There is a murmur of subconscious agreement among video game players of all walks that many games are carried purely by their visual power. Shooters get this tagging a lot, Crysis being the most stellar of all examples. These games are supposed to go out with a bang and have no lasting appeal, what with the development cycle being so lopsided toward gorgeous instead of good. It just assumed that the game will age poorly and in two or three years, when we can honestly say "this doesn't look THAT great," the 9/10's and 5 star impressions will fade to the weaker "real" experience the game "actually" had to offer.

I am a firm dissident to this belief, and my most recent reinforcement of this fact is Half-Life 1. Valve, as you probably know, lowered the price of HL1 to 98 cents in commemoration of its 10th birthday. This game, until very recently, has been in my dark closet of shame where games I should have played a long time ago reside. I bought HL2 and its corresponding episodes all on pre-order, playing and beating them all within 3 days of their release, yet I had not played the very first one that gave the later games such limelight. I can honestly say that, had I paid $10 for the game, I would not have been satisfied.

Some of you may have noticed a contradiction here. I believe graphics don't drive how good a game is, yet I have a disillusioned taste of this decade-old masterpiece. The problem wasn't graphics; it was the core gameplay. Say what you will about the video content of FPS's over time and their subsequent softening in difficulty, the shooter has come a longer way from its roots than any other genre. StarCraft II, coming out someday in the future, is maintaining a fair amount of similarity to Blizzard's elder gaming style in strategy; adventure games have always been about the story, the mechanics driving the bus being secondary and sometimes even pointless; platformers have gone 3D and stopped, some like Mega Man even regressing to the older two-dimensional style. There isn't a commercial game company making another Doom.

That is because, for all the charm the game has to offer, the FPS's of yesteryear have design elements and restrictions that no major game developer finds valuable in any way besides nostalgia. Did you traversing square-shaped mazes, looking for key cards, while dodging enemies with a single attack that made the same noise every single time they died? Games that possess these traits nowadays suck. Mazes are considered poor level design; key cards are fetch quests; repetitive voicing kills the immersion. Notice how we now have advanced gaming terminology for every one of these ideas? Those terms comes from the negativity that surrounds their ideas.

Half-Life 1 doesn't look great anymore, to be sure. The textures are pixelated regardless of the range you view them from; no one has more than a hundred polygons to their figures; the particle effects (with the notable exception of the machine gun blast which is surprisingly good looking) look like something out of a really cheesy flash video. Despite all this, as I was playing, I never muttered "man this game looks like crap." Most every shooter has the player running around to much for this matter in the slightest and clarity of image becomes the only real graphical factor. No, I was muttering "why does it take more than a double blast from a shotgun to kill a soldier on Normal?" and "How the hell am I supposed to make this jump and not die from the falling damage (seeing how I've been clinging to 3 health for the last half hour)?". The game wasn't fun for me; the only entertainment I gleaned from it were the nostalgic bits and the loose story ends that I was unaware of from playing the sequels.

I didn't review the game for GiantBomb because I don't think reviewing classics makes practical sense...too many factors make the evaluation of others about famous oldies hard to use reliably. If I did, I would give it 2 stars, with the only positive notes being the atmosphere and the under-the-hood nature of the story. Valve, as a developer, has grow by an incredible degree in maturity in these 10 years. They cling unnecessarily to the past in some instances, such as their health system, but the series of Half-Life 2 games is a monumental step toward in pretty every concievable way over its predecessor. HL1 is worth it for a buck, if you consider a net neutral enjoyment to be counter balanced by filling in your old-game pallet.