You're first experience of HL

ríomhaire

ríomhaire

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For many of you this will be the Hazard Course the Tram Ride or the Trainstation but for me this was actually the Opposing Force demo. After playing this I though OP4 was a horror game, the zombies and vortigaunts scared the living shit out of me. (as far as I knew) I was a soldier sent in on some secret mission (probably to save those scientists) when my chopper is shot down. I get knocked out and wake up to find all my squadmates dead. Then some wierd monster has taken over my buddy and kills everyone (this sparked my drawing for about a week, the headcrab, not the killing). I make it out and find a gun when holly shit there's monsters appearing infront and behind me in a flash of green lightning, scared the living shit out of me and gave me a fear of alien slaves which I didn't get over until I finished HL for the first time. It was also the most (possibly only) imersive game I'd ever played. I replayed that demo so many times.

What about you?
 
When my best friend told me "Dude you have to play this awsome game" That game was HL1. And 3 hours after I left, I bought it. Best choice I made.
 
I actually got HL2 just for CS:S but I had dail up at the time and that became kinda hellish compared to other games I played online at the time. So I started playing HL2 for the hell of it being the actual game I bought and it turned out to be kick ass, I knew it was quite different than most games just from G-man 'waking' me up. I didn't play HL 1 before so I figured I saved the world or something in the first game from the way G-man was talking to me "no one is more deserving of a rest and all the effort in the world would have gone to waste until...well lets just say your time has come again." which is when I knew this was gonna be saving the world or something of the sort type of game. And the citizens praising the hell outta me kinda proved that.
 
I am the first experience of Half Life?

I don't know what to feel!
 
actually, I saw it in a Wal-Mart after it had already earned the "game of the year" and just thought "Pssh...rip off of Quake is all it is. How lame is that, your a scientist? pssh." i was a quake/doom fanboy...i stand greatly corrected......although I was semi-right about the "quake ripoff" part seeing as how it was a heavily modified quake engine that the game was based on if I remember correctly.
 
huntingbear said:
actually, I saw it in a Wal-Mart after it had already earned the "game of the year" and just thought "Pssh...rip off of Quake is all it is. How lame is that, your a scientist? pssh." i was a quake/doom fanboy...i stand greatly corrected......although I was semi-right about the "quake ripoff" part seeing as how it was a heavily modified quake engine that the game was based on if I remember correctly.
Click to expand...
By that logic, the Ship is a rip-off of HL2.
 
ríomhaire said:
By that logic, the Ship is a rip-off of HL2.
Click to expand...

gotta hate those people that cant think of their own idea haha :)

my first HL experience was my neighbor, who still lives next door, but moved past videogame playing....he bought it the week of its release and i watched him play through most of the game, at the time i was unable to play it on my pc, but a few months later i was, back then u could have like 10 poeple use 1 cd-key, so he let me just use his game and cd key.....and aside from wanting a box to hold onto, cuz i used to collect pc game boxes (the super giant ones, still have a ton of em, including gunman chronicles, for u die-hards) my steam account still somehow is attached to that cd-key cuz ive never used another.....i no longer hang out with my nieghbor but i have thanked him online for his cd-key contribution, cuz 8 years later, here i am. more specifically though, my most memorable part was watching the "on a rail" section, he would just mess around with it constantly, and it was my fav part at the time.
 
Waking up at 6 AM, to get ready for school, to see my dad with a crossbow on BootCamp, coming up the stairs to the side with the shotgun, and has a view of the little sniper hole..anyway, my dad zoomed in, got his face, him happily shouting, "Yeah got him!"...and that is the day I realized I wanted to own the game. Best decision ever.

Thanks dad....heh, now that I think of it, he downloaded the copy, and his keygen code actually worked on the crappy browser. I forget what it used to be. Anyway, see, Pirating something can lead to you actually buying the game *2 times for me* and purchasing later additions. :)

huntingbear said:
actually, I saw it in a Wal-Mart after it had already earned the "game of the year" and just thought "Pssh...rip off of Quake is all it is. How lame is that, your a scientist? pssh." i was a quake/doom fanboy...i stand greatly corrected......although I was semi-right about the "quake ripoff" part seeing as how it was a heavily modified quake engine that the game was based on if I remember correctly.
Click to expand...


I was a Quake/Doom fanboy too. I also know what you meant about "bleh" factor for HL. Saw a commercial for it, was like "God, when are they going to stop making cheap ripoffs. Heh...that's what I get for judging a game off of 15 seconds of random gameplay videos....
 
I distinctly recall. I was 8 years old, and my dad came home from work, saying, "Hey, you liked Dark Forces, right? A friend of mine said you'd like this." He hands me the HL disc in a jewel case. I have never heard of it. At 8, I of course did not have the faintest clue what 'Half-Life' meant, and had no idea what I was in for.

The first real sensation that "This game is AWESOME!" was when I was watching the Xen teleport experiment go hideously wrong. I played to the start of Unforseen Consequences, and insisted my dad buy this game. He did, and I am forever grateful. At 8 years old though, some of the shit in HL was pretty damn scary.
 
A friend of mine had introduced me to Counter-Strike a long time ago at his house. I was so hooked on it that I decided that I had to buy Half-Life in order to download it. I had seen Half-Life before, saw all the GOTY awards, but it hadn't really registered into my consciousness as anything more than a stepping stone to CS.

Before I decided to buy it, however, I decided to try out the Uplink demo. I spent an entire day downloading that ****ing thing, but it was worth it. It scared me, the marine battles were awesome, and I couldn't get enough of it.
I had actually started playing it around midnight and my friend was looking over my shoulder. In the final scene, where the huge Gargantua busted out and started wrecking the room, we both stiffened with fear. When he broke the supports to the platform I was standing on and sent us colliding towards his feet, we completely freaked and screamed our heads off.

Cue fade to black, we're just sitting in silence until my friend lets out "HOLY ****ING SHIT". After that, Half-Life took priority over Counter-Strike for me.

Hmm... I think I'm gonna go play som HLDM right now.
 
It was so long ago I can't remember exactly but anyways.

It started in school when I went in 5th class (or 6). One friend of mine told us about a fantastic game his father had bought. I remember him saying that you killed a lot of aliens and zombies in some sort of research lab. I can also reveal that I was pretty afraid of FPS's in general back then, probably due to Duke Nukem 3D.
Anyway, he said so much cool stuff about it that I, more and more, just needed to see how it was so I asked if I could borrow it from him just to try it out. Unfortunately his father, what I can remember, didn't want that.

Okay, enough of that bull crap. After a while my bro's friend lend out his copy, so we installed it and launched it.
The computer we played it on was pretty shitty, generally speaking. It didn't have a decent enough graphics card so the game didn't look especially good. But back then I wasn’t really into computer games so graphics weren't something I really cared for. Still, Half-Life was one the best looking games I've ever seen when I first played it.
The first thing we did was trying out the Hazard Course, this was actually the first real training I've ever had in a game. Of course I was a little impatient scumbag back then who didn't care what the holographic woman said.
When we reached the weapons training area is really were it kicked in how damn awesome this game was. Shooting the targets were so fun and amazing, the sound on the MP5 even more (although I hate it now) and it really felt like it was me firing a gun at some stationary targets.

Basically the Hazard Course is my first experience in Half-Life, probably my best experience ever because it was thanks to Half-Life I became more interested in gaming.
 
I felt absolute amazement. It was just a mind boggle. Me and a friend both played it together for the 1st time.
 
My first experience was also the Opposing force demo, I thought it was great and ended up getting the platinum pack not long after.
 
My absolute first experience wasn't me playing, I was like 10 and one of my brothers came around with this new game he said was great. I only saw the intro and wasn't allowed to see the rest after my brother had gotten the crowbar. It looked really scary :D

Many years later i played it myself, was probably the most gripping game experience ever. I think I played opposing force more though

Damn, what a game.
 
My first HL experience? Well, somewhere in the first half of 99 I had borrowed two games from a friend of mine, one was HL and the other was Unreal. I had heard of HL but not much prior to that. I played HL up until when you meet Eli and he tells you to go to the surface. Up until that point I hadn't even fought any enemies yet, but I was absolutely blown away by the atmosphere of that game, I was totally creeped out. I also tried out Unreal but I wasn't that impressed. I think it's obvious which game I bought after that.
 
Bought it in 2001 methinks. The Hazard course was fine but the intro to HL still blew my mind! With exception of WW2 games, HL was my first big FPS, and I just fell in love with AM and the whole first part of HL. Once the killing got started I felt things went downhill for a bit, at least until Office Complex, We've got hostiles, Blast pit and surface tension. Opposing Force wasn't my cup of tea but Blue Shift was. BS is the best HL expansion ever.
 
Read a review in PCZone, figured I'd be interested in getting it once I got a PC capable of playing modern games (I had a P133 :p). Annoyingly, something contrived against me when the demo was released: the buggering disc wasn't in the Cover CD case! Didn't matter tho, the Uplink demo was installed on the new PC when I brought it (twas a Pentium III 450 with a Voodoo Banshee video card). The game ran pretty well and I was blown away by the demo alone. Must have played through that demo again and again until I got the full game for my birthday in September 1999 (I didn't have) and played it through in a week. Jumped on Opposing Force the minute it was released.

At the time I was pretty new to FPS games. I wasn't keen on stuff that involved killing for some reason or other. Half-Life changed that, with a little help from Unreal 1.
 
My science teacher used to play it whilst he was teaching us

that is where i seen my first halflife moments

i then bought the generations boxset


and then i just played it till my fingers bled i remember staing up all night trying to complete blue shift within 3 days
 
Friend introduced me to Counter-Strike....I bought Half-Life for CS and ended up liking HL more.
 
My first experience was before it was released. I was involved in the Quake community quite heavily and there was talk on community forums about a new Quake Engine-based game called Half-Life.

I did some research into it and liked what I saw. I then went on to join Halflife.org before it became PlanetHalfLife for the GameSpy network. I left as soon as they merged though. I'm not one for that whole gaming network thing, I prefer independants like this place :)
 
Shippi said:
I got stuck on HL at the blast pit level. It took me sooo long to reach that point I thought it was the end boss (yeah I sucked)...
Click to expand...

Same here actually, I got stuck at "Blast Pit" and it took me more than a year before I finally came back and went through it. Unfortunately I then got stuck at the "Lambda Core" chapter too, the final sequence when you're about to get teleported to Xen, so it took about a year before I completed that as well.
So basically it took me roughly 2 years to complete Half-Life. :sleep:
 
It must have been 1999-2000 when I bought it, because I played Counter-Strike at my friends house.

The first thing I did however was play a bit of HL, and the game totally freaked me out.

I still managed to get addicted to CS for 2 years :p
 
I'm pretty sure it was when I played the game for myself, soon after it was released. I was at school and my friend lent me his copy to install (don't worry, I later bought the game, twice). I don’t remember hearing any hype about Half-Life or knowing what it was about but once I’d started playing I do remember enthusing with my friends regarding certain cinematic plot points and comedic set-pieces. For example at the beginning when everything has gone FUBAR and you try and call a lift and you cause a group of scientists to plunge to their death. The part that blew me and my mates away the most was when you first witness a scientist run to a soldier for rescue only to be gunned down, I never saw that coming and realising that the soldiers are out to get you as well as the aliens was an amazing revelation. Oh yeah, and the air-vent bit.

People who are new to the Half-Life world my not realise how ground-breaking the original game was, but not ground-breaking in terms of graphical prowess as computer games are all too often judged by.
Previous FPS like Doom games and the Quake games and others such as Blood and Duke Nukem 3D were certainly entertaining in their own way but Half-Life was the first FPS I can remember so have an engrossing plot and cool set-pieces without even resorting to pre-rendered cut-scenes (a stroke of genius).
It took me ages to finish too, I remember particularly hated some of the enclosed sections of “Interlopers”. Although, despite what some people say about the game going downhill when you get to Zen, I did like the open-atmosphere parts with the floating pads and Gonarch's Lair and Nihilanth where good bosses.

Oops, bit of a ramble there. Basicly I played Half-Life soon after it came out and liked it. A lot.
 
I was around 10 (1998), when i read in a monthly Dysney magazine (no kidding) that this so called "Half Life" game was an exelent piece of entertainment. The tiny article had a screenshot next to it: a scientist beign chased by a bullsquid! I was amazed. One year later, my older brother came back from a 3-month exchange program in Swizerland. He had this cool friend over there that organized Lan partys with HLDM and TFC! He told me everything:the guns, the TFC classes, etc...
Unfortunately, i had to wait until the Op4 demo to be able to play anything. One word:
Orgasmic
Soon after that (2001), i bought a copy (Guys, inland from Argentina is a hard place to find a legit copy of... anything), and played endless days and nights. If it wouldnt have been by HL, i wouldnt have keep gaming in general.
The AM chapter, with the exploding antyespectrometer, made me back away from the screen. It was like a revelation, that made me redefine all i new about computer games....
Later, i bought Op4 and BS bundle (yes, also pirated versions). But nothing compares to HL...
The HL2 circumstances were exactly the opposite. It was the first time i ever handled my parents credit card. And it was hard to get, since my dad is a very old-fashioned person.
At 5 AM (+5 from PST), i had been restarting my Steam over and over, until it started to download the last files...
 
My first experience of Half-Life 1?

I actually took a leaflet delivery job to raise money to buy that game, I was so poor at the time. In fact, there were two new games at the time available to me, Half-Life and SiN.

Being the type of person interested in research labs and all that, I chose Half-Life, and never played SiN, except the demo, which I thought sucked.

I fell in love with Black Mesa the night I got HL1.
 
A long time ago a friend of mine took me to a LAN place near where he lived and we played some CS and HL. The maps I remember playing are Militia (CS), Killbox (HL), and some map that was modeled after a Goldeneye level (HL).

Edit: I didn't play it again for a while after that, until I found the demo somewhere and dowloaded that. A while later I bought one of the package deals.
 
I played Blue Shift first. I loved the atmosphere the most... and it was also easier than AvP, which was the first game I had ever played before hl. Couldn't get enough of it, I played all parts hundreds of times and was thrilled to hear there's hl2 coming.
 
CyberPitz said:
Pirating something can lead to you actually buying the game
Click to expand...

i agree... some one gave me a pirated copy of half life 1, he was like: " dude this game is really good! I'll give you a copy tomarrow." so i was like: "cool". I got it, i played it, it kicked ass! was like my first FPS on pc ever! Made me wanna go out, upgrade my pc and buy half life 2! and almost every other source game as well.
 
I first played Uplink on my cousin's pc in France. We made up a song about it. I can only remember the lines: " Pied de biche et mitraileuse. C'est Halflife avec du sang... " (I hope I'm spelling that right. It means "crowbar and machine gun. This is halflife with blood..." bear in mind we were quite young and English was our first language). My brother got the game when I was about ten, and it blew us away. It was the first time I'd ever really played a game. I've since played Oposing Force and it was decent, but not a patch on HL1. I never played Blue Shift. Christ, what a game. By the way, I only completed Uplink ages after I completed HL1. I was too scared in France and time was short.
 
My first experience was in 1998 as i was making maps for Jedi Knight. I was searching for editing tools and stuff for that game and i accidentaly found an article about a preview of a game named Half-Life. I remember that someone was invited to valve office to have a look at that game. Then he wrote an enthousiastic article about what he saw, especially the astounding AI of some soldiers. As i read that i new i had to have it, and when it was released, i search in every store to find that thing. I remember it was in november 1998 when i finally saw that orange and black box with the lambda on it. I still have the box the book and the CD. That was the 1.0.0.5 version with all the lovely bugs still in it!
 
My cousin showed it to me once and let me play at his house for a while. I thought the intro was neat, and my cousin was showing me neat things you can use the 'use' key on. Then I kept dying at the part where you go down the lift and the headcrabs start falling down the side.

I hadn't played any FPS's since the old Doom/Quake days (kinda got stuck in an Age of Empires addiction around then), so I was still trying to ignore the mouse, and use arrow keys to move and ctrl to shoot. I was also wondering why space was used to jump instead of open doors. My cousin had to tell me "It might work better if you use the mouse to shoot and look around." This is sad to admit, but after growing up using only the keyboard, learning how to use the mouse was really darn hard.

Anyways, my cousin let me borrow the game. I think I put it aside to play more Age of Empires for a while :p but eventually I picked it up and got through it. My cousin also showed me Opposing Force.
 
Oh MAN I used to use just the keyboard for playing Doom 2, and when I got into my first LAN party I got hammered. So I learned then to use the mouse, although I had teething troubles with getting the mouse sensitivity right on differing mice and computers, and I still got hammered.
 
First experience was in 98, can't of been far from the release date, great memories been a half life fanatic ever since
 
In 1998, I think. I played the Uplink version and was scared to death when the resonance cascade occured. When I saw that first vortigaunt, I immediately shut down the game. :p

Two years later I played through it.
 
Well i was always a big FPS fan, doom, heretic, quake 1 and 2 - so any fps game news i kept my eye on.

There was a time where there were about 3 fps' being made at the same time - one was SIN, the other was HL and i can't remember the other... but my favourite gaming magazine gave the impression that halflife was very special.

Some online friends then told me more about it and directed me to contaminated.net (which was planethalflife originally i believe) where i read all about it and got very excited!

I bought the game within the first week of it's release, as well as a voodoo2 graphics card a bit after that. Total gaming bliss.

Never had anything been so immersive and realistic - i remember being amazed at scientiests walking around black mesa, talking to you (OMG THEIR MOUTHS MOVED!) and interacting with things in the world without just having to shoot them.

Totally awesome. I lent my copy to a bunch of friends, to show them how awesome it was and (which subsequently led them to buying their own copies of hl and hl2) we made a mod together, RAT (Runaway Train... Anyone remember it? =p). So many great memories, best $80 ever spent!!

EVER

On a side note it's really interesting hearing how young some of you guys where when you first played it - i was 13 or 14 when it came out. To think some of you were in single digit years is freaky - that'd have scared the fcuk out of me!!
 
I believe that I got the special value pack of fun about 4-5 years ago, although I'm fairly sure I played Opposing Force first, because, well, the notion of a kick-ass scientist with huge, thick glasses was unheard of to me at the time. Of course my short attention span had me stuck somewhere towards the pit worm area when I lost intrest.

I started playing Counter-Strike a lot, played the original HL, beat the evil big-headed baby boss, did a little dance, and continued with Opposing Force. I then went on a massive homicidal rampage because the ending sucked more than Rosie O' Donald's career. I eventually played Blue-Shift and tried the high-def pack...WHICH I WOULD LIKE VALVE TO RE-RELEASE SOMETIME THIS DECADE...

Oh, yeah, can't forget HL: 2...yeah, good times, good times.
 
I was 9 and we read about it a bit in the old computer and video games magazine, thought all the characters looked pretty cool (vortigaunts were called slaves) I laughed at how the ceiling-creatures were called barnacles, bought uplink, loved it, then about a year or so later afriend of mine lent it to me til I completed it. I can remember halloween night, midnight, walking into a room and feeling the terror as I heard the blast pit tentacle monster, felt amazingly cool and skillful diving under cover just in time to avoid a vortigaunts electric blast, and running into a room to see two marines going nuts with a gargantua (poor guys)
 
First time I played Half-Life and I never even had a PC. I was a console gamer. HL came out on PS2 and I rented it to see what all the PC gamers were raving about.

Played through it and fell in love with it because of it's crazy action.
 
some time before hl was to be released, hl: day one was to be released as an oem with some 3dfx card or cpu or something, but it had been leaked to the internets
I downloaded it, I played it
so yes, my first hl experience was a warez version of day one
 
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