3ERDC HalfLife

After the Dreamcast version of Half-Life was officially cancelled on June
15, 2001 I had lost all hope of playing the game. I had never played Half-
Life before, always favoring console videogames over PC games, but I
wanted to----badly. It was one of my most anticipated Dreamcast games
and that's why it stung so badly to see it go unreleased (especially
given how close it was to completion). In fact, it stung so badly that I
have written an editorial (Segaholic's Rant #11) on the subject as well
as three features: a memoir, a timeline, and a code list.

But here I am, finally reviewing what many people claim to be one of the
greatest games of all time. Accordingly, I had high expectations of the
game. Before I begin with this review though there are a few things I
want to make clear: 1) I have never played any Half-Life game before, so
I'm sorry if the original PC game, or the PS2 upgrade, or any of the mods
are the greatest gifts to the gaming world, but I cannot compare the
Dreamcast version to them. Thus, I am reviewing the DC game as it is
and how it compares to other Dreamcast games. 2) I realize this game
was never officially released, and is thus incomplete. I have taken this
into consideration and will be fairly forgiving on bugs and loading times.
On the other hand, I still must review this game as it is because that's
what it is. I agree it is a shame that Sierra never ironed out all the
problems in the game and I wish we all would have had the chance to
play Half-Life on Dreamcast the way they envisioned it (including the
online-multiplayer game), but in reality I have to review what I have in
front of me. With that, I can now begin my review of Half-Life Dreamcast.
My evaluation of the Blue Shift mission can be found under the Replay
Value section of this review.

Half-Life is a first-person shooter that puts you in control of Gordon
Freeman, a scientist who works at the Black Mesa research facility.
Your team has opened a portal into another dimension, and one day
while studying a crystalline specimen from the "border world" an
explosion occurs, aliens find their way into our world and all hell breaks
lose. All you care about is escaping the lab, but you soon discover that
that is not as easy as it should be since the government has sent in the
military to "clean up" the mess.

The story isn't all that original, but the way it is told makes it seem like
it is. Because it is a first-person shooter you never really see yourself as
Gordon Freeman. In fact, if it weren't for the other characters in the
game referring to you by name you wouldn't be Gordon Freeman at all.
This allows you to truly become the character, and even though the
game is pretty linear, you will feel like you are really making important
decisions and discoveries. This feeling is further established by the fact
that there are no cutscenes in the whole game (well, I guess there are
two segments that could be considered non-interactive cutscenes but
they are quite short and one of them is the ending). Thus, the story is
told, or rather picked up, by listening to dialogue from other characters.
In other words, overhearing announcements from the PA system,
conversing with other scientists or security guards, or eavesdropping
on military soldiers all allow you discover what is really happening and it
works well by establishing that sense of self-discovery rather than
simply having cutscenes show you the story.

As brilliant as this method of storytelling is it has its limits. Namely, the
story never really gets that deep and because you may not talk to every
character (or if you accidentally decide to shoot them instead of
listening to them) you are likely to miss out on a lot of the story. You will
encounter most of the really important dialogue though whether you
want to or not, so unless you choose not to hear it you will get a pretty
good idea about what is going on in the game.

Gameplay

I'll get the bad stuff out of the way right away. Due to the fact the game
was not officially released there are still quite a lot of gameplay issues.
I only had the game completely freeze on me once, but most of the time
the framerate struggled to keep up with the onscreen action as it would
jerk repeatedly and become annoyingly choppy. Unfortunately this
happens way too much and could be one of the reasons why Sierra
decided to cancel the game. They had been working on porting it for
eighteen months and still could not get the game running smoothly.

Along with that are some horrible load times. Prepare yourself now for a
lot of waiting as new areas in the game need to be loaded up constantly
and take long enough to do so that you'll feel like you're back in the 32-
bit era. You will eventually get used to the loading times, but compared
to other Dreamcast games this is as bad as it gets.

And finally is the VMU save file bug. It seems that the developers never
locked down the file size save, which has resulted in fluctuating file
saves. Consequently, you will probably need to dedicate an entire VMU
to the game if you want to play it. My file saves ranged from 6 to 126
blocks and will fluctuate up and down throughout the game for no
reason. One file save may be 33 blocks, the next time you save the file
may be 88 blocks, and then the next time you save the file may drop
down to 17 blocks. Only once did I encounter a corrupted save, but it
did happen. Luckily I had a backup save so I didn't have to start all
over. I recommend you keep two saves going just in case, alternating
back and forth over which you overwrite so that you don't lose your
progress.

