Want to know what Half-Life 1’s like, but can’t be bothered to play it? I did it for
you. Took 5 and a half hours. The game starts with this famous train ride,
down into the heart of the Black Mesa facility. I didn’t play the game when it first came
out because I wasn’t allowed a PC and only had a playstation at the time, but perhaps
that helped me to appreciate the significance of this game. Before this point, games comprised
of corridors filled with enemies to shoot. I always longed to have friendly NPCs- or
at least, ones who weren’t trying to kill you. And scripted scenes were something of
a luxury before this point, yet here Half-Life was, adding them to almost every room!
It’s nice that they throw people into most of these scenes to let you get a sense of
scale with these environments. I almost missed him, but you can see the g-man
watching you from this train carriage. You’ll notice him a lot throughout this game, peering
down at you from balconies and such. Here it says that Gordon Freeman is 27. I
always saw him as older than me, and that’s why he’s such a genius. Now he’s younger
than me and I’m wondering how he became such a genius at that age.
I always thought this was Barney, who you see return in Half-Life 2. But apparently
the real Barney is the one you see at the start of the train sequence and the rest of
them are just ‘security guards’, which explains why they all die in such horrible
ways when they’re in my company. Spoiler alert.
‘Morning Mr Freeman, looks like you’re running late. Beep beep beep beep’
Yes, he’s making the beep sounds with his mouth.
Even though you’re free to explore, there’s a sense of urgency and forboding, first in
the fact that you’re late for work, and second because there’s been some kind of
system crash that morning that they’re recovering from. Oh and third, there’s an experimental
test you’re about to take part in which is making the scientists nervous.
I got stuck in the wall in this scene and had to noclip out.
‘Hi Mr Freeman, I had a bunch of messages for you but we had a system crash about 20
minutes ago and I’m still trying to find my files.’
‘MY GOD STOP! What are you doing?! Come on Gordon, you trying to get me into trouble??’
You can see the G-man speaking to a scientist in this room, but it’s unclear what it’s
about. There are lovely little touches, like getting
cans from the vending machines and blowing up the food in the microwave, which upsets
a scientist. ‘‘MY GOD, what are you doing?!’
The names around the locker-room are from developers who worked on the game.
‘Ah hello, Gordon Freeman, it’s good to see you!’
This is where you get your HEV suit, allowing you to pass on through to the test chamber.
‘Welcome to the HEV mark 4 protective system.’ You head down a series of corridors and elevators
until you get briefed on today’s scientific test and it’s clear they’re pushing the
machine too far and there’s a very slight chance of a catastrophic resonance cascade
event happening. ‘Ah Gordon, there you are, we just send
the sample down to the test-chamber.’ ‘We boosted the anti-mass spectrometer 105%’
‘It’s about to go critical! It wasn’t meant to do this in the first place.’
‘Gordon, we have complete confidence in you.’
*EXPLOSION* ‘OH DEAR! GORDON!!!’
It’s not like I’m going to show all of this game in such depth, but the slow-moving
build-up was one of the things that made it special at the time.
So, the disasterous Resonance Cascade has occurred and you’ve got to retrace your
steps through Black Mesa to reach the surface in search of help, of which the scientists
are sure is coming. ‘Thank God for that hazard suit! Get to
the surface as soon as you can and let someone know we’re stranded down here.’
This is when you have your first encounters with the enemy aliens who have teleported
into this world- though it’s kept easy. The first time you see one it can’t get
to you, the second time it’s easy to run past and so on.
After some laser-dodging, you get your crowbar for the first time and then it’s up the
lift shaft to face your first zombie. *Screams*
But at least for now, you have help from a security guard. I say help, but the number
of times these guys shot me throughout this campaign I started to wonder whose side they
were on. Valve realised that players liked friendly NPCs, and began to appreciate their
company. So much so that they’d end up feeling bad if they died.
But I needed a gun and he had one, so…
There are some awesome scripted events in these first few levels, I’ll showcase a
few of them here as they perfectly show the stages of a headcrab attack and how it transforms
people into zombies. I’m hoping Half-Life Alyx will depict the same thing in some way.
As a child, these levels were pretty creepy.
Injured guy crawls towards healing station but doesn’t quite get there, but it does
at least point the player to it and hints at its function. I always saw this as a sad
story of the guard not quite getting there, but looking back at it, this kind of intuitive
tutorial was ahead of its time, in an era when most games would just drop you in a level
and expect you to get on with it. It’s the same easy, slow-building approach
that they’ve done with Half-Life Alyx. Only with that game they’ve received criticism
for ‘dumbing the series down for novices’. Oddly enough nobody seemed to notice back
here in Half-Life 1. So now you have to fight against Houndeyes,
which rush towards you and let off damaging shockwaves unless you kill them quickly.
And just a few rooms on you encounter your first Vortigaunt, who are actually friendly,
but are controlled by a suit they wear that forces them to attack Gordon.
‘No! I don’t wanna die-‘ You go into the pipes to raise the water level…
…go on a dank funicular ride where you get attacked by dozens of headcrabs, in a sequence
that’s perhaps more comedic than it has any right to be. If you think the headcrabs
are a bit… sexual, there’s a reason for this. Gabe Newell thought these kinds of creatures
would be the sort of monsters that adolescent boys would be disgusted by. The end.
In the next room you encounter your first bullsquid, which has enough time to spit acid
at you before collapsing the walkway and falling to its death down the pit below.
But through the vents, you come across one in a large room and must shoot it from a distance.
And you can make out your first barnacle monsters dangling from the ceiling. You next have to
swim through this water, so shooting them now will make it just that little bit easier.
