by Dark & Unded
Friday June 18th, 2004
The original Half-Life made shockwaves on it's December 1998 release: the game won 50 "Game of the Year" awards and has since sold over 8 millions copies worldwide. The first game was followed up by two extremely successful expansion packs: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Many mods were made, such as the most popular online action title, Counter-Strike.
Developer: Valve Software's
Publisher: Sierra Entertainment
Released: December 1998
| (http://www.hlfallout.net/images/content/articles/features/full/hlgordon_full.jpg) image: http://www.hlfallout.net/images/content/articles/features/thumbnails/hlgordon_thumb.jpg
Gordon Freeman - 1998 style.
|
Welcome to the Black Mesa Federal Research Facility, a decommissioned missile base harboring a top secret project. A portal was opened to another dimension known as Xen, and science teams are being sent to this world for research.
You, as Gordon Freeman, a research associate in the Anomalous Materials Laboratory, have limited security clearance. You just don't know how dangerous your job has become until the day that you were sent into the Test Chamber to analyze a strange crystalline specimen.
You push the specimen into the beam as instructed but something goes horribly wrong. All that you hear are screams and explosions. You stand up to find that the Black Mesa Facility is now a total nightmare. Sirens are wailing all over the place and most of your co-workers from the science team are now lying dead on the floor.
Hordes of creatures are invading the complex. Your only option is to evacuate the facility, but this won't be an easy task. Creatures are lurking all over the place and most of the routes are impassably closed by the disaster.
| (http://www.hlfallout.net/images/content/articles/features/full/hlscreen_full.jpg) image: http://www.hlfallout.net/images/content/articles/features/thumbnails/hlscreen_thumb.jpg
The trick is getting out. Alive.
|
Your only option is to enlist the aid of the Scientists and the security guards. You will need to sneak pass high-security zones, sneak and fight your way through the ruined missile silos and the complex, in air ducts and subterranean railways.
Your enemies aren't only aliens. The government has sent in a force of marines to destroy all life on the facility — whether human or alien. Quickly realising the marines will never stop Gordon nor the alien hordes, the government dispatches a new class of military troops and assassins know as the Black Ops. Their ultimate objective: to see nothing gets out alive... especially not Freeman.
Your only option is to head towards the lambda sector and open the portal leading to Xen. You must destroy the monstrous Alien Controller known as Nihilanth.
After the confrontation, you lose consciousness and awake some time later in a train that appears to be flying through space. There you are posed an ultimatum by the mysterious blue-suited "G-Man": work for him or die.
Either way, the Xen invasion is just the beginning. Half-Life 2 picks up the story a decade later: the Black Mesa facility has been obliterated and the world is a very different place. The story continues on our HL2 story page (http://www.hl2fallout.com/html/story.php).
| (http://www.hlfallout.net/images/content/articles/features/full/dod_full.jpg) image: http://www.hlfallout.net/images/content/articles/features/thumbnails/dod_thumb.jpg
Outstanding mods like Day of Defeat have received official support from Valve.
|
Perhaps the most intriguing and engaging aspect of the original Half-Life is its mod-ability. While HL multiplayer and TFC kept Half-Life a dominant force in the world of online first person shooters, it wasn't long before modifications started creeping on to the scene. The most notable of any Half-Life modification is, of course, Counter-Strike (http://www.counter-strike.net). CS, a counter terrorism themed action mod, was created in the early days of the HL modding community (1999) and has continued to grow since then, though now in Valve's capable hands as an "official mod". CS isn't the only modification to hit it big, however. Day of Defeat (http://www.dayofdefeat.net/), a great World War 2 mod, is also an official Valve product and has seen great success.
| (http://www.hlfallout.net/images/content/articles/features/full/ns_full.jpg) image: http://www.hlfallout.net/images/content/articles/features/thumbnails/ns_thumb.jpg
"Unofficial" mods like Natural Selection and Sven Co-op keep the community playing.
|
Great mods don't have to be official, however. Natural Selection (http://www.natural-selection.org) is an amazing display of great game design and just how far a focused design team can take the aging Half-Life engine. For anyone who enjoys squashing some alien guts or chewing on a few space marines, this mod is definitely worth a look.
Some mods have provided functionality above and beyond the limits of the original Half-Life engine, and Natural Selection is a good example. Another would be a little mod called Sven Co-op (http://www.svencoop.com). Sven Co-op takes the original Half-Life universe and applies cooperative multiplayer gameplay to it, and the end result is: fun. This kind of ingenuity can be found throughout Half-Life's modding community, from mods like HL Rally (http://www.hlrally.net) all the way to less serious mods, like Rats-mod (http://www.rats-mod.net).
All in all, Half-Life's success is partly due to being a great game, and partly its amazing expandability and partly Valve's continued commitment to updates. We can only guess what kind of amazing modifications are in store for Half-Life 2, but there is no doubt that the quality will be high and the community extensive.Post comments @ http://www.hlfallout.net/comments.php?id=7430
—Dark & Unded, send feedback to mathieu.trudelle@gmail.com
Written for HL Fallout - http://www.hlfallout.net
