This entry should be no surprise to anyone who’s worked out a pattern in my gaming habits or to anyone who knows anything at all about games. Although the mechanics of the game weren’t fundamentally different to it’s predecessors, Half-life stood head and shoulders above the competition because of the way it was designed and its heavy reliance on narrative driven gameplay. This was obvious from the moment you started the game with the legendary tramride sequence through the top secret Black Mesa research facility. The first 20 minutes or so of the game was spent setting up the arena that the game took place in. It was the calm before the storm. Then, during a highly dangerous experiment, all hell breaks loose and the walls came crashing down and everything that you had already seen had been changed.

One of the major innovations that Half-life brought to the FPS genre was the introduction of unique scripted sequences - little scenes especially developed for the game that you got to see once if it all. These ranged from the benign and humorous (a scientist banging angrily on a soft drink machine) to the scary (a scientist being dragged screaming into an air duct and chunks of blood and gore being spat out). Someof the most memorable for me came late on in the game: for example, at one point you’re crawling through some of the endless air ducts that the facility has when all of a sudden you here some voices saying “He’s up there - in the ducts!” A gun cocks and shots are fired and ahead of you, the darkness of the duct is broken by bullet holes letting in shafts of light. It’s a very dramatic and cinematic moment but you’re not just being shown it, you’re actually playing it.

Unfortunately, I felt that while it was a superb game, Half-life jumped the shark in the last act when you arrived in the alien world of Xen and the game turned into a rather tedious, low gravity platform game. The addition to your arsenal of a high powered alien weapon that never needed ammunition as it constantly recharged also took something away from the game. And that’s why, as much as I loved the original, it’s Half-life 2 that makes this list.

Taking place some 20 years after the first game, you - still playing the MIT graduate and all round laconic, bespectacled hero Gordon Freeman - are woken from stasis by the mysterious, gravel voiced G-Man. One more iconic train ride later and you find yourself in City 17, a former unspecified Eastern European city. As with the first game, you spend the first 20 minutes or so wondering around weaponless, being shown the world as it is now - and the world is not a pleasant place.

Half-life’s approach of treating the game like a cinematic story rather than just dropping you in a room full of monsters, giving you a gun and letting you get on with it, is what sets it apart from the rest. But it never needlessly bogs you down with exposition - the characters you meet and interact with all assume that you know what’s been happening and that you’ve just been missing for 20 years. And why not? Since that time, an alien race known as the Combine has successfully invaded, conquering the world in a mere 7 hours and the population has been shifted into the safety of fortified cities. (How do you know all this if there’s no exposition? The devil is in the details and there’s ever so much detail! Snatches of conversations you can overhear, newspaper clippings and computer screens you can look at, inferences from what people say to you all help - but none of it is essential to the game.)

I love everything about this game. The new graphics engine makes the place come alive with high-res graphics giving the world a photorealistic quality. The intergrated physics engine makes the place seem more real and the carry over from the first game of the scripted sequences and dialogue makes the world more threatening by letting Combine soldiers engage in random acts of oppression and brutality and more depressing by showing you repressed humans giving up on life. The already impressive AI of enemy soldiers was improved in the second game making for some fantastic set piece firefights with enemy soldiers who provide covering fire for each other as they try to outflank you - there’s nothing more disheartening than chucking a grenade at a group of baddies than having them shout “Grenade!” and take cover or, worse still, picking it up and throwing it right back at you.

As with the original Half-life, there are no levels as such - each area transitions seamlessly into the next and the feeling of immersion in the world is barely interrupted. The introduction of drivable vehicles certainly made getting around easier as well as making the game seem a lot bigger and during the course of HL 2 you get to explore City 17, a massive canal complex (by means of jetboat), a massive coastal area (by means of car), an old deserted town known as Ravenholme (a “survival horror” level which is just the scariest place in the entire game), the “processing” facility at Nova Prospekt and others until, by the end of the game, you find yourself once again running through the streets of City 17, fighting pitched battles with the Combine forces alongside the forces of the human Resistance - taking up arms against such memorably terrifying foes like the Striders; towering, biomechanical tripods that are almost impossible to defeat. (Again, the AI here is fantastic - your companions in arms will come running down the street towards you yelling “Strider!” and then trying to find any sort of shelter or cover and returning fire, however ineffectually.) The attention to detail mean that it constantly feels like there’s something going on throughout the game world, whether you’re there or not. It’s not only great game design but is fantastic and compelling story telling too.

If you’re at all into video games (particularly PC gaming but with the recent release of The Orange Box, PS3 and XBox 360 owners can also take part) then this is a game that you should play (unless you don’t like shooters that is). If you haven’t got it yet then I can recommend the aforementioned Orange Box as it contains not only Half-Life 2 but the two episodic sequels, Team Fortress 2, Portal and, I believe, Half-Life 1 and its exapansion packs as well. Not bad for a mere £27! I also happen to have a copy of Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 to give away so if haven’t got it and you want it, drop me a line at the usual address.