ResearchHalf Life - when you can't get a whole life...
Wolfenstein, Doom, Hexen, Quake: Here's your gun, there's the bad guys. Shoot! For nearly a decade, the first-person shooter was dominated by this simplistic formula. People were too blown away by the new 3D experience to care much if there was any kind of background story. Unreal made some token effort to provide a background story to the action, but this ended up being little more depth than that aspired to in Tomb Raider. But along came Half Life, and the first-person action genre has never been the same.
Why do we play games? To escape. Largely that's it; we immerse ourselves in a virtual world for a while to recharge our batteries to deal with the real world, where the solutions to the problems aren't always so clean. And when you've met your first 3D action shoot-em-up, you're busy inhabiting the virtual body of your non-character. After you've played your third or fourth one, though, you begin to notice something missing. For a while there, interactive adventure games looked to corner the market on game story quality, with the Myst series taking the lead followed closely by the likes of Schizm and Traitor's Gate. The idea of adventure games is to structure it with such a story that it's more like a movie, with characters, a plot, and an ending, and then you play one of the parts. Half Life, then, was the first to smoothly integrate the best of both the first-person shooter and the adventure genres.
Which isn't to say that the plot is worthy of Hitchcock, or even Stephen King. But I've seen Spielberg do worse. You have to fight your way through a landscape of many places and dimensions, navigating through a war between marines and the alien Xen race, while being attacked by both sides. The Xens want to kill you because you're just another human with a gun, and the marines want to snuff you because you know too much. And in the background is the mystery figure of the G-Man, ambiguously either friend or foe, who will eventually make your acquaintance.
Comes Half Life 2, and the mighty Valve software (founded by ex-Microsoft alumni), amazed everybody by bettering themselves with every minute of the five year's development effort showing in the product. Along with the leap in technology on every hand, the story is far more involving. This time you are thrust a little farther into the future when the new alien race of the Combine have taken over the Earth, but at least this time you have allies in your fellow humans. A cast of many characters will come into play as you race through the scene trying to put down the alien's tyranny. This is to say nothing of the other expansion episodes, which are admitted to be in lieu of a Half Life 3... or are they just biding their time?
It would be a shame to reveal more of the story for those who haven't played it yet. Half Life 2 is expected to come out for the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 over the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007, with expansion episodes around the same time. If Half Life 2 sells enough copies, it will be the most-purchased action game of all time, a record currently held by... Half Life. Surprising, what?