Mark takes control of the world's stealthiest scientist…

Half Life 2 is the Ninja of console shooters. Not because its main character Gordon Freeman can call upon Sam Fisher-like feats of sneakiness, or adopt the invisible assassin stylings of the Tenchu series. And it's certainly nothing to do with the type of ingenious infiltration techniques that would make Solid Snake proud. No, it's because the Xbox port of last year's PC Game of the Year had been so under-the-radar leading up to release that we weren't even sure it was happening. In fact, we didn't believe it until we were actually playing it.

Following our initial shock, however, came a pleasant surprise: despite the gargantuan gap in system specs, Half Life 2 on Xbox is the actual PC version, fully condensed to fit Microsoft's machine. Admittedly, it's only the single player mode without the Counter Strike multiplayer, and it makes some obvious visual tradeoffs for the sake of playability, but all the environments, set pieces and physics are here, from each exploding barrel down to every last headcrab. This is no mere re-imagining; it's what everyone doubted it could be: a fully playable and complete port of the PC's finest first-person shooter.

Of course, for those who have played the original version to Barney and back, that may be something of a moot point. There's certainly nothing here that owners of high-spec, Optimus Prime PCs won't have experienced before in glorious high resolution with all the aiming freedoms afforded by a mouse and keyboard. But forget that; as a PC-to-console port, that's a given. And as joypad gaming goes, there's nothing like this on Xbox or any other home system that even compares to the masterful mayhem of City 17 and beyond.

Having said that, there's two distinct ways console gamers can receive Half Life 2. Some undoubtedly won't "get" it; the thrill-ride linear progress, the immaculate use of the unparalleled physics engine and the ingeniously designed areas that take advantage of both. No, this is no gun-ho Halo wannabe, nor is it the one-trick pony that ID's Doom 3 port was so vehemently accused of being. It's an altogether different kind of FPS.

A history lesson

For those unknowing gamers then, first: the history bit. It really is worth pointing out the heritage of the Half Life brand. A wonderful game-as-event, Half Life released into a stagnating shooter genre in 1998 and took it by storm. It mixed the same linear mazeyness of then genre leaders Quake and Unreal with cinematic set pieces, irreverent humour and a unique first-person storytelling technique that put players behind the eyes of the character, while the world of the Black Mesa Research Facility went to hell around him. Half Life 2 does all of this; bigger, bolder and outright better than its predecessor, in a new, oppressive setting and with an unpredictable narrative thread. In doing all this, it reinvigorates the genre it reinvented seven years ago.

The game begins in the downtrodden dystopia of City 17. The Earth has been invaded by an alien race called the Combine, its population enslaved, and moved about randomly between ghetto-like urban arenas. To begin with, you don't know why, and you don't believe the many propaganda broadcasts that permeate the City's single television channel. Before long however you meet a fellow Black Mesa escapee and become embroiled in an underground resistance that sees City 17's entire Combine collective on your tail.

What makes the adventure truly stand out is its uncanny mix of great gunplay, outstanding level design and real-world physics. Each more than the sum of their parts, it's impossible to tell where one element ends and the other begins. From the beginning, Half Life 2 constructs a believable, solid and cohesive game world in which to ply its trade. It then gives you weapons with which to wreak havoc, a convoluted stream of corridors, tunnels, and structures to explore, and fills these with intelligent, thought provoking puzzles. Can't access a high window? Try stacking some nearby crates. A ledge just out of your reach? Drop some bricks on the back end of a nearby wooden plank that's splayed over a concrete cylinder. Voila! A makeshift seesaw.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg - the game positively explodes after its opening two hours. First, a marathon run through a sewage-stained reservoir sees you careering the first of the game's many vehicles between hordes of the game's Combine compliment, desperately weaving to avoid gunfire, explosives and the floating remnants of City 17's once great civilization. Then comes the game's true raison d'etre - the gravity gun. Oh how one matter-moving weapon can make such a difference; the gravity gun is not only Half Life 2's signature weapon, it's an integral part of both the game's combat and its puzzle-solving dynamic. With it, no longer are you forced to conserve ammo, or fall back on the ever-present crowbar. The gravity gun gives options that no other shooter ever has; deny your delight after picking up a spinning circular saw blade and shredding a room full of Zombies. Go on, we dare you.

