Fun With Fractions

About that beer I owe you,

Tonight's topic is a little game called Half-Life. I know most of you out there in reader-land have never heard of it, but that has never stopped me before, now has it?

When talking about the best and most influential FPSes of all time, HL often comes up. Hell, when discussing the best and most influential games of all time, it is almost inevitably mentioned. That's quite a reputation, you might say. How well can this Half-Life actually hold up when separated from all the hype, you might continue. How much of my salary can I donate to dkaufman so that he may continue playing and writing about games for a living, you go on to wonder.

Released in 1998, HL was something of an oddity. FPS norm was generally things of the DOOM or Quake persuasion: level-based blastfests that required little thought to complete. Sure the fragging was good, but the industry was changing. Goldeneye had come out a year earlier and revolutionized console first person shooters with its emphasis on stealth, mission objectives (and multiplayer, but I'm not here to discuss Counter-Strike.) Gamers were ready for something more.

Enter Valve Software's first effort, Half-Life. Running on a hybrid Quake/Quake2 engine, it was a game unlike most anything that had come before. Rather than some buff space marine, you play as Gordon Freeman, a 27 year old physicist/nerd/stand-in for the geeks who would inevitably play and love it. He has recently been transferred to Black Mesa, a top secret military research facility in the middle of a New Mexican desert. Showing up late to an experiment, you accidentally open a portal to another dimension, allowing ravenous creatures to pour through and feast upon the delicious brains of scientists scattered throughout the complex.

In all honesty, the plot itself is not spectacular; it is really nothing more than B-movie drivel. Yet, it is one of the most talked about aspects. Why? This is because the story-telling was revolutionary when it came out. In a time when games boasted about how many hours of cutscenes they contained and Final Fantasy VII sold a bazillion copies for a few short CGI sequences, HL bucked the trend by having none. You are never taken out of Gordon's perspective or forced to watch ten minutes of people talking. The story is never really forced on you; most everything is felt and implied. The opening tram ride is perfect for giving players a feel of what is coming, hinting without ever giving away. When the military shows up, you know their mission is to silence those who have seen the creatures because you might witness them shooting a scientist in the back. If you are attentive, there is a lot to pick up on and ponder over. This drives some people, who have no patience for nuance or subtlety, crazy. However, it is very effective at setting the atmosphere and overall effect of "you vs. the world."

Black Mesa serves as the backdrop to your fight for survival. Rather than being broken into levels, it is one massive interconnected game environment. This helps add some realism and plausibility to the entire experience; it is not some abstract version of hell, neatly broken into stages with a different colored key separating each.

Mood and atmosphere are very important to HL. Black Mesa is in appropriate disarray, with plenty of leaking radioactive waste, screaming scientists, crumbling catwalks and the like. Ammo and health are not found in random locations, floating in midair, but instead are in armories or near the bodies of less fortunate souls. The soundtrack is very sparse, only coming in to accentuate a particular discovery or enhance an intense battle. All of these elements combine to create an appropriately creepy and somber game.

This is not always the case. Early on, I was surprised by the gore in the game, which seemed rather campy. There was never enough of it to be realistic, but still more than was necessary. I suppose this is a byproduct of the time period, but after beating a body repeatedly with a crowbar, I don't expect the body to explode and leave behind only a skull and and a rib. I thought it was kind of jarring and out of place at first, but then I realized that the game is more sly than I gave it credit for. However atmospheric and intense some of the game is, there is definitely a satiric undercurrent throughout. Valve is aware that they have created the equivalent of a 50's sci-fi horror movie, regardless of how immersive it may be. The various scientists and security guards you happen upon are pretty much parodies of similar characters in movies or TV. Or they might just be thinly veiled stereotypes. You decide!

Enemy AI deserves a mention, as it is impressive. Each of the various creatures you encounter has its own attack style and personality. Some attack all the time, some retreat when not in a group, some are blind and seek you by the sound you make. You can even get some of the different enemies to fight each other, which is always entertaining. The variety helps keep gameplay fresh. The tactics the soldiers use can be particularly impressive and devious at times, taking cover, flanking and using grenades to flush you out. I still have nightmares about the ninja assassins encountered later in the game.

All is not well in the land of Half-Life however. The biggest gameplay gripe I had was the platforming, of which there is quite a bit. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark have proved that FPSes do not need a jump button. While some of this hopping kind of makes sense in the context of the setting, it isn't nearly as polished as a game like Metroid Prime or Jumping Flash. Some areas were made unnecessarily frustrating by a plethora of environmental hazards that needed precision control to navigate.

Towards the end of the game, there are some parts with infinitely spawning enemies. This is never a fun design choice, especially in the platform heavy sections and ammo is scarce.

Some people complain about the game's linearity, which is not a gripe I understand. Does anyone complain that Super Mario Brothers is linear? Or Metal Gear Solid? Or God of War? Sure, it kind of sucks that any event you witness is planned in advance and will happen every time you trip the trigger, but it is a viable solution working within the constraints of 1998's PC technology. This is especially true with the lack of overt cinematics.

The middle of the game drags a bit, particularly the entire "On a Rail" portion. That little cart just isn't fun for any length of time and if you abandon it the game restricts your movement. What is the point? The whole thing is slow and boring and the game would do better without it.

What really broke the experience for me was the ability to quicksave. It utterly destroyed any semblance of challenge as I could walk into an ambush, die, restart and approach it, instantly save, try a few strategies and take the attempt that expends the least health and ammo. It was like using a save state. There are better ways of recording progress than giving the player that much power. It seems like an easy way out, rather than implementing a thought out system.

So, at the end of the day, is Half-Life the amazingly awesome game it has hyped up to be? Of course not, no game ever is. It was probably a lot more impressive if played back when it was released, but its influence cannot be denied. A pretty good FPS in its own right, genre fans definitely should give it a look. Additionally, if you are interested in gaming history, HL should not be missed.

Quite a nasty piece of work you managed over there,
Gman

Puzzling Problems

Woohoo, first blog post. I’ll try to write this so that it isn’t too embarrassing when I become famous (a process I’m willing to give another three years to develop). I’ve been a loyal reader of JDiH almost since it first began, so I’m really excited about this opportunity.

I recently played through Half-Life 2: Episode One. I was attracted to the oversized DVD case on a shelf in a North Carolina GameStop for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to see if some of those Source mods are all they’re cracked up to be, and I was under the false impression that Episode One was a cheaper way to get the engine (Half-Life 2 is actually now the same price as Episode One). Second, I have a fetish for experiencing stories out-of-sequence. I think it started when I saw Return of the Jedi before A New Hope and solidified when I chose to read The Silver Chair before The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I bought the game, which is rated M, and I was carded for first time in my life and found that totally hilarious when I was a block away and realized why she had asked me for ID (I had paid in cash, so it wasn’t that other reason).

I probably don’t have to tell our readers that the game is good, albeit short. We’ve all already heard about that. This isn’t a review of the game, but some thoughts about game design in general that were raised for me as I crowbared and gravity gunned my way through enemies and puzzles.

Puzzles. In a way the term seems to me too broad to single-out any particular feature of game design. After all, isn’t gameplay always about figuring out what to do to effect the desired result? Are King Koopa’s patterns of jumping, breathing fire, and tossing hammers not a puzzle? When my little brother goes for ultralisks three Starcraft matches in a row, is he not challenging me to solve the puzzle to stop the pwnage?

On to sharpening the term into something useful. While there is always some element of "figuring out" involved in playing a game, some challenges are set aside as "puzzles," and furthermore, some games are categorized as "puzzle games." Should I really be using so many shudder quotes? Generally, they are a sign of n00bliness, but I think these are warranted. My first thought for a definition of puzzle is that they are the less action-packed challenges. This was my experience with the puzzles in Resident Evil 4, but the definition doesn’t account for fast-paced puzzle games like Tetris. As I try to nail down what we mean by a puzzle in a game, I see endless variety that refuses to stand under one umbrella. Sometimes you know what you want to do but not how, sometimes you know what means are at your disposal but not what you are supposed to do with them. Puzzles can be obvious side shows or fall completely within the mechanics of the rest of the rest of the game. I am tempted to say that puzzles are those a challenges that have one definite solution, a quality that sets them apart from such obstacles as an AI-controlled enemy, which can be beaten in an infinite number of ways. However, great puzzles have multiple solutions and beating many AIs boils down figuring out how they tick a la simple puzzles.

This brings me to another point, which is the realism of Half-Life 2, even running the game at a lower resolution than it can be, I felt like I was there, in those corridors and windowless death traps. It was stunning, which made me all the more agitated when my creative solutions to various puzzles (I can use a word even if I can’t figure out what it means. . . what? stop looking at me like that) didn’t pan out because of cracks in that realism. Not every object was counted as an object by the engine, for instance.

Is Half-life 2 a bold step toward the perfect realistic, absorbing shooter, or does it merely cut a little closer to an unbreakable limit in game design? No matter how many solutions Valve could think of and program into the game, gamers would think of more which wouldn’t work. Is it possible to break that limitation and create a far more open-ended game in the spirit of Half-Life? I hope so, because I would totally play that game.

As for my little tussle with the word "puzzle," if any of my esteemed colleagues or one of our devoted readers could enlighten me as to what sets a puzzle apart from other challenges in games, I would be delighted to hear about it. I have some other thoughts about puzzles I plan to discuss at some point, and frankly, I’d like to know what they are.

Signing off not as creatively as dkaufman,

me