Half Life 2 (Spoilers!)

I am not an avid gamer, but one of my favourite videogame series is the Half Life 2 PC game series. I like this series of games for several reasons, one being the game style. These games are First Person Shooter style games, whose gameplay depends heavily on physics. When I play these games, I feel very immersed in the environment, and I like how I am free to explore the world, in some ways more free than in real life. For example, in the game I might navigate to an interesting area by jumping on top of cars and over fences--something I wouldn't normally do in real life.

The other reason I like this series is for the story. The original Half Life game did not have a very complex story, and was more of a horror genre game. In Half Life, you play an experimental physicist working in a fictitious lab called Black Mesa, based on the Los Alamos National Lab. You are doing high energy experiments on rocks of a mysterious origin, which you later discover originate from an alien world. You also learn that the researchers have been able to develop interplanetary teleportation technology from them. At the beginning of the game, you witness the researchers perform an experiment on the purest sample yet found, which accidentally causes large numbers of wormholes, or portals, to open up. Unfortunately, these portals are connected to a world inhabited by alien life. The native wildlife proceed to pass through these portals and kill most of the researchers in the process. The rest of the game involves you attempting to escape from the research facility alive.

Half Life 2 has a much more in-depth story line. The story begins about 15 years after the events of Half Life, where we discover that the portal storm caused by the experiments at Black Mesa caught the attention of a hostile interdimensional totalitarial empire known as the Combine. The Human race was mostly wiped out by the Combine within a few weeks of their arrival; however, a Human representative struck a deal with the Combine to keep the survivors alive, under the condition that their reproductive capabilities be restricted, and moderated by the Combine. It is in this setting that we are thrown into the fray, to lead a rebellion against the Combine. The world is also much bigger in Half Life 2, where we travel both over water and land, seeing many different places. The game series now has a spin off series called Portal, which I think I will discuss in my next blog entry.