The Real Top 30 Games

July 5th, 2006 by ironsoap

1. Half-Life – Ever since games started, timidly at first, trying to tell stories along with providing opportunities for play they have struggled with how to do this effectively. If you stop the game and show the story you interrupt the real reason for turning it on in the first place: Essentially you inject a bit of movie into the game. For most designers this was an acceptable compromise. Reward the players with a bit of a break as we throw some exposition at them between boss battles (or whatever). This wasn’t much of a problem with older games which were always third person and whose graphics were generally anything but lifelike. Then came first person games with Wolfenstein (and others) putting players into the protagonist’s shoes. 3D graphics from Quake and a steadily improving market for video accelerator cards started making things look semi-realistic and this presented a problem for the story-in-game people: Players live through the action in this character’s shoes, do we pull them out of that state to show our movies? Half-Life solved the problem like no game before or, really, since: Don’t pull the player out of the character’s shoes. Somehow the writers of Half-Life managed to present a silent protagonist that didn’t strain the suspension of disbelief and using scripted events and a few load-time tricks they delivered the most immersive, emotional and enjoyable experience of any game I’ve ever played. I was literally frightened at times while playing this game… wandering through dark corridors with nothing but a flashlight to guide my way made my palms sweat. Each time I fell into any water my phobia welled up, rationalized by the inevitable Ichthyosaur attack. The conspiratorial tone led by the G-Man’s creepy presence was timed perfectly with the X-Files craze and the attention to detail was such that even later expansions like Blue Shift and Opposing Force fit perfectly within the game’s story and carefully crafted world. When the game was over there was always Counter-Strike which made this game the only real must-purchase PC game for a period of almost ten years. Half-Life stands alone as a game that does what so many others attempt to do but fail and in doing so didn’t forget that above all else it was still supposed to be fun to play.

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