Before this, story in action gaming was either in QuakeTown or the Metal Gear Solid District, an occasional text scroll between murder parades to check that you haven't run off to burn down your school yet, or holding you down and barfing onto your face until you drown in exposition. But Half-Life showed that you can have a deep narrative without sacrificing gameplay, something games of today still have trouble grasping. On the surface you are Gordon Freeman, a bearded mute who somehow managed to gesture his way through MIT and must escape from an underground research complex after aliens from another dimension invade and nick all the good parking spots. And if you want you can leave it at that, cleaning mashed headcrab guts off your armored suit nipples. But if you pay attention to the background details, you can find yourself in a far bigger story, involving conspiracy, an inter-dimensional conflict and a mysterious man in a blue suit with the ability to manipulate time and space. Presumably he worked for the accounts department. Basically you decide your own level of immersion. When the soldiers you thought were the rescue team start executing scientists it would only have hurt the game to fade to cut scene and show Gordon Freeman shaking his little bearded fists in rage. There's a reason why Freeman remains a beloved character despite having no personality; because he is whatever we want him to be. Maybe he's shocked by the military cover up and staggered by the implications and his relative smallness against the organizations that now hunt him, or maybe he's going, "Oh boy! I couldn't wait for an excuse to return fire on those science-hating jockle cocks! I bet they voted against stem-cell research." And at the same time, nothing is skimped in the all-important gameplay either. The combat style shifts in service of the story while retaining the same simple controls. You start off in survival horror mode, trying to escape the labs, fending off freshly teleported alien animals attacking anything orange and bearded out of sheer bewilderment. Then the heavily armed frat boys join the party and things get more flanky and tactic-y. Then the alien forces start to show signs of organized invasion when the alien soldiers appear, the government gets desperate enough to send in motherfucking ninjas, and you end up ducking back underground to take your place as king of the Bullsquids. It was simultaneously action up the butt, and a well-crafted story about being a part of something far beyond your understanding. That's why it always struck me as kinda weird that by the time of Half-Life 2, the human population regards Gordon Freeman as the new Jesus, 'cause all I remember him doing was get chased around failing to rescue his co-workers, and depending on my mood occasionally also shooting them in the knees to see if they do that little shaky leg animation that I think is cute and then he spends the intervening years locked in the accounts departments fridge. So all I can say is he either had a fucking good PR team working on his behalf or his beard releases a pheromone.

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Half-Life

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