64Digits

Half-Life (half-bad)

Posted by death on July 20, 2012, 9:25 p.m.

Am i seriously the only one who thinks Half-Life is an extremely over-rated game? I bought the game, thinking "gamers can't be this wrong, it's almost got perfect scores all around, it's the 2nd highest rated game on Steam!" and after playing through almost all of it in a short amount of time, i am incredibly disappointed by this Quake rip-off.

this game has no quality what so ever. it is incredibly buggy. I've had to restart whole levels due to glitches with doors and dialogue, I wasn't able to continue during some of these glitches. no choice but to restart a level? how does this shit get over looked?

The movement just isn't right here either. If it's anything i hate, it's First Person Platforming. You walk too fast to be jumping off of narrow/thin platforms and it always feels like your slipping on ice when you land. Timing and landing a jump is difficult as well. These sections feel so random, as if they've been thrown together for no real reason at all. It's a ton of shooting, than outta nowhere, it's jumping on pipes and ducking under electrical wires.

The combat is flawed as well. There isn't a lot of ammo but there are a ton of soldiers. Man that was random. at first it was a scary horror themed game where you're killing monster/aliens and than it's a shootemup with Tanks and shit.

I'm gonna pin this up as being outdated. Standards have changed. Half Life came out in 1998 and was made on the Quake engine. Valve was still young and they have defiantly improved over the years. Maybe people back in 1998 thought this game had great graphics or presentation, it was also back when FPS games were still blooming. Nowadays we've got way too many of them and so people get a little picky about their shooters.

Do keep in mind, i'm talking about Half Life only, not Half Life 2, or any of the episodic games or spin offs. Since i bought the whole collection (it was on sale so no big loss) I still have to play the other HL games. HOPEFULLY Half Life 2 is better... but i have been fooled before…

p.s. Bioshock sucks too. [/ranting]

Holy shit 10 days left! I'm ……………………… not sure if i can finish in time [-_-]

EDIT: also i feel i should say, i'm not completely bashing the game, i'm just stating that it's not a masterpiece at all. it's not even what i would consider great (imo) but it's also not the worst game ever. I can play it but i'm not enjoying it much.

Comments

Praying Mantis 12 years, 5 months ago

God…. Toast, when did you start being such an egotistical and uncouth debater? You're usually well learned and well spoken on most issues, but in this instance you don't seem to understand (or you disregard) subjectivity.

Toast 12 years, 5 months ago

I've already said several times that he's entitled to not like the game, and there's no point trying to convince him otherwise. That about sums up subjectivity as far as I'm concerned.

I don't however accept the idea that's its fundamentally bad or overrated, as there's evidence to support the contrary. Of course the game has dated and it can't compare to modern games, but it does not change its importance. F1ak3r makes a good point - we're so used to the type of games that Half-Life pioneered that it's now less enjoyable than it deserves to be.

I must admit I wrote these comments alot quicker than I usually do, which was probably a bad idea. What might appear egotistical or uncouth is just me being blunt and to the point.

Praying Mantis 12 years, 5 months ago

I was mostly calling you out on comments like these:

Quote:

Half-Life was the best FPS ever until Half-Life 2 came out.

Then it was the second best FPS ever.

And it still is.

Fuck you.

Quote:

Feel free to enlighten us. Tell us which FPS games you think are better. So we can laugh at you.

Quote:

Of course it is. Because it is.

Quote:

your last paragraph is just plain wrong. It is not up to you to decide whether or not Half-Life is a masterpiece. Half-Life is a masterpiece

But that aside, I quite simply think that Half-Life was really fun and original in its own right, but made difficult to play because of its flaws. The game was quite inspirational and revolutionary, but the quality of art is contextual; just because it was good doesn't mean it is destined to stay good. A product can be marred by it's legacy, and even if that cannot be helped, it does detract from the enjoyability of the experience.

Toast 12 years, 5 months ago

I stand by the last one.

The others ones are just me trying to be satirical but coming across as an ass

Cesque 12 years, 5 months ago

Quote:

aliens and hi-tech shit? how is there no comparison to be had? It's obvious they were heavily influenced by Quake. Did they do some things different? of course, but it isn't exactly the most original game ever. Also i don't think it has this grand deep story either, it has a little introduction and than it's shooting the rest of the game. not really all that different than Quake. (only quake doesn't even bother with the intro)

Wait, everything that has aliens is influenced by Quake now? That's odd, seeing how Quake didn't even have aliens and had very little hi-tech shit (Doom had more).