These barnacle monsters suck you up and then chew on your face unless you shoot them in
time, in which case they drop you instead. This first encounter has been made easier
in 2 ways- firstly, the ceiling is high, so you have plenty of time to shoot them if they
get you. And second, since they’re above water, when they drop you after they’re
shot you won’t sustain fall-damage. Get through that room, and you finally get
to this. I’ll just let it be known that the movement in Half-Life 1 is more slide-y
than you get in modern games, which makes these kinds of platform sequences more difficult.
What kind of place is Black Mesa?!
Here, your first goal is to disable the electricity to let you safely pass down the corridor.
I’ll skip through this chapter quickly, because although it’s full of awesome moments,
but doesn’t really do anything new. It’s the same enemies and mechanics as before,
only with added electricity and choppy fan blades. It’s also more darkly lit to encourage
you to use your flashlight. As you progress you encounter pockets of scientists
and security guards who will follow you if you want them to. You also get to watch them
interact with the more advanced enemy types like the barnacles, which is always a bit
of fun. Electrified water encourages you to jump from
table to table, which is fun. And headcrabs litter the vent systems for
cheap scares. They get you, even if you’re ready for them, and every time they sap your
health by a few points. One new encounter are these weapon turrets.
something I don’t like much is the shotgun in this game. It’s unreliable. Sometimes
it’ll do good damage, other times, it’ll miss completely. As soon as you reach medium
distances, it becomes useless. It certainly encourages you to charge towards enemies,
which leads to faster-paced combat than in the sequel.
Honestly, this level became a bit of a maze and there were a few stairwells which looked
very similar and I ended up getting a bit lost.
The next new mechanic is even slipperier ground in the freezer room, which you clear out with
a security guard and then have to complete a puzzle which involves flipping a switch,
then scaling the cabinets and hopping across a moving platform. Very 90’s.
Something this game did better than Half-Life 2 was its sound design. I loved the reverb
in the vents. Then I accidentally killed a friendly guard
when trying to explode a body. Then I got killed on the slowest moving fan
blade EVER and had to redo a large portion of this level. THAT’S why you quick-save
regularly in older games. I was out of the habit when I started, but it had returned
by the time I got half way through this game. At the end of this level you see the G-man
through this door, fight some zombies in this corridor, then climb a more difficult lift
shaft as a poor scientist slips to his death. ‘For God’s sake, open the silo door! They’re
coming for us, it’s the only way out! Oh my God, we’re doomed…’
You head towards the surface, and meet the military that’s been sent to find you.
You first encounter tripmines and tripod turrets which are activated if you trigger a beam.
Also, this is the point the game stops trying to be fair with headcrabs, and begins spawning
them into existence behind you from time to time.
And Vortigaunts, too. And again. Yeah, you get the idea. It’s
like this for the rest of the game. So after clearing a series of rooms straight
from Mission-Impossible, and spotting the g-man up in the rafters again…
…You finally meet the army. BUT TO YOUR HORROR…
…They’re trying to kill you! They’re trying to kill everybody. They’re there
to destroy any evidence of the resonance cascade. And that includes you.
You battle your way through room after room of these people, in each they’re executing
scientists and running about chucking grenades everywhere. It leads to some fast-paced action
that certainly still has appeal, though you’re unlikely to clear a room without sustaining
quite a bit of damage. You finally make it to the surface, have another
large fight, and then I got randomly blown up by something and had to do it again.
This time I rushed to a bunker And got crushed by some falling debris.
The next time I survived and got to see them awesomely abseiling down into the abyss, firing
as they went. The rest of this chapter is spend skulking
around, getting lost in vent systems and listening to them gloating about how many scientists
they’ve killed. ‘I’ve killed 12 dumbass scientists and
not one of them fought back. This sucks!’ You finally come across a scientist who explains
what’s going on. ‘Well, so much for the government. Their
idea of containment is to kill everyone associated with the project.’
And then you head on down to the Blast Pit.
This is probably my favourite part of the game.
After having spent the game so far climbing towards the surface, you now descend down,
down down into a seemingly abandoned part of the complex.
You hop on a train carriage and plough through some enemies,
And then are launched off, across a toxic lake. You have to walk along a series of pipes
until you happen upon a gigantic concrete structure, inside of which is another concrete
structure. It’s massive. And then the banging starts.
‘Fire the… rocket engine… destroy the damned thing before it grows any larger. STAHP!!!’
It turns out this massive creature cannot see, but it has excellent hearing, so you’ve
got to creep through the room it’s in without making a noise. Which is made infinitely more
difficult by the ladders. Because this is a Valve game and so ladders are fiddly as
balls. And you’ve got to clear barricades using
grenades, all the while dodging the semi-random attacks from the thing’s claws.
In short, where that thing is is the hub, from which you go on missions to activate
the power, fuel and oxygen. The
first one I did was at the top of a perilous climb, terrorised by a rogue horizontal lift.
It got me once. But I reached the top, whereupon I found a
scientist who was hiding for his life. ‘OH DEAR!’
I activated the power, and left him to it. Then I had to creep through the blast pit
again without making a sound. This next mission involved activating a massive
fan. This level made me realise I suffer from megalophobia. The fan, once activated, blew
me up against the ceiling and I smashed my way through into the vents.
After clearing a room of zombies I could turn on the oxygen and fuel.
Then I made my way alllll the way back to the control room and activated the rocket.
Then climbed / fell down the hole that was left behind.
Down here I got the revolver, which is an extremely powerful and useful gun against
later enemies. Went through some pipes…
Got supplies from crates…
I’ll continue this in a second video, but I’d like to see what kind of feedback this
video gets first. Anything I should change? Should I go faster or slower? Are you happy
with the other Half Life games also being covered like this? Let me know in the comments
section and DON’T FORGET TO SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON.