Half Life

At the time when it came out I could only read the rave reviews with a sense of great envy as my PC of the day struggled to run any recent releases any faster than slide show speed.

In fact I ended up building my first ever system because of Half Life, only possible by reducing costs and doing the work myself. It was built around AMD's magnificent Athlon 64 4000 - basically a rebadged version of the massively expensive FX53.

Anyway how long this took can be judged by the fact that the Half Life I'd bought was some kind of commemorative edition celebrating 1.5 million worldwide sales.

I wasn't to be disappointed though. It looked absolutely great and well...the storyline was unlike any other first person shooter I'd played before. We'd come a long way since the 'see it shoot it' days of Doom, from a plot perspective at least.

One thing modern games could learn from Half Life is how to do 'scripted' sections better. Many a time, especially in more recent games, one feels as if the action is running 'on rails' with little chance of really participating or changing what's going on. I recall the Half Life equivalent - you walking into a large room packed with soldiers. If you managed to sneak in you look around wondering how to tackle it. Then suddenly the doors blow in and a host of aliens attack... you can watch what's going on, or help one side out. Load a save from just before entering the room and it could end a whole different way each time.

You didn't feel like everything was based around you, what was going on was part of a bigger story and it was just a lot of fun.

In most top games lists these days Half Life 2 is the one listed at the top of the tree. But it made me feel car sick (a known strange problem)... Add ons Blue Shift and Opposing Force are well worth a look now.

Homeworld

If I had to pick a number one game it would probably be this. When I was a kid playing on my ZX Spectrum this is what I dreamed games might one day look like. Massive ships, but still small against a colossal galactic backdrop. It just looked amazing at the time - and still holds its own.

Thematically it was similar to Battlestar Galactica, while combat and ship design seemed, to me at least, to take its cues from Babylon 5.

While seeming a bit daunting to begin with, control and command soon became intuitive and easy.

The panic which set in when swarmed early in the game by enemy fighters, or when trying to save cryo-trays containing the last members of your race from destruction, while still trying to use salvage corvettes to steal an enemy frigate for research purposes, was just amazing.

Pretty difficult, great design, along with probably (in my opinion anyway) the best and most atmospheric in game music ever. It also had those slight quirks which, once you get the hang of the game, it's fun to exploit. This was corrected in subsequent offering Cataclysm, but one of the addictive elements of Homeworld was salvaging as many enemy ships as possible, particularly the capital ones such as destroyers, heavy cruisers and carriers. If you really go for it with frigates it was possible to capture so many they stretch away out of sight after a warp jump.

Anyway even once you get impossibly good at the single player game it is quite possible to come a cropper on some levels, especially the last one.

Starcraft 2

The first Starcraft was an amazing game, which invented the 'three race' approach to real time strategies which has been repeated many times since.

It didn't do much different really to that 'genesis' of real time strategy games: Dune 2. Main base, create new buildings, collect resources, build up forces etc.

Anyway it was mega popular, doing especially well online. Fast forward 12 years and we have the follow-up. As I said in my review, it doesn't do much different from the first one, but due to a great storyline, brilliantly conceived units and great single player levels, it's completely brilliant.

I'm just playing it through now for the third time, and enjoying it just as much as the original.
It achieved the impossible task of bettering an absolute classic.

Forget playing online though. Servers are populated by superhuman automatons capable of 300 actions per minute.


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Keep checking technobabble for part 2.