YMMV / Half-Life

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• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • D0G, for basically being Alyx’s big badass robot companion. Valve responded to his popularity by giving him a major role in the intro of Episode One.
  • The G-Man himself is quite popular due to the whole mystery surrounding his motivations. People also get laughs out of him through Garry's Mod.
  • The All-Knowing Vortigaunt from Half-Life 2, simply because people love speculating about what he’s telling you.
  • Adrian Shephard from Opposing Force. Valve themselves have taken note of his enduring popularity and have not ruled out having him make a return at some point.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Do not claim that Overwatch soldiers participated in the Seven Hour War - they are purely a post-Seven Hour War Combine creation. SFM animations that depict Overwatch soldiers in the Seven Hour War usually get decried for doing this.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The G-Man often gets ironically called "Garry-Man" due to how Garry's Mod is similarly abbreviated as GMod.
  • The Vortigaunt who accompanies you through parts of Episode Two has no official name. Naturally, he was nicknamed Cecil.
  • Dr. Rosenberg is given no first name in-game, leading to "Stanley Rosenberg" as a popularly accepted one.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Deus Ex, as both Half-Life and Deus Ex are landmark FPS games for PC, and were released within a few years of each other (1998 and 2000, respectively). Fans of both series will also lament the cancellation of the Half-Life games headed up by Warren Spector.
• Genius Bonus: The series is full of references to scientific concepts (starting with the game titles), particularly quantum mechanics and cosmology. This game is where most people first heard about The Challenger Deep, Dark Energy, Singularities or The Calabi-Yau Model.
  • The teleportation theme seems to be a bit better researched than in most games, as well. It appears to be based on a wormhole principle, which, naturally, requires that Dark Energy everyone talks about.
• Genre Turning Point: Both Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were landmark events in the advancement of gaming in general and the FPS genre in particular. The first game revolutionised the idea of story telling from an Unbroken First-Person Perspective and popularised the Video Game Set Piece, as well as breaking new ground in realistic world design. Its sequel elevated these storytelling devices to new heights and showed they could incorporate a more plot-based, character-driven story with the most lifelike NPCs gaming had ever seen, as well as breaking new ground in realistic Video Game Physics, perfectly encapsulated in the inclusion of the iconic Gravity Gun. Later on, Half-Life: Alyx proved to the gaming community that a polished AAA virtual reality title was more feasible than initially thought. There's a reason people just won't let go of the idea of Half-Life 3 even after all these years.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The headcrabs. Especially the poison ones, which are specifically designed to screw with your ability to deal with other enemies.
  • Manhacks apply, as well. Those buggers just swarm all over you. Plus they fly! Once you have the Gravity Gun, though, they lose a lot of their annoyance to the "grab and punt" kill method.
  • The Antlions, who often push you onto sand, causing more of them to come!
  • The Barnacles, if you're not careful, one can literally catch you off guard, but since they're completely stationary and can only damage you if they lift you to their mouth, they become just a minor obstacle once you spotted them and they only take a few shots, or a single crowbar hit to kill.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Half-Life and Lost were made by fans of each other and have referenced each other. Then, in 2017, Marc Laidlaw's plot outline of Episode Three revealed that the plot had involved the Borealis constantly traveling through time and the only way to find it is to predict where it's going to be, the exact same method given by Lost on how to find the Island that was that show's focus.
• Magnificent Bastard: The G-Man is an enigmatic bureaucrat who uses his supernatural abilities to carry out the whims of his "employers". Always watching from afar, the G-Man monitors people who exhibit great survival instincts to employ them under his cause. Responsible for bringing the crystal sample that caused the Black Mesa Incident, the G-Man went against the orders of his superiors to rescue Alyx Vance and Adrian Shephard for his own purposes. The G-Man would rearm a nuclear warhead to destroy the entire facility to cover-up his tracks. When Gordon Freeman killed the Nihilanth, the G-Man recruited him as Xen was now under the control of his employers. Twenty years later, he sent Gordon to City 17 to help overthrow the rule of the Combine. Although he was held back by the powers of the Vortigaunts, the G-Man waited until they were distracted to order Alyx to warn her father about the Borealis. With motives known only to himself, the G-Man removes any sense of choice from the people he manipulates.
• Memetic Badass: Gordon Freeman stopped an Alien Invasion with a crowbar. He's well on his way to doing it a second time... after the aliens in question have already taken over the world.
• Memetic Molester: The G-Man gets hit with this a bit, not helped by his personality, otherworldly mannerisms, and his tendency to freeze people in place or otherwise trap them while giving eerie speeches.
• Memetic Mutation: See the series' page.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic. Originally, they were simply Gaiden Game multiplayer add-ons to Half-Life, being sold at retail mostly in bundles with the Half-Life games, sharing the bulk of their assets with it, and implicitly being set in its universe by the presence of things like Black Mesa logos in the retail maps. For a while, the only way to even get Counter-Strike: Source was to buy a copy of Half-Life 2. However, the massive success of these games' sequels, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 has arguably made those series more famous and successful than the one that they spawned from. To wit, Team Fortress 2 was at one time the most popular PC shooter period, while CSGO sold 25 million copies prior to going free-to-play, which is more than Half-Life, Half-Life 2, or The Orange Box... combined.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The Xen healing pools.
• Narm: This Korean dub of the beginning of the original video game.
• Paranoia Fuel: Headcrabs are everywhere, especially when they leap out at you from vents when you don't have your flashlight on. Compounded when the sequel added poison and fast varieties of headcrab. An unofficial design principle for custom maps runs thus: "A headcrab in every vent is boring; a headcrab in one-fifth of the vents is terrifying."
• Polished Port:
  • The PlayStation 2 port of the first game is noted for being very well done, including even higher-resolution character models than the Blue Shift HD pack, an exclusive two-player splitscreen campaign, and extended versions of the training course.
  • The Xbox port of Half-Life 2 works surprisingly well with its limitations. The game takes a major hit to resolution and framerate, but the gameplay is completely intact and feature-complete, and the actual graphics are of a very similar level of fidelity to the PC version. Regardless of the sacrifices made, it's still held up as a very impressive backporting of a technically-demanding game.
  • The 25th anniversary update is, according to Valve, the "definitive version" of the game, and it shows. Besides the fact that it can run on any modern system with no worries (which is helped by the fact that it has native widescreen support from the get-go), it also runs on the Steam Deck. Other additions and improvements include (according to the official site): Half-Life: Uplink (a mini-campaign that was exclusively distributed on CD for magazines and hardware manufacturers), four new multiplayer maps, proper gamepad support, restoration of Dummied Out content (including the classic Valve logo intro), and several quality-of-life improvements.
• Porting Disaster: Half-Life: Source is by no means unplayable, but compared to the goldSRC version it is frequently disliked, due to having a number of glitches that don't exist in the original game, and while it does take advantage of the Source Engine's more realistic water and particles, the new assets clash with the still-blocky 1998-style character models and environments. Source notably used to sit at "mixed" reviews before being pulled off Steam altogether while the original game is still on Steam and with "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating. A number of engine glitches caused a great deal of trouble for Freeman's Mind creator Ross Scott leading to Schedule Slip for that series, and the port's deficiencies were part of why Crowbar Collective started work on Black Mesa.
• Recurring Fanon Character: John Freeman is an Original Character who is Gordon Freeman’s brother and the protagonist of the So Bad, It's Good Troll Fic Half-Life: Full Life Consequences. He became famous in the fandom because of the hilariousness and ridiculousness of the story.
• Sacred Cow: The series served as a revolution for first-person shooters and video games as a whole and played the biggest role in putting Valve on the map. Consequently, criticisms of it are rare and usually met with unanimous disapproval from anyone who lends an ear.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Adrian Shephard of Opposing Force definitely comes off as this to those wishing for him to finally make a reappearance ever since the G-Man put him in indefinite detainment at the end of the game.
  • Race X, also from Opposing Force, comes off as this as well to those who thought this alien race was more fun and unique compared to the Xen aliens.
  • The Nihilanth from the original game. Despite being the Final Boss and being built up to a lot throughout Xen, it's never brought up past throw-away lines by the Vortigaunts after the original game's ending. There's also everything involving the Nihilanth, from why it was trying to take over Earth to what it was running away from. Outside of the game's original ending, everything involving Xen besides the Headcrabs and Vortigaunts are either not mentioned or implied (but never stated). The theory that what the Nihilanth was running from was the Combine is never actually stated.
• Ugly Cute:
  • Lamar, Dr. Kleiner's pet headcrab. Every other headcrab is Nightmare Fuel defined and the only physical difference Lamar has from the rest is that she's been debeaked, but she's otherwise a domesticated pet who feeds on watermelons whose startling but completely harmless attempts to latch onto other people's heads and tendency to hide in vents is strangely endearing.
