Let’s Play Half Life!
The original Half Life is a veritable classic and strongly showed what was possible in both the first person shooter genre as well as just solid sci-fi storytelling in videogames.
It’s not as effective today as it tends to have been left behind in favor of more expansive but similar games, but given that this came out in 1998(ish) it was a bit of a groundbreaker and took the industry by storm.
Let’s Play Half Life:
As fondly as I remember playing this game, it’s one of those games which didn’t translate to a good let’s play for me. I prefer my let’s plays I do, particularly those of games I’ve beaten in the past, to be relatively efficient. Not just in the recording mind you but in the play itself. I don’t want to go out of my way to have to pause the video and chop and edit later on.
This was a game I had to really put my hardhat on for in the post stage and coupled with the fact that it was longer and more difficult than I remembered, it was a frustrating LP which is disappointing given how much I loved it growing up.
The difference is it’s one of those games when you’re a kid that you don’t mind rolling up your sleeves for, figuring out the puzzles and hacks in your own time, and feeling satisfaction when you put it all together to beat it.
As an adult when you just want to knock it out, yeah that wasn’t happening.
And I didn’t even take down a helicopter! That was the coolest thing when I did that as a kid. I figured the helicopter was just windowdressing, part of the scenery and not something you could really interract with to the point of destroying it with a grenade launcher.
I felt a bit blue balled on this one, a lot of it just missed the mark. And points where you’d be running around aimlessly to find where you were meant to go next because it wasn’t linear enough for my liking (when it’s really the most obvious thing compared to bigger games of today). Grr.
Enough complaining, though. Still a revolutionary classic and I was glad to finally tackle it on my list of games I have to play through as the owner of a let’s play channel.
Plus that ending gets you geared up for Half Life 2 which I never played, with joining up with the creepy thin man. What does it mean!? What’s next for Gordon Freeman?
That’s a retorical question, of course. I’ll find out for myself in HL2 when that inevitably comes down the pike.