#5: Half-Life (1998)

When I played this, never before had I felt that I had such a vested interest in the outcome of a video-game. This was even the one and only occasion I stayed home for two days, pretending to be deathly ill, simply to finish it, which I did in a three-day blitzkrieg. You don't understand, I had to. Yes, it didn't have the prettiest graphics EVAR, but that didn't matter.

It spawned two of the most successful multiplayer games ever to grace us in Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Its successor, which ran on the venerable Source Engine, gave birth to many more, including Dota 2 (which was very nearly on this list), Portal 1 & 2 and Left 4 Dead among the stand-outs. Of course, it's not a very fair thing to do, to list a game engine's creations as part of the success of a game, else Quake III: Arena would have so made it. Instead, I'll focus on what actually made Half-Life great. Not too tough a task, mind you.

Where it all started with GREATNESS, was the introduction. It didn't tell you what happened, but everything started with that famous (or infamous) train/cart/transport ride welcoming you to the Black Mesa research facility. Then the accident. It let you experience it all, instead of narrating, as so many games did. It was a stroke of genius, ensuring involvement.

I'd always had an almost morbid fascination with industrial "art". Big vats of goo, power-plants, dynamos, wiring, huge silos...the more deadly and other-worldly, the better. Half-Life certainly delivered in that department. More than that, it very cleverly based a whole bunch of puzzles on this. I still DELICIOUSLY remember the one based on a huge alien trapped in a test-fire area silo for an experimental weapon. You had to turn on the oxygen, fuel and power in order to BLOW that ugly thing away.

Not only that, but although nothing will ever beat the perfection of Quake III's deathmatch, there were certain aspects of the Half-Life multiplayer that beat even that. Who can describe the joys of playing the "Crossfire" map? The very first time I played Half-Life, multiplayer, was against my father. I was hidden in an air-con duct, dropped a satchel charge, and waited for a minute or two. Along came my father, innocently inspected the satchel, ran forward and backward over it in an effort to pick it up, before being blown sky-high. 

This was another of those where the real game only starts about half-way through. True, the aliens are fairly formidable, but when the marines enter the mix...it becomes a whole different game. The pure, unadulterated fun of duking it out with one of those bad boys takes me back to being a teenager. Story - A+. Graphics - B+. Puzzles and Gameplay - A+. Fun - A+++.