Those are the game's major flaws, but as I said, I am going to be a little
more patient with them in this review since the game really was never
completed.

The controls work very well on the Dreamcast controller. Similar to
Quake III's setup the four face buttons are responsible for movement (Y
and A move forward and backward, X and B strafe left and right) while
the analog stick is used to aim and look around. R is used to fire your
weapon, and L + R fires a weapon's alternate attack. On the D-pad, Up
makes you jump, Down makes you crouch (Up and then Down serves as
a jumping crouch), Left turns on your flashlight, and Right serves as a
use/action button (to turn on switches and levers or pull boxes and
crates). Pressing L + Up manually reloads your weapon (it will
automatically reload when you run out of ammo, but you don't want to
enter a shootout with two bullets left and get mowed down while you
auto-reload). L + Left or Right cycles through your different weapons,
and then pressing R selects that weapon. These are the default
controls and the setup I liked the best, but the game also has two other
setups available, or you can fully customize your controls including X
and Y-axis sensitivity and inversion of the analog stick (which I
changed).

The AI is a mixed bag. On one hand it is quite realistic. As your top-
suspending train goes through an airlock it won't move until the rail
extends itself to connect the two rails. You can get pop out of vending
machines or turn on air dryers in the bathrooms. You can kill scientists
and security guards but if you shoot at a Black Mesa security guard
(i.e., your ally) he won't hesitate to shoot you back. Military Soldiers
(enemies) will attack in swarms, effectively using grenades to lure you
out of hiding. They will hide around corners and drop from helicopters
into ventilation shafts to hunt you down.

But several flaws undermine the realistic quality of the AI. Several times
I was able to sneak right up on soldiers, basically staring at them in the
face without them detecting my presence. One time I tossed a grenade
down a flight of stairs and a soldier ran up the stairs to find me but
ended up running right past me, not noticing me until I started firing at
him! The same problems occur with many of the alien enemies as well.

Gameplay shifts back and forth from pure gun-fighting action and the
now classic puzzle solving methods of box pushing and lever pulling.
Most of the time I knew what I was supposed to be doing, but a few
times the puzzles were confusing enough to create much frustration
and I found myself wishing the developers had focused more on the
action segments (which is where the game really shines) than on the
puzzle sequences.

There are three difficulty levels to choose from, the higher the difficulty
the more it takes to kill an enemy. Enemy attacks will be more powerful
as well, but for the most part there were enough first aid kits and
stations that I never had to worry about dying from lack of life. What I
did have to worry about, and what became my biggest pet-peeve of the
game is the insane number of cheap deaths. Luckily you can save the
game as many times as you want whenever you want, and I suggest you
save every five to ten minutes because there is always a cheap death
around the corner, whether it is a fall off a cliff or through a hole, or
from fire damage, radiation damage, running into a fan or turbine, or
simply trying to descend a ladder (which is a lot more difficult than it
should be) you will die a lot and it will be very frustrating having to re-do
segments of the game you took so much care in beating. You have a
power suit that acts as a shield to limit some of the cheap deaths from
sudden enemy tank and rocket launcher attacks, but it is not enough
(and unlike the first aid kits I though the HEV stations and battery cells
used to recharge your shield suit were not as plentiful as they should
have been). Just take my advice and save often to save yourself from
unnecessary frustration.

85%

Graphics

Half-Life is a port of a 1998 PC game, and it shows. The developers
spent a great deal of time and effort trying to get the graphics up to par
with some of the Dreamcast's best, and in many areas they do reach
this level. But overall the game's age is obvious. Human character
models are greatly improved over the PC original, but most of
background textures have not been upgraded at all. Likewise, alien
character models are unimpressive, and as good as the human models
look, it is quite disappointing to discover that all the security guards
look alike and there are only a few different models of scientists.

The inconsistency is obvious in other areas as well. For instance, in one
area there are rotating signs on the wall of the lab, similar to those
rotating billboards on interstates. It's impressive to see, but by the time
you reach some of the later levels this eye candy is gone and the vague
textures of the environment are quite boring. The game looks pretty
when you get out of the complex and get to see the outside world, but
these instances are rare. Explosions look pretty good too, and enemy
character movement is pretty fluid (the way they crouch and move
stealthily into position is well done).

I could tell how much effort the developers put into the conversion
whenever I broke crates with my crowbar and out flew VMUs and discs
of the game itself. It's obvious they wanted to make the port special
and just needed a little more time to do it. But when it comes down to it,
Half-Life for Dreamcast isn't a bad looking game at all, it's actually
pretty good, but it's definitely not up to the same level as Shenmue or
Code Veronica. Then again, this is to be expected from a PC port of a
game released in 1998.