If the transition of the game's physics engine to Xbox is impressive, it's entirely equalled by the arresting experience of the HL2 in motion. It may not be the full-spec home computer release, but this console port has, ironically, not been done by halves; it gets the absolute maximum out of the machine, managing a very good impression of a medium spec PC running the game with reduced texture detail.

Okay, so the framerate drops to a crawl in certain places, but only in the game's busiest instances, and renders proceedings unplayable on less than a handful of occasions. The compromise is entirely worth it for the gritty, maturely crafted and immersive game world, the hi-octane twists of its ever-enthralling narrative and some truly humane characters exhibiting emotion with animation as only a next-gen system should be able. Half Life 2 looks better on Xbox than it ever had a right to, and brings to the table a style of shooter previously unrealised in the mass market of mainstream console gaming. For that, Valve can only be applauded.

There are those who would claim that Half Life 2 should have been released on 360 as a true killer app on launch, to improve on the award winning formula rather than hold it high as a last-gasp great of Microsoft's first console venture. Then there are those who will spurn Valve's console port as a one dimensional romp with an altogether inferior approach to the system's own signature shooter. Yet to dismiss Half Life 2 on either count would be churlish. It gives discerning gamers a long-awaited cerebral shooter with every bit of the quality of Halo, that doesn't try to trump the Master Chief at his own game. It leaves the carnage, warfare and online modes behind and delivers instead the best all-around twelve-hour one-player adventure the system has to offer. Regardless of its perspective then, to view Xbox Half Life 2 as anything other than a triumph would be as misguided as the game is outstanding.

GAME's Verdict

• Gritty, immersive and cohesive gameworld that's a joy to explore.
• Supreme pacing, puzzles, set pieces and first-person storytelling.
• The sound! The animation! The physics! On Xbox! Sublime.

• Frame-rate issues when the going gets hectic.
• No online mode or splitscreen multiplayer.

Review by: Mark Scott
Review Published: 25.11.05

Half a life is more than enough for our Jonny...

It's a sad fact of being a games journo that you find it harder and harder to really be amazed by footage of new games. Not that games aren't still exciting - of course they are - but when you have to play dozens of excellent new titles a month there's obviously some desensitisation.

Stuff like Halo 2 on Xbox looks great, and we already know it's going to kick ass once we play it, but viewing footage of the game didn't cause us to whoop like US games journos at a WWE mud-wrestling jamboree. Half-Life 2 though. Wow. Watching the short videos that have so far been released onto the web had us gasping, laughing, rewinding, and in some cases, dropping dead from shock. This is truly amazing stuff - light years ahead of any other game on the release schedule of any other system.

Half-Life is a game that needs no introduction to most PC gamers. But just in case, here we go. Over fifty Game Of The Year Awards. Eight million copies sold at retail worldwide. Facilitated the most popular online game in history.

That's some mighty impressive figures. And well deserved too. When Half-Life first emerged in 1998 it sent a shock through the games industry and especially the PC gaming community. First-person shooters were still the new thing, but had grown somewhat tired.

With its blend of gripping sci-fi storytelling, balanced combat, fearsome enemy AI and scripted yet interactive sequences, Half-Life changed gaming forever. As bearded and bespectacled everyman Gordon Freeman, you started the game as you began a new job at a top-secret underground facility, and before you could even enquire about cigarette break allowances you were trapped in no man's land as a war raged between government black-ops soldiers and a hideous alien invasion force.

Fast forward to 2003 and it seems we're in much the same position. First-person shooters are still the staple diet of the PC gamer, but the genre has again grown stale. The last big FPS release, Unreal 2, proved emphatically to many that the genre was running on fumes. Uninspired combat, plodding plotting, overblown weaponry, schoolyard female characterisation - it seemed that the first-person shooter had nowhere to turn. Except from, of course, down another identikit sci-fi corridor.

Until recently, when Valve, who developed the original Half-Life, made their shock announcement. Half-Life 2 has been in development for five years, and it's practically finished. The release date is September 30th 2003, a mere couple of months away at the time of writing. And best of all, the indications are undeniable that Half-Life 2 will catapult the genre into an exciting new era once more.

At the end of the first game, the enigmatic G-Man, the evil besuited fella who was somehow behind the mess, offered Gordon a choice. Work for him (quite possibly in The Pursuit of Evil™), or be ripped apart by his army of extra-terrestrial lapdogs. Mmmm, there's a toughie. Half-Life 2 assumes you chose the latter, natch.

Valve aren't releasing plot-specifics yet, but we do know that the game takes place "not long" after the first title, and in the fictional European City 17. We also know that the tubby and loveable security guard Barney appears, having survived the first game, which is good news for his army of fans - Barney's popularity even led to his own spinoff - Blue Shift. Oh, and there is no trip to the alienworld of Xen this time. We didn't actually mind it - but most of you hated that part of the original, so Valve has left it out.

One major new character is Alyx. The daughter of one of the scientists from the original title, she will fight side by side with you at numerous points of the game. Alyx is a laudably refreshing portrayal of a woman in an FPS, in that she doesn't feel the need to wear skintight PVC and thrust her cleavage at you all time, but what's most remarkable at this stage is that Valve are using her to show off their stunning new facial animation technology. This time around, people, move, speak and act in a thoroughly believable, and importantly, human manner. One of the strong points of Half-Life was that for a game it had many surprisingly emotional moments, and with lifelike characters Valve are looking to seriously expand on this oft-neglected area of videogame storytelling.

The aliens have also made the required leap, and now are more frightening than ever. All the old favourites, such as the Head-Crabs and Barnacles are back but this time they're joined by bigger, more pant-wetting aliens, such as the Antlions, which can smell human sweat from a great distance and swarm towards you in great numbers, and most impressive of all, the Strider. These humungous, tripedal horrors are seen stomping all over City 17, bringing to mind the ancient BBC sci-fi series Tripods but with a considerably bigger budget (and no French lad called 'Beanpole', at least we presume).

Of course, the armed forces will be making their unsubtle presence felt, and this time, they're even smarter. One of Half-Life's most impressive features was the scary AI, which had soldiers working effectively as teams to flush you out and take you down, and this has clearly advanced as far as everything else in the game, and it's not just the humans you have to worry about - some species of alien are now remarkably intelligent as well. They'll remember where they last saw you and hound you regardless of where you run or try to hide. It's all very well pushing a filing cabinet against the door and hiding in the corner sobbing, but after a few silent seconds there'll be a rap-rap-rapping at your chamber door, and a huge splintering crash followed by the crack-crack-cracking of your skull if you can't find a way to fight back.

Perhaps Half-Life 2's most amazing advances are in the area of physics. Valve seem to have provided something that gamers have been crying out for, for a long time - a realistic environment where the only limit to what you can do is your imagination. Wood acts like wood, metal acts like metal, and water and fire have exactly the kind of behavioural properties you'd expect them to in real life.

This creates a kind of toybox effect, where the developers put you and hundreds of highly intelligent creatures and NPCs into a realistic world and stand back to watch the effects. The possibilities are endless, as you and your actions can have huge repercussions on the environment around you, which allows a massive amount of freedom in deciding how to deal with situations, as you put what we all naturally know about weight, force and inertia, as well as Chaos Theory, into practice, with staggering and sometimes unpredictable results. That huge enemy might be shaking off shotgun blasts, but if you're clever you may be able to figure out how to crush it beneath a huge metal skip, if you can drop it from high enough.

Despite the stunning looks and advanced AI and Physics routines, Valve are promising that you won't need a monster of a machine to play the game. The kind of figures being thrown around now for minimum spec are a 700MHz Pentium III with a TNT graphics card, so this should definitely be accessible to most gamers.

