june gloom on 20/11/2008 at 04:33
Half-Life was the first "modern" shooter I'd ever played. Up until then the shitty eMachines I was stuck on were only capable of running Doom and Duke Nukem 3D; when we got a Gateway in 2000, a used copy of HL1 was one of the first games I bought (along with Fallout 1.) It's still one of the greatest games I've ever played. It's not aged well, visually, but gameplay is still quite solid and it's just overall amazing. I remember being blown away by it.
Funny thing was, shortly before I bought HL I had played the Duke Nukem 3D Starship Troopers mod to death, and a lot of that mod had a very strong Half-Life feel- but I didn't realize it until after I'd played HL itself. So my first taste of Half-Life was essentially a totally unrelated mod for a totally unrelated game.
Also, funny thing about HL... when I first got it, the Gateway was a shitbox with onboard video and 64mb RAM. Back in 2000 that was pretty crap! So I had to run HL in software mode and the game stuttered frequently. When I first got HL2, my video card (which was on the computer after the Gateway- another Gateway) was a Geforce FX 5200. The game stuttered frequently, both due to HL2's early versions being a bit uhhhh and due to my shitbox of a video card. And I wasn't even annoyed! Because it was nostalgic.
Rogue Keeper on 20/11/2008 at 10:53
Good one, went through it two times, but in no way I'm going to bother with it again.
Quote Posted by Koki
You're not going to bitch about Xen?
Now that you mention it, that part really sucked.
Something I liked more has also 10 years :
Inline Image:
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/3773/ut1chromefo4.jpgNedan on 20/11/2008 at 11:29
BR796164, a picture is suppose to be worth a thousand words... or so they say. But the very second I stepped off the Vortex Rikers spacecraft... I was utterly speechless. The only word that came to mind at the time was simply incredible.
As I think about all the first person shooters I have ever played... HL does not come to mind as being the most memorable or the best for that matter. But truly... it would take me far too long to really settle on which was the best first person shooter I ever played. I couldn't even list the top ten right away for that matter as there were a lot of games that brought different things to the table for me at least. But if I had to pick the most memorable... Star Wars Dark Forces, Descent, & Unreal would be my choices.
Rogue Keeper on 20/11/2008 at 13:04
I think 1998 was in some sense a historical breakthrough year for first person action genre, or to put it differently, it was year of a big FPS paradigm. While Unreal was an impressive dot behind the era of linear doomlike action shooters with linear progress, search for access cards and switches and minimum NPC interaction, few months later Half-Life ended this era and introduced more NPC interaction, various 3D puzzles, more fun with environment physics, necessity of advanced tactics emerging woth specialized weapons, several minigames in game (like switching rails in tunnels), even traces of stealth approach and numerous other enhancements of Doom's concept. That's why Unreal 1 is the last great old school first person shooter, while HL was founder of new generation FPS games.
But if there was one thing in which Unreal was superior over HL it was this sense of awe which you could feel in various locations. Mainly combination of superior level design of exotic places and music. Oh that music!
And speaking of 1998... there was one more speciality which has defined an important FPS subgenre. It shouldn't be difficult to guess what it is, for members of this community, now would it?
Tulsidas on 20/11/2008 at 15:45
Played the series a couple of months back. In my opinion, HL > BS > OP. Well, the second half of OP didn't have a single headcrab or zombie.
Unlike most people, i haven't been that impressed with the AI. The soldiers are a threat only because they have infinite grenades, which they sometimes drop at their feet and forget to run. And they don't mind being shot at so long as the source of pain isn't in their view cone/distance. Guards are even worse in this regard. The assassins jump and run around randomly, that's their AI. Once, i yelled seeing an assassin running around like an idiot for around five minutes without sneaking a single shot at me.
Doesn't have enough bullsquids.
Still a good shooter because of the overall variety. But Unreal takes the cake for me.
Renzatic on 20/11/2008 at 15:54
Ahh, Unreal. The game that had me flabbergasted at lens flares and taught me how to mouse look. I played it chugging along at 15 FPS, and still loved every second of it.
Exiting the Vortex Rikers was cool enough, but I still think the best scene in that game was the boat ride.
Rogue Keeper on 20/11/2008 at 16:04
And it had so-ahead-of-it's-time water! :D
Shakey-Lo on 20/11/2008 at 16:30
Quote Posted by BR796164
And speaking of 1998... there was one more speciality which has defined an important FPS subgenre. It shouldn't be difficult to guess what it is, for members of this community, now would it?
Tribes? It's Tribes, right? ;)
Tulsidas on 20/11/2008 at 17:01
Quote Posted by Shakey-Lo
Tribes? It's Tribes, right? ;)
No. Thief. :cool:
LancerChronics on 20/11/2008 at 17:32
Quote Posted by sh0ck3r
Holy shit. It's on sale on Steam for 98 cents until Nov. 21.
THANK YOU for posting this. I would've completely missed this deal, and have been wanting to play HL1 again for a while. Saved me 9 bucks. I only wish that the trilogy was on sale for 3 bucks or something too, but oh well. cant have everything.
