Half-Life 1 Anthology

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $18.73

Features:

• 4 exciting tiles in 1 great action-adventure compilation
• Survive killer aliens in Half-Life's plot-driven, complex world
• Explore restricted areas of mysterious government facility in Blue Shift
• Opposing Force offers new arsenal of weapons and 12+ multiplayer maps
• Team-based multiplayer game, Team Fortress Classic

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Poor version of a great game [Posted on 2007-11-20]
This Half-Life Anthology is hard to judge. There are a bunch of problems with the game, which due to my lack of experience with the series, I don't know whether to pin on Half-Life the game or this particular Anthology version.

I'm a little perplexed by all the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the original Half-Life. I see "great story," "revolutionary," "intense action," and I can't really say I agree. While the beginning and end of the game are unusually dramatic for an action game, there is essentially no storyline in between the bookends. Every level is a series of trials to enter another doorway, to talk to another NPC, who will direct you to another doorway. In essence, the plotine of the game mirrored every other action game I've played. I grew pretty tired of the repetitive nature of the quest.

Half-Life's saving grace is the action, which is nearly always white-knuckled excitement, but yet not always fun. Valve did a great job with enemy placement and creative combinations of repetitive environmental objects. The marine AI is amazing, and still puts many modern shooters to shame. Unfortunately Valve had no qualms over using cheap instant-death traps to inflate the difficulty level. Nearly every scenario includes one or two improbable enemy placements, infinite enemy respawn points, or unpredictable roof collapses, necessitating quicksaves between every encounter. I really don't appreciate that kind of level design.

The weapons look and sound intense, and are easily the best visual feature of the game. Charcter models, particularly enemies, are well detailed and move fluidly. The rest of the game is hideous. Even giving it a ten-year grade cushion, the graphics of Half-Life's environments are ugly to the point of hampering gameplay. Critical buttons and switches are often obscured by the muddy low-res detail of consoles and panels. On more than one occasion, I thought a critical door switch was an eye chart or a Dominos pizza box tossed against the wall.

While weapons aiming is very accurate, there's not much more about the game's movement engine I can compliment. Protagonist Gordon Freeman moves too quickly at the default rate, and slides too much when attempting to stop. Even by the game's end, i couldn't get comfortable moving him on tricky surfaces or sneaking up on enemies. And the thankfully infrequent platforming parts of the game are brutal. Even climbing and descending a simple ladder was a continual excercise in frustration for me. Basically, I enjoyed shooting stuff but not moving my clumsy oaf of a character.

Most disturbing to me were the number of glitches I encountered playing Half-Life. Weapon animations would cut out, or doors refuse to respond to my prompt so often that I began to suspect something wrong with the code in this Anthology version. And I experience scripted sequence failures on at least four or five occasions that halted my progress. Without cheat codes, I couldn't have finished the game.

So, I can easily see why people went nuts over the original Half-Life when first introduced. Perhaps it was the stellar multiplayer mode that made so many people overlook the weakness of the singleplayer storyline. Unfortunately, the above problems along with the intrusive and annoying Steam service lead me to belive that this Anthology is simply not the preferable version of Half-Life to be played.

Just the best [Posted on 2007-11-22]
I honestly believe that this is the best game ever created, even thou half-life 2 is out I prefer to play this.

Great Collection! [Posted on 2008-01-23]
Since the debut of this videogame I was testing the Demo version (Opposing Force), now getting all the versions, I really have to recommend you to buy it. It's really great!

A Classic!! [Posted on 2008-02-20]
I played this game (Team Fortress Classic) alot a long time ago, and lost it. So I decided to buy it again. One of the best purchases ever. It's still a lot better than TF2.

Great Games--AVOID STEAM. [Posted on 2008-02-22]
these are the games you remember. except for STEAM. with STEAM, you are only buying access to a game for as long as STEAM exists, however long that is. more, should you ever use your credit card to "chargeback" anything you've purchased via STEAM, your STEAM account will be disabled over this and you will lose access to everything you have already spent money on. why would you chargeback? because STEAM didn't give you a refund. because STEAM DOES NOT OFFER REFUNDS ON ANYTHING EVER. they could, of course--and it would be fair to both parties since the software is only playable over their system making pirating impossible. this is simply their arbitrary choice. which they do not make obvious. it's buried in section 4 of their subscription agreement. naturally, you should always first check out refund policies prior to buying anything anywhere. but the reason for this review is to warn you that if you are going to purchase this game, or these games, or anything, avoid STEAM. it just doesn't make sense to buy anything from a non-refundable system that doesn't have any guarantee of being playable in the future. if you are going to buy it anywhere, buy it from somewhere like here at AMAZON that at least will give you a partial refund on open software (that might legitimately be more than your rig could handle, for example, or might be badly flawed as does happen) or even a full refund on unopened software returned within 30 days (should you have gotten the wrong gift or if you have second thoughts for whatever reason)--"unopened" being a status STEAM does not possess. no, STEAM is buyer beware.

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