Price: £39.99 Players: 1 Released in 1998 on the PC, Half-Life has taken some time making its presence felt on a console, the Dreamcast potential being sadly scrapped when it turned out to be about as profitable as the UK PAL laserdisc industry, but despite it being three years