high-powered guns (tau cannon, gluon gun) give some oomph to get through tough encounters later in the game.
- Mostly good level design. The designers made good use of the limited resources, and whilst most of the game looks pretty similar, they did a good job of making it feel different. The Lambda complex (late-game) feels quite different to earlier areas.
- Most of the game is pretty fun.
- Some clever or interesting puzzles.
The bad:
- AI a disappointment. It’s simply not as good as people thought at the time. The AI doesn’t hold up to today’s games.
- As shown above, there are a lot of simple problems which game designers have gotten better at avoiding.
- Too much backtracking. Got lost way too often.
- Distribution of ammo and health irritating at times.
- Outdoor areas almost all terrible. I know the graphics were limited, but there were simply too many blank rock walls.
- On all max settings, the game occassionally lagged. Note that the test computer is brand new, with 4 GB RAM, and a good processor and graphics card.
The interesting:
- Nonsensical storyline still nonsensical
- I thought there was a bit where you got to shoot down a helicopter. As soon as I got the rocket launcher, it ran away.
- This blog post is a bit under 2700 words.
Overall Conclusion
Half-Life 1 is still alright, but it’s just not as fun as Half-Life 2, even without accounting for the graphics. Even so, its effect on the gaming world will never be forgotton.
Side note:
One of these days, mod Black Mesa will be released. It’s a mod for Half-Life2, still in development, which will bring Half-Life 1 to the Half-Life 2 engine, with update graphics and gameplay. Although, it’s been in development for ages… I suppose it’ll get released one of these days. Should be good.
Similar Posts:
