Somehow, it has been 20 years since the release of Half-Life. Which means, I guess, that it has been almost 20 years since a friend came back one night to the student house we were all renting and told me about this amazing game he had played. A first-person shooter - did we call them that back then? - in which, for the opening section at least, you did no shooting.
Instead, you...what? You rode a tram to work in a secret test facility deep inside some kind of mountain in the desert. For whole minutes you just sat and watched as the world went past. No goblins running at you, no demons invading and popping out of one monster closet after the other. It was like one of those films, my friend explained. It was like Total Recall, where you get to see Arnie going about his day in the near future. Except it wasn't like a film, because it didn't cut at all: it was like a video game, all first-person, all inside someone's head, behind the eye sockets, but a video game that was doing some of the same purely world-building stuff you often got in the really lavish sci-fi films.
20 years later, I have played Half-Life. I have played Half-Life 2, and the episodes and stuff like Portal with its teasing glimpses of the Half-Life universe. More than playing the games, it feels like I have spent the time waited for them. Has any series been as well named as Half-Life, as perfectly primed to measure the slow decay of hope? Anyway, I waited like we all did, through the anticipation stoked by that early Edge reveal of Half-Life 2, then the first glimpses of this impossible game in which everything was not just graphics but physics, a world you could pick up and throw about. Waited as the gaps between episodes grew longer. Returned to oddities like The Lost Coast, still my favourite Half-Life, if I'm being honest, due to its compactness, its sense not even of being a short story in the Half-Life universe but a few perfect paragraphs cut off from the main narrative. I even read through that transcript of what Episode 3 would have been and realised: of course they couldn't release this, because good as the twist is, after all that waiting it is not enough and could now never be enough.
from Eurogamer.net https://ift.tt/2DQfIdF
https://ift.tt/2BnA5wf November 20, 2018 at 02:03PM https://ift.tt/2CT6urR
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