87%

Sound

The sound effects are very well done. Voices trail off as you move away
from a character, and pick back up as you move closer to them. The
voice acting is pretty good, much better than some games, though
there are some minor issues such as characters repeating the same
things.

The game music is simply brilliant. It fits the game perfectly, beautifully
complementing the upcoming situation. You just know something big is
going to happen when the music kicks in and it doesn't disappoint. My
only gripe is that it didn't happen enough. The action scenes and their
accompanying music were the most enjoyable aspects of the game. If
the game had more action sequences with music like this to
complement it, it would have been absolutely superb.

95%

Replay Value

Believe it or not, but in my opinion Half-Life was actually a little too long.
Some of the sequences in the middle seemed completely unnecessary,
like they were thrown in simply for the sake of making the game longer.
But in any form of entertainment, whether a book, a movie, or a
videogame, it's best to keep unnecessary parts out. It's not good when
the consumer questions why an author had an unnecessary paragraph
in a book, or why a director left an unnecessary scene in a movie. They
just waste the consumer's valuable time and lead to frustration. The
same thing applies to videogames. Developers often feel they must
fulfill an unnecessary length standard or gamers will get upset. This is
true in a sense, but all they really have to do is tell the story, don't drag
it on.

Think of a game like Metal Gear Solid, it took some heat for being so
short (roughly ten hours of gameplay), or Panzer Dragoon Saga (which
takes roughly 15-20 hours to complete, which is unbelievably short for
an RPG), but what critics of these games fail to realize is that these
games only seemed short because they were that good. Their stories
were brilliantly told, and no unnecessary sequences bogged them
down. Those who complained of the length of those games only did so
because they didn't want them to end, and that's a sign that the
developers did it right. Half-Life could have been the same way, but
unfortunately there were too many parts where I found myself wanting
to get through the game simply to get through it. If Sierra had
eliminated some of those superfluous puzzles this game probably would
have made it into my top ten games of all time list.

Consequently there isn't much incentive to play through the entire
game again, but certain parts are good enough to spark your interest.
And thanks to the inclusion of a code system, you can easily jump to
any level in the game with all the guns unlocked, infinite ammo, and
invincibility and just blow shit up. In this sense the game does have
replay value.

Blue Shift

Where the game really reveals its replay value is in the inclusion of the
Blue Shift side-quest. Once a Dreamcast exclusive, Blue Shift puts you
in the shoes of Barney Calhoun, a security guard at Black Mesa. The
quest is six levels and will take only a few hours to defeat, but in my
opinion this is perfect. I know many PC fans (Blue Shift was ported to
the PC after the Dreamcast cancellation) ripped it apart for its short
length, but if Blue Shift is taken for what it originally was meant to be, a
side-quest to the original game to offer replay value and provide more
insight into the story, then it is exactly what it should be.

The gameplay in Blue Shift is the same as I described above for Half-
Life, except you don't get as many badass weapons. This is a
disappointment, but it's not that big of a deal. The story in this mission
reveals another aspect of the Half-Life story as you aid the scientists in
their escape from Black Mesa and the incoming military. There is more
character interaction (or at least if feels like there is), and this is a plus.
There is also a better balance of puzzle and action sequences in this
mission, though I still felt some of the puzzles were a little too long. As it
stands though, Blue Shift is an excellent addition to the Dreamcast
version of Half-Life. As a side mission it is short enough to make you
want to play it, but long enough to stand on its own. I give props to the
developers.

85%

Overall

For every complaint I had I think it's important to reiterate that I am
reviewing a game that is basically six years old; and, with only minor
graphical updates and some minor gameplay issues, the game still
stands as an enjoyable action game that can get the heart racing.
There are a few flaws: if Sierra had bumped up the number of action
sequences and reduced the number of puzzles the game would have
been one of my all-time favorites. For what it is though, the game is still
the best first-person action game on the Dreamcast (I'm not including
Quake III, Unreal Tournament, or Outrigger in this comparison simply
because they are multiplayer focused and Half-Life is single-player).

If it would have been released I definitely would have purchased it
without regret. And if the developers would have had all the time they
needed to port this game, it could have been included among the
Dreamcast's best. If the game had been released in its current form, the
gameplay flaws would have been unacceptable, pulling the overall
score down a lot. But given the situation I give it an:

85%