Lol.
For those that don't know.....
Half Life is one of the most definitive PC FPS franchises, the most sold, and vastly eclipses virtually most every FPS made in the FPS genre.
The evolution of the PC FPS Genre has been:
Wolf 3d
Quake
Half Life
Everything else
It's basically the Halo of the PC FPS world..For starters.
The primary aspects of why it's such a great franchise is the attention to storyline. Unlike every FPS made up until that time, very few had major backstories, and if there were any, they were in the manuals, and not ingame. Half-Life did a great job of intergrating the storyline into gameplay, telling the twisted tale of one of the best sci-fi stories in the past 10 years.
Your basically at the epicentre of the end of mankind, and the plotline is interwoven around your actions ingame, and is just a great storyline (I spent about 2 nights reading the storyline, because I never really knew much about the HL series).
Also, the game focuses alot on puzzles, and platform-jumping as parts of skill, instead of just run-n-gun gaming (ie, Halo, Quake, Doom).
And finally, the biggest reason HL is the best PC FPS (and arguably the best ever): Counterstrike. CS is the reason we even have multiplayer for many games. CS paved the way for huge online server support, since so many people play it (and still do, nearly 10 years after it came out). Not only this, the source code is readily available, allowing players to heavily modify the Quake Engine gaming, allowing for millions of mods. CS has a Goldeneye mod, transforming Half Life into an online multi-play Goldeneye with 100% accuracy to the game (but much better graphics), as well as dozens of other huge mods.
So there you have it, Half Life is to PC FPS's as Final Fantasy is to RPGs, and Mario is to platformers.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
