In Hindsight: Being Gordon Freeman
Posted in gaming on 03/17/2009 10:18 pm by Wes
My love for the first-person shooter genre stretches back nearly as many years as I’ve been playing video games. It began with iD Software’s incredible Wolfenstein 3D and continued years later with Goldeneye and The World Is Not Enough on the Nintendo 64. I certainly missed out on plenty of greats — Doom, Quake, and Marathon, just to name a few — but Goldeneye deathmatches and epic World Is Not Enough bouts of King of the Hill were enough to cement shooters as the go-to option for multiplayer funtimes.
And then came Halo and the Xbox. Combined, the two ushered in a tidal wave of shooters for home consoles, online gaming became a viable multiplayer option from the couch instead of the computer chair, and I was utterly hooked. Most of the shooters from this period weren’t so hot, but enough stood out and held their own that there was always something new to play, some new carnage just begging to be wreaked. Unquestionably, it was — and is — my genre of choice. Which brings me to the series at hand — Half-Life. If there’s a game in the FPS stable that’s more highly regarded than Half-Life 2, it’s a narrow victory. Deus Ex and Bioshock spring to mind, but in the Fall of 2004, Half-Life 2’s long-awaited release absolutely blew minds, balancing traditional shooting mechanics with a brand new, cutting-edge physics engine to continue the story of one seriously badass bespectacled scientist, Gordon Freeman.
