The Best Game For The Computer. Half Life!

Hello gamers! So, today we are going to write about Half Life 1 that was made by Valve. Yes, I know, it’s an amazing FPS (First Person Shooter) game and I’m going to thoroughly tell the story of it. So stay tuned!

Warning, spoilers ahead.

Half Life (1)

Half Life was released on 1998. I’m going to review the story, gameplay, graphics and a lot more!

The Story:

You start the game on a train Inside Balck Mesa Recearch Facility, located in New Mexico, where they do scientific researches (mostly quantum, dimensional traveling, and teleportation ). You are Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist who graduated on MIT and received a Ph.D. You are 27 years old. You are assigned to anomalous materials Laboratory although you are new at the job.

As you go on, on the train you can see that this facility contains a lot of high technology, like advanced robots and machines for the currently time (around the year 2000). Before you almost arrive to your destination, you will see a man on another train. A mysterious pale man in a dark bluish suit (They call him G-Man). You will see him, along the game and he will be an important character throughout the game even if only you see him once or twice.

Your train finally arrives at the destination, a guard opens the door of the train and tells you, that you are late for the job and opens the main door to the labs. After you are in, you see a bunch of doctors. The main security guard tells you to go to the test chamber where they were waiting for you for a half of an hour, but first you have to equip your HEV Suit

(Hazardous EnVironment suit). The guard also said that they were having some technical problems at the test chamber.

As you keep looking for your suit you see G-Man again talking to a doctor but you can’t understand what they are saying.

I believe this doctor is Eli Vance of Half life 2. But more on that later. The other man is G-man.

After you finally find your HEV suit, they grant you access to the test chamber. In here, the Black Mesa employees do research of samples they extract from the Xen world and study their species. The scientists reach Xen Border World by teleportation, like the specimen that live there did. Before you get to the test chamber you see two scientists worried about the system going critical and saying that they shouldn’t be doing the test. But nonetheless the test continues.

The Test Camber

At the test chamber they ask you to “start the rotors” wich you do and then a sample comes out and they ask you to put closer to the “scan” machine to analyze the sample. When you do this, everything starts to shake and lights start to appear out of no where! Then, you are teleported to the Xen world and back to the test chamber twice, where you see Vortigaunts and another species. It triggered a resonance cascade, wich means unstable portals between the Xen world and Black Mesa will start to appear!

When you are back, the test chamber is destroyed and pretty much everything around it. Most of your colleagues and everyone else at Black Mesa, are dead or injured. The rest are hiding, fleeing or being killed by Xen species. You then find the two doctors (who said the system was critical and they shouldn’t do the test) and they ask you to go to the surface to get help, so that’s what you do.

On your way, you find a crowbar. This will come handy to fight the Xen Species. You also find that the headcrabs are getting attached to the scientists skulls wich means they are killing them and then control their body. They then become like a zombie, attacking everyone in their way. As you continue you find a pistol from one of the dead guards. Everything is falling apart and you see xen creators everywhere, but you continue to find a way out.

Along the way you will find some “puzzles” in wich you will have to find your way. Like in this picture:

It seems everyone is trying to go to the surface of Black Mesa and you heard a scientist saying that some soldiers have arrived at Black Mesa to save them. You find a storage with a shotgun and lots of ammo and some grenades. Once the soldiers appear, instead of rescue you and your Black Mesa Team they start to kill everyone even trying to kill you. So now instead of fighting “only” Xen aliens you will also have to fight the government soldiers as well. Things are looking “promising”!

You find another scientist that tells you that there’s a possibility to stop the resonance cascade and It’s in the Lambda complex or Sector F of Black Mesa. So you are headed there. On your way you have to do some challenging puzzles and kill this Xen creatures:

You also find a Colt Python wich is like a revolver pistol. After this, You find a security guard that tells you that you have to launch a satellite so the Lambda team “could try to fix this mess”, wich means stopping the resonance cascade. You jump to your train and continue the trip fighting soldiers and vortigaunts.

You finally get to the satellite base and after you kill all the soldiers, you launch the rocket to the space orbit with success! After that you find another train and continue your journey, but you don’t go far, as you get ambushed by the soldiers that destroy

the rail and you fall deep in to the water. You then find another scientist that explains to you the rest of the way to Lambda Facility.

You finally think you reach the surface after killing some female assassins, only to be ambushed (and also captured this time) by the military government wich they knock you out and confiscate your weapons. When you wake up, you’re being dragged by two soldiers for questioning, but they decide to try to kill you before that.

