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A bad day can happen to anyone at work. “Always better than having no job at all” is what one often thinks.
Yet, I wonder how many discouraged unemployed individuals, how many hopeful minds fleeing would be willing to trade their colorless horizon for the job of Gordon Freeman, 27-year-old theoretical physicist at the Black Mesa research center in the New Mexico desert.
Because for Gordon Freeman, it’s not just a simple bad day; it’s a real day of nein, niet, non, ??????, 0110111001101111, aò t’ho detto de NO!...
Because for a scientist, all those years of sacrifices spent on books before tasting real life, those years spent being mistreated, those years when social life was set aside in an indefinite pause in the name of a higher goal for all humanity, those years can lose meaning if you find yourself in the mess that happened to Dr. Freeman.
If from a failed experiment, you find yourself, in no particular order, having to exterminate hordes of hideous aliens coming out of a dimensional portal using weapons that usually don’t end up in a physicist’s hands, crawling through mile-long ventilation ducts full of disgusting critters that jump at your face screaming, fighting marines who seemed to be there to save you and your colleagues but actually want to cover up the mess by killing you and your colleagues, swimming through radioactive brown waters, escaping a trash compactor before it crushes you (epic Star Wars reference), taking down a helicopter with a bazooka, jumping over a minefield or on platforms suspended on the side of a canyon wall, falling into an elevator with a broken cable, getting teleported to the alien world to sort things out once and for all, well, after all this, you do wonder if it was worth it. If it wouldn’t have been better to enroll in a humanities faculty.
At CERN, none of this would have happened, let alone at the Accademia della Crusca.
“Half-Life” is a shooter from 1997 but it doesn't count. I mean, it’s a shooter, but saying it like that is reductive. It's like describing the Beatles saying “they were a band.”
“Half-Life” is an incredible adventure, a milestone in video game storytelling, no video game before this had ever told a story in such an engaging way. It doesn’t matter that it's not hugely original, that there are considerable gaps in the script, because in Half-Life the story is us (ehr...). No cutscenes, no introductions, nothing: we are Gordon Freeman, who in the game is never represented (except on the cover), never says a word, we are his eyes, his mouth, his ears, his hands. The game begins like just another normal workday.
Among the many tricks used to make you feel part of the game special mention goes to the sound, among the most incredible ever heard in a video game: the air whistling in the ventilation ducts, the shrill and horrid screeches of the aliens, the Geiger counter “crackling” when near greenish liquids and the marines’ radios coordinating to flush you out. These, by the way, display artificial intelligence unprecedented for those days, still notable today: in fact, they are not dummies ready to be riddled with bullets like Doom's demons; on the contrary, these “want to live,” they don’t stand still to be shot, if wounded they run away, and if they see you’ve tucked yourself into a crevice, they think nothing of tossing a grenade in.
“Half-Life” is a unique experience: a video game that offers 20 varied and intense hours without ever dropping tension, though it is not a horror experience in the strict sense, as you never know what's around the next corner.
Produced by the now-legendary Valve Corporation, a software house that has made creativity and originality its banner with titles like Portal, Team Fortress, and the Counter-Strike series, Half-Life was followed by two expansions produced by Gearbox, Opposing Force and Blue-shift, which allow experiencing the chronicles of the Black Mesa incident from the eyes of a marine and a security guard at the research center, respectively. But the real official sequel, Half-Life 2 is possibly even more revolutionary, but that’s another story and if you want to play it, you can’t miss the original.
Today you can find it for a few euros for both PC and Playstation 2 (in a faithful conversion with some 2001 graphic improvements) with an Italian dubbing even better than the English one (which cannot be said for Half-Life 2, which seems to be dubbed by Albanian immigrants just off the boat). Or, you can download it in the “Source” version with the graphics and physics engine of Half-Life 2, and if you can’t stand the somewhat dated graphics, you can find many texture packs to try and spruce it up a bit. But as you may have gathered, Half-Life is a classic whose legacy has nothing to do with the aesthetic shell that covers it.
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