Gaming Masterpieces: Half-life

Half-life. The name should be enough to spark a certain feeling in your mind. If it isn't, then you are not a gamer. Half-life: you should know it without me telling you that it's one of the better first-person shooters that has ever hit the market.
Whenever i think of Half-life, i can't really think of anything that was bad about it, or that i didn't like about it. Not to say that the game didn't have SOME flaws, just that everything it stands for tends to dim that to the point that they're not recognisable anymore.
At first glance, Half-life was just a normal FPS with some guy who shoots aliens and soldiers. But there's something about it... something in the way it's done that says "you're here" in a way that no other shooter can, because it heavily exploits the features based on human emotions: the feeling and setting. Until now, no other game has managed to get me so intrigued in the exploration of a top-secret science facility which destroys itself as you go deeper and deeper down its dark corridors. The feeling is amplified by the way the story is told, i.e. only through the eyes of the main character, which is given a name but not a face: Gordon Freeman. You know how he looks like through the loading screen and the game box's cover, but there is a lack of mirrors or mirror-like surfaces in this game, and we never see the game from any point of view other than Freeman's eyes. There are no cutscenes, and the intro and outro consist of trips seen in real-time through Freeman's eyes. This gives the game a measure of integration, in that you become Freeman, and whatever happens to him has a greater impact upon you than when, say, the guy in Quake died or something. Even though people talk to you, Freeman never says a word, which in Half-life 2 is exploited further by making people feel uncomfortable when they, for example, make a joke and you don't laugh.
The thing that sets you apart from the local NPCs and also the thing that tries to explain why you are able to kill 43753874 monsters without dying (if you've read my Crysis review, you'd know i consider that kind of explanation something that every FPS should have) is the HEV suit, an enviroment suit which protects you from damage received (i.e. your "armor") and offers you an interface with which you can monitor your health, ammo and so forth. You take it for experimental purposes, and you end up keeping it.
Marked with a degree of guilt from the fact that it was you who started the alien invasion of the Black Mesa Research Facility (you are lead through a series of events at the start in which you need to push a crystal inside a beam, starting a "resonance cascade" which rips apart the fabrics of dimension and invites aliens into our world), you are encouraged to explore, survive and fight your way through many diverse, interesting and challenging levels. The story also deviates, special ops marines start to appear and contrary to the belief that they're there to rescue you, start shooting everyone, including the scientists. You are taken prisoner and left to die, you escape and have to fight your way to the facility's Lambda Complex in which the scientists are devising a solution for the current situation. There are no objectives, the game doesn't feature much interface other than your normal suit's health, ammo, armor, light gauges and weapon icons, this is only what the scientists you find along the way tell you. At the Lambda Complex, you are teleported to an alien world called Xen, on which you will eventually finish the game, by killing a huge ugly... thing. This is the point when you are faced with another of the game's original elements: the G-man. The game is made to make you think that this man is always following and observing you, always appearing on a ledge, platform or level which you cannot reach (and usually cannot shoot), and as soon as you look at him, he casually and enigmatically strolls off. G-man stands for government man, because of the fact that he wears an office suit and always carries a briefcase with him. He finally faces you at the end, when you can see that he is indeed powerful, as you are without weapons and cannot do anything to harm him. He talks to you and congratulates you, saying that certain... people (although the term "people" is not used) have taken interest in your abilities, and offers you "further employment". Meanwhile, you and him are teleported through several alien scenes, ending with the tram that you rode in the intro, but that now seems to be flying through space. At the end, you can accept the G-man's proposal and exit the tram (the door opens and a teleporter light appears), or wait until the door closes, at which point you will be teleported in front of a huge army of aliens, the screen will darken and Freeman will be presumed dead. Note that Half-life 2 is designed with the first ending in mind.
Going back to the feeling, i mentioned that this game has no cutscenes. That would usually make a game dull and boring, but Half-life succeedes to become an exception to this through its wide use of scripted events. Laboratory equipment that explodes in your face, trams that explode with you in them halfway to your destination point, taking you somewhere else entirely, ambushes set up by the millitary, alien monsters knocking doors apart, all of these take the place of cutscenes, and all of them are happening in real-time, with you having not just a front-row seat, but a role in them as well. The puzzles are easy enough to not be an inconvenience and hard enough to matter. All in all, Half-life is one of the games that shouldn't be missing from a gamer's repertoire.
Following the great success of Half-life, 2 expansion packs were released: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. The former takes place through the eyes of a millitary soldier named Adrian Shepard, which appears to talk (by how the drill instructor is talking to you in boot camp), but we can't really hear what he's saying. The one thing Shepard and Freeman have in common is that they're followed around by the same man in an office suit. The ending of Opposing Force takes you face-to-face with the G-man again, and you can now see the full conclusion of the Black Mesa incident: the whole facility is nuked and wiped from the face of the world. After which, the G-man takes you into custody again. Shepard has yet to make an appearance in any of the Half-life sequels.
Blue Shift is a short expansion featuring the lab security guard Barney Calhoun, and is the only one of the Half-Life games featuring a happy ending. Barney never goes to Xen and never uses alien weapons, but sets things in motion for Half-life's sequel (such as the teleporting sequence), eventually escaping Black Mesa with a group of scientists.
The expansions didn't have the same success that Half-life originally did, but are considered worthy descendants nonetheless.
In conclusion, as long as i remain a gamer, Half-life will always have a special place in my heart as an example for how future games should be. A masterpiece in itself.