  • Despite (or rather because of) their cyclopian arthropod appearance, Snarks may be the explosive Xen equivalent of piranhas, but their giant green eye, little bird-like beak, and squeaky chirping makes them endearing, especially since they're held like a hamburger when equipped. Black Mesa takes this a step further when Idle Animations show Gordon playing with an equipped Snark and said Snark even giggles while getting tickled by Gordon before trying to bite his fingers. In Half-Life: Alyx, Alyx also keeps one in a jar as a pet, and she can feed the Snark like a pet goldfish.
• The Woobie: It's inveitable that quite a few people will suffer given the Crapsack World that the Half-Life franchise is set in. Still, these characters have been through much even by the standards of the series.
  • Gordon Freeman. He's just going to work like any other scientist in the Black Mesa Facility when his entire workplace explodes, all of his coworkers die, and he's forced into a hard-fought battle against trained soldiers and monstrous aliens while being constantly reminded that all this death and suffering is technically his fault. After defeating the Nihilanth, he’s forced into a deal with the mysterious G-Man who puts him into stasis for twenty years and then is rewoken purely to defeat an oppressive alien regime that has taken over Earth. He’s then forced by his old colleagues into the role of a Hope Bringer for a resistance that he had no idea existed up to this point, ends up unintentionally causing an uprising that results in many deaths and finds out in the end that he was just being manipulated by the mysterious entity that brought him into this mess in the first place. After he escapes said entity’s control, he still doesn’t catch a break and ends up watching his friend Eli die right in front of him while he is powerless to stop it; Eli is later brought back, but at the cost of Alyx, his daughter and one of Gordon's closest allies, being forced into the G-Man’s servitude. And because he spent 20 years in stasis, these traumatic events end up seeming to him like they all occurred in just five days. For someone with the last name "Freeman", he spends most of the series under the control of someone else and has to endure constant hardships because of it, and for that he tends to be viewed not as a emotionless warrior, but rather as a victim of dire circumstances who's barely holding himself together.
  • Eli Vance is a former Black Mesa researcher and Gordon’s old friend who ends up surviving the Black Mesa incident. Prior to the incident, the G-Man warns him of "unforeseen consequences" and Eli tries to halt the experiment, to no avail. Haunted by his inability to stop the incident, he ends up blaming himself for the lives lost and the later Combine invasion. His wife also perishes in Black Mesa, and he’s forced to raise his daughter under the totalitarian world the Combine later establish. Establishing a resistance against the Combine, he ends up losing his left leg to a Bullsquid while helping Dr. Kleiner escape into City 17. When Gordon arrives at his lab in Black Mesa East, Eli is quickly captured by the Combine and taken to Nova Prospekt for questioning. Unknown to him, his close colleague Judith Mossman is a Combine spy and has been working behind his back. Later on, his daughter ends up almost being killed by a Hunter and later delivers a "message" from the G-Man that causes him to collapse in shock at the realization that something like the Black Mesa Incident could happen again. When he tells Gordon and Alyx that he’s proud of them before the two fly off to the Borealis, they get attacked by two Combine Advisors. His last moments are spent pleading for Alyx to look away and that he loves her, and he’s soon given a brutal death via tongue to the brain by one Advisor. He does end up being resurrected, but at the cost of his daughter being taken into stasis by the G-Man he hates so much.
  • Father Grigori is the sole surviving resident of Ravenholm, a Badass Preacher who has managed to avoid becoming a headcrab zombie through the use of his booby traps. Driven mad by his predicament, he’s gone certifiably insane and will quote various disjointed biblical phrases while he guns down headcrab zombies. Grigori takes no joy in killing the zombies, seeing it as a mercy-killing and them being "cured of their affliction". Grigori is also implied to miss the inhabitants of Ravenholm and will lament his loneliness if Gordon dies while going through the town. In the end, Grigori urges Gordon to continue his journey while he stays behind in Ravenholm and fends off the headcrab zombies.
• Woobie Species: The Vortigaunt race. They start off as low-tier mooks in the first game and, thanks to Gordon Freeman, are freed from slavery (after Gordon slaughtered a few hundred of them), only to fall under Combine control, with most of them living either on the run or as slaves of the Combine.
  • To give you an idea, part of the reason they don't hold a grudge against Gordon despite killing so many of them is because life under the Nihilanth was so bad they consider it a mercy killing.

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