You wake up between two walls pushing against each other, with you in the middle but you manage to escape and you find your crowbar. It looks like they put you in the residual wastes of Black Mesa and you will have to find your way back in.

After you find your way back and freeing some scientists from the soldiers, they warn you that everything up ahead is controlled by the military, but if somehow you manage to stay alive, you will finally reach the Lambda Complex, so you’re headed out there.

One of the military bases:

 

That helicopter will hunt you down along the way and make your life difficult until you find a rocket launcher and finally destroy it! You go ahead but you realize there’s more military bases. It seems some ships of the Xen aliens (wich are dropping vortiguants and alien grunts) are being teleported to our planet as well. It seems they want to make earth their new “home” and the more you move on, the more of them teleport.

You heard in the radio of one of the soldiers saying that they are abandoning the base and to “forget about freeman” because they will start to fire air strikes and command their soldiers to get out of Black Mesa!

You finally reach the Lambda Complex and a scientist tells you that the way that you came from was the only entrance of the Lambda facility still opened the other ones have been sealed off to contain the Xen aliens invasion. He also tells you that you need to activate a reactor to reach his colleagues because they are waiting for you on the Teleportation Labs.

After you activate the reactor you will then have to do a challenging puzzle with mini teleports to reach the science team. You find your way to the Teleportation Lab, and there is a scientist and a security guard there waiting for you. Then, they tell you that the Black Mesa team has been extracting materials from the world Xen before the incident and that the resonance cascade it’s being caused by a single being (but a powerful one) and can be stopped if you kill him. This being is called

Nihilanth. He is the one that’s sending all the creatures from Xen especially the Vortiguants (who are his slaves )and alien grunts to inhabitate on earth. They also give you access to a device that allows you to super jump, this can be useful on Xen. Once you are on the teleportation room, the same scientist is trying to open the portal to Xen, but some Xen creatures appear and trying to stop the portal to be open. After you kill the creatures, you then jump in to the portal to Xen World!

XEN WORLD

  • You continue to explore Xen to find Nihilanth but instead you find a giant headcrab wich is called Gonarch, and it’s her last phase of her life cycle. After you kill it, in a challenging fight, it destroys the ground below and you find a portal that takes you to a similar base you see in the image but full of ships with vortigaunts.
  • As you fight your way in, going through portal after portal and fight Nihilanth’s army (vortigaunts, alien grunts and alien controllers), you find one last portal different from the others, you decide to enter it and finally reach the Nihilanth’s lair.

He fires energy spheres and portals at you and can regenerate him self with some pillars on the wall. After you destroy them, it becomes easier, because he can’t regenerate anymore. He then, starts to get weak only firing one energy sphere at a time! You send the final blow above his head destroying the Nihilanth for good!

And then what hapends? Our paled friend G-Man appears saying that he confiscated your weapons for the time being, but you can keep the suite. He then tells you that the Xen world is “in our control” thanks to you. But you see in the background that, the military force seems to have failed to stop the alien invasion, because, a storm of portals happened on earth due to power Nihilant unleashed, after he died.

G-manG-Man

So all kinds of aliens were teleported to earth in that time. Like the Combine. But more on that later. G-man, then offers you a “job”, wich you don’t know anything about, also saying that if you don’t accept he will deliver to you a fight you can’t win. So it looks like you accept the job in the game Half Life 2, wich I will be reviewing on another article. It appears on your screen that you were hired for the job and G-Man “puts you to sleep”!

And that ‘s it for the story guys!

I really do think that the story is very captivating and well written. The mysterious G-Man character really became iconic between the fans. What is his purpose? It seems nobody knows the answer. And what happened to Freeman? I will explain better on my next Half life 2 article.

About the gameplay, I think it’s a bit difficult to understand the mechanics and also the game itself it’s a bit hard to beat. But that is what gives the game so much hype. It contains some bugs and glitches like the well-known “Gonarch’s Lair glitch” wich the Gonarch doesn’t go to the right way.

The graphics of the game are very good for an 1998-year game. I really like the environment of Black Mesa at the beginning and the Xen world is very well design as well. The puzzles are also very challenging wich is good.

So I do think this is the best game for the computer. I think you can agree that at least is one of the best old school PC games out there!

See for yourself. Play the game and then write in he comments below what you thought about the game

Without further ado I will “see” you on the next aricle, I hope you enjoyed my story review of Half life!

Bruno Santos, A.K.A Chester

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *