It feels wrong rating a game higher than I normally would just because the concept is funny. Most of the things people say about it is true, it's unresponsive, pretty sluggish, the controls are complete nonsense (you press back on the d-pad to block), but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a little bit of fun playing it just because of the novelty. Besides, if you just play the story mode like I did, it's pretty easy to just stun-lock the AI by button mashing, and once you get used to the controls, there is a genuine cathartic joy in just high kicking women, children, and the elderly to death.

In a lot of other FPS games, you play as a trained soldier or if not that at least someone with some degree of combat training. In Half-life, you play as a random nerdy scientist who gets flung into a life or death scenario for reasons entirely outside of his control, and what's cool about Half-Life is that it absolutely makes you feel exactly like that. You could argue this is a skill issue, but when you're fighting in Half-Life, every second Gordon continues to live feels like a miracle from God, which only makes it all the more satisfying when you finally win and get to move on to the next area. The slippery movement, aim assist making sure you don't have to stop moving and jumping around like a maniac, and satisfying weapons make Half-Life's combat some of the most frantic, desperate, but rewarding I've ever played, and it's definitely my favorite aspect of the game.

The puzzles and especially the story are also great, especially for the time this came out. i think Valve's puzzle crafting was definitely not as refined as it later became in Portal and HL2, but most of the puzzles in the game do still toe that line of not being too cryptic, but also not being so easy they aren't satisfying. The story of Half-Life is essentially just a story of everything going progressively more wrong, and i think it adds a lot to the desperate atmosphere I associate the game with. Every single possible thing is breaking or not going as planned, and it feels like the entire universe is against you, but somehow you still manage to keep progressing. The only thing keeping this game from 5 stars is the platforming sections, (especially some of the final areas), which due to the aforementioned slippery controls are more annoying than fun, but those sections are still somewhat manageable, and not all of them are even bad.

The controls and feel of the game hold up really well, there's a level of precision there where you feel totally in control of your vehicle while also moving at 400 km/h. Pulling off really tight turns feels really great and cathartic, it's a very sleek and tight game. My only problem is how unforgiving it can be, once you fuck up and get knocked back to like 7th place, you're probably never going to get back to third in a million years because the track is so narrow and if another vehicle even slightly touches you, you get flung into the side of the track and damaged. The narrowness and tight turns of these tracks, while being really fun in first place when you only have to dodge the occasional bot that you're lapping, if you're in 4th and there's two other racers next to you, it's a complete nightmare where everyone is getting flung into walls and you're probably going to run out of power and explode. Speaking of running out of power and exploding, I also wish that attacking other racers was a more viable option. Theoretically, it's possible to screw over everyone else by ramming them into the walls, but 90% of the time if you try that it mostly just harms you more than the person you're trying to damage., which is a real shame for me since that would both partially solve the problem of the tracks being so narrow that it just turns into a mess when you try to pass someone, while also allowing me to indulge in my childhood dreams of being a supervillain from Speedracer . This would probably only apply to the main three other pods(?) so that when you're in first the challenge of still having to dodge the other pods occasionally would still be there.

I've read from a few places that this game was inspired by the John Cage composition 4'33, but honestly it sort of feels like a kind of sarcastic response to John Cage. The idea that I've always taken from 4'33 is that even though the musicians are silent, the audience will make some small ambient noises just from slightly shifting around in their seats or whatever else, which combined with the ambiance of the room the piece is being performed in creates a series of sounds that will be unique at each performance. This game is different though, the "game-play" of the game will be the exact same loading bar for everyone. The unique aspect comes from the fact that in order to beat the game, the player must be the only one playing for the whole 4 minutes and 33 seconds (Which is pretty easy nowadays, I wasn't interrupted a single time.) To me, this comes across as questioning why we value uniqueness in the first place. As I was waiting to win the game, I found myself wondering why it's important to be the only one who happens to be playing at this very moment when people have had this exact same experience before me and will after me. It sort of reminds of The Stanley Parable, where in that game the idea of choice and freewill is questioned by having a pre determined path and story even when the player believes they've gone off the beaten path (The ending where you jump out of bounds from the office window is a great example of what I'm talking about here). Here, there's a similar thing where even if the player may feel unique, every moment of the game is pre-determined, meaning every successful play-through will always be the same unless someone else decides to play the game during your play-through. It's never truly unique. And you can apply this to all sorts of other things as well, especially art. What does it mean to be unique if you can easily just make an exact copy of any given painting. Why is the painting being the one originally painted by the artist even matter if you can just make an exact copy of the painting? These same questions can also be asked of movies, shows, books, John Cage compositions, and as this game shows, video games.

Also I quickly want to write about how this game pushes the idea of what is a video game. The only way you can interact with it at all is by launching the game. Does that make this a movie or a video? I would argue no, because other people launching the game will reset your play-through. But that's not a change in the game itself, that's just rewinding the game to the beginning and starting it over. If you were watching a movie in hotel lobby and the staff reset the movie every time someone else glanced at the screen, would that be a video game? or even just a game? I'm not sure, but I think it's really cool that this game makes me ask. Really, that's why I like this game and other games like this. Sure, some may say they're pretentious and not worth playing, but I just love that something as simple as this can ask so many questions about the way that we think about art, uniqueness, and what it means to be a videogame.