Game: Half-Life
Developer: Valve Software (Sierra Studios)
Minimum Requirements: 133MHz or faster Intel Pentium MMX, Cyrix M2 or AMD processor, 24MB RAM, CD-ROM Drive, 150MB hard disk space, 2MB graphics accelerator, Windows 95/98/NT/2000

Well, I'm saving the best for last. Half-life is, in my opinion, the best first person shooter ever made, even better than Quake 3. See, even though it is over a few years old (it was released in 1998), it still holds in a class of its own. Why? It's not because it has the best graphics (that's not to say that it doesn't either) but it's because of the gameplay. See, Half-life is more than just running around shooting people, it's running, ducking, hiding, reloading and then shooting people (yes, you actually have to reload your weapons). All those extra obstacles really adds to the realism of the game and actually makes you think about your next move.

As mentioned above, even though Half-life might not be the best-looking game out there at this moment, its graphics are still extremely realistic. Valve has paid extra attention to even the tiniest details like realistic-looking blood splattering all over the place when you shoot someone, body parts flying everywhere when they explode, black blotches on the walls when you blow something up and other nice details. :-) Again, all this extra detail really adds to the realism.

There are the usual singleplayer and multiplayer modes of this game. The singleplayer is excellent. Again, Half-life is very different from the rest because each of its levels are connected and you never actually leave the map. The entire singleplayer game is basically played on one HUGE map that loads into different "chapters." All this is connected to a storyline, which really makes the player feel like they are actually in the situation in the game. Multiplayer is also excellent. Players have the choice of playing on a LAN or through the Internet. Gameplay is usually very smooth when playing multiplayer. (Gandalf is actually planning a LAN party for 8-16 people to play Half-life multiplayer.)

I must stress that the quality that makes Half-life stand out from the rest of the crowd is its gameplay. Like I said before, instead of the usual run-around-and-blow-everything-up type of gameplay, Half-life adds a little bit of realism (such as having to reload your weapon) to make this OnePC's most recommended game (for now).

Buy Half-Life @ Amazon.com
Download Half-Life Demo (48.5MB)