The original Half-Life was so good that gamers are expecting the impossible from Half-Life 2, and yet on the evidence we've seen we remain totally confident that the sequel is going to deliver what it promises, and much, much more. Book your ticket to City 17 now, because you do not want to miss out when the fun starts.

Preview by: Jonny Austin

Interview with Gabe Newell

How's it going?

Pretty good. Thanks for asking.

Standard question first - what's your name, age, role and favourite game that isn't one of your own?

Gabe Newell, 40, managing director, Mario 64.

There must be a lot of pressure on, because everyone's *really* looking forward to HL2 - are you getting the games equivalent of second album panics?

Yep. We've received a great deal of support from the press, from retailers, from fans, and from the online community in the years since the original Half-Life shipped. Now it's up to us to pay them all back, and, yes, we are terrified that we won't deliver.

Is the levitation gun (if you could give us the real name, we'd sound way better!) used to levitate / fire things about in the tech demo trailers going to be in the game?

Yes. If you have a system in your game - shaders, particles, physics, whatever, and you want to have it be about gameplay and not just presentation, then you are probably going to give the player some straight-forward method of having an input into that system. You could restrict the player to having indirect or "realistic" methods of input a la Trespasser, but that proved to be such a disaster that none of us tinkering with physics ever want to bring up Trespasser. Especially not in an interview - nope. You'd have to be a total gnork to say "Trespasser" in an interview where you want people to believe physics could be fun.

Can you / are you willing to comment on Doom III?

Sure - I think the thought police are over at Monolith this week. I think Doom 3 looks great. I'll buy it.

What's the official minimum spec machine for it, supported operating systems etc?

Windows 98 and later, Pentium-III 800, with a DX-6 level graphics accelerator.

How would you describe the game to someone who's not a hardcore FPS fan, why is it going to rock their world and have them running to upgrade their office PC to play it?

We've shown Half-Life 2 to a number of very casual or "so casual they don't" gamers. The characters and the world interactivity seems to be the key for them. Usually they tell us "it looks just like a movie, except I'll be in it", and we grit our teeth and say "Interactive Movie" is a Really Bad Thing, and they are not to say it again, or we'll take away their Half-Life 2 hat.

It seems like guns alone won't be enough - what else can you use to survive?

I was showing some people down in Hollywood the game last week, and was going through zombie town, showing how I could "Rambo" my way through with guns a-blazin, or I could "MacGyver" my way through by paying attention to the world and being clever (it's easier to be clever when you helped design the level, of course). We're trying pretty hard to reward people for thinking about what's in front of them and the tools the world gives them that could be useful.

There seems to be a sense of a free world, in which you figure your own way out to deal with stuff - or are there pre-set triggers (such as the pipe swinging and knocking everyone out)?

The physics gives you a lot of freedom to approach things your own way, but we also try to insert more discretely authored experiences to give people a sense of "that was cool" without having them feel too much "that was really contrived."

What's your favourite new feature?

The character technology.

Are we correct to assume it'll have WON authentication or something like it in place to whack nasty people with?

It will use the Steam authentication and anti-cheat technology.

Does Half Life 2 have its own anti-cheat code at the heart of the game?

It will use an updated version of what's out there on Steam.

Will it be a exclusive to any one server provider or will All Seeing Eye work with it?

We think of third party server browsers as being MODs. We love MODs, not least because our customers love MODs.

Did the success of Half-Life take you by surprise, and how has it influenced the design of HL2? For example, will you be keeping support for the large modding community?

Yes, we were quite surprised. We've tried to learn from the original so we have made the new engine much more flexible and approachable for MOD authors (e.g. MOD authors will find it a lot easier to add network entities, they will have explicit control over all of the rendering on a per-poly basis if they want to). It's challenging, because now there is a great deal of more functionality, and the art bar is a lot higher, so the MOD teams will have their work cut out for them.

When will the HL2 SDK (Software Development Kit - so happy MODDers can get going tinkering with it) be released?

Hopefully we will start releasing pieces of it to a broader group of developers starting in August. Some developers already have the engine, such as Troika.