I think you're confusing graphical similarity (because of the limitations of the era) with influence. That's like saying Final Fantasy 6 is inspired by Metal Slug because both use pixelated sprites, etc, etc.

I like how Toast pretty much repeated my comment point by point probably without reading it first. just goes to show what people remember as original and interesting about HL1.

Quote:

.. what difference does it make? oh so you get extra credits if you do something other games did but in a different perspective? woooow very impressive.

Yes, that actually is very impressive. You have to change a lot of things to make certain ideas work in a completely different perspective - look at all the 3d platform flops for examples of how it could go wrong.

Apart from the outro, Half-Life doesn't have dialogue and cutscenes. Making FPS cutscenes was pretty difficult back in the day, and HL managed to show all the events you can't have an impact on without wrestling the control away from the player at any point.

Half-Life doesn't stop the game to show you a random scene of a scientist getting killed by dropping down from a broken elevator. You just climb a ladder to get to the said elevator and when you're halfway there, you see him scream and fall and go splat. I still remember that leaving an impression on me the first time I played it.

In other words, I think death is perfectly entitled to his opinion, but his arguments make very little sense to me and I'm not sure standards would he use to judge a game as "original", "impressive" or "fun".

death 12 years, 5 months ago

Quote:

i don't think i would use the word "judge" when it comes to an experience i had. I didn't have fun with the game, that's what i felt, not just what i thought. One thing i've noticed in reviews is that game reviewers tend to review about how they felt about a game, rather than being critical about the game's aspects. (much like good movie critics)

I'd say that's how Skyrim got such good reviews. It feels great for a while, same with Minecraft, but after the excitement dims, you start to notice all sorts of annoyances and problems. The game might actually be a technical mess or utilize impractical mechanics.

Quote:

www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/

i see what happened there. i type pretty fast and since the spell check didn't highlight it, i didn't notice i spelled a different word altogether.

now i'm off to go play as a 9 year-old girl in Fortune Summoners! [:D]

Juju 12 years, 5 months ago

Quake ripped off Lovecraft, for pete's sake. And it kinda rips off Doom as well (which is unsurprising given they were made by the same company). It's really hard to be innovative in terms of message - freshness and originality comes from a story's exposition. Half-Life was a story, Quake and previous run-and-gun FPSs simply weren't. That alone means "Half-Life was a good game."

In 1994, Looking Glass Tech released the original System Shock. It was a first-person game with combat and a story and great voice acting and fantastic graphics for the time. It grabbed you by the balls and didn't let go. The reason people have virtually forgotten about SS1 is that its market was so much smaller. The PC, by 1998, had doubled in number from 1993 (source) and was being used in the home rather than at work. The were simply more people able to play Half-Life.

Half-Life remains influential as an expositional touch-stone and a landmark in gaming because a) it was good and b) lots of people played it. Many things gamers take for granted now were popularised - not invented - by Half-Life. That's enough to make it important for the FPS genre.

Re bugs: Dude, get over it. Games have bugs. Part of the problem will be that you're playing a very old game on new hardware. Furthermore, games nowadays have just as many bugs as they used to - they're simply bodged up quicker.

Finally, F1ak3r is spot on with SeinfeldIsUnfunny. Take a read of this (take the extremity of some of the statements with a punch of salt, mind) or this. An interesting game is Ghen War, an FPS in full 3D that pre-dates Quake.

colseed 12 years, 5 months ago

Quote: SeinfeldisUnfunny-VideoGames

Half-Life, being the first modern, highly scripted first person shooter with adaptive AI, now seems somewhat typical after being endlessly copied, ripped off and modified by just about every first person shooter that came after it.

when placed in the context of this blog/ensuing comments, lol

(interesting link-reads there though)

Juju 12 years, 5 months ago

Whilst I'm here, Ground Control 2 was/is woefully underrated. Tempest 3000 as well. And Crash Bandicoot 1 and Spyro 3.

Toast 12 years, 5 months ago

I love Crash Bandicoot. People who say that all 3D platformers copy Super Mario 64 don't realise that Crash Bandicoot came out only a couple of months afterwards.

IMO it's also aged much better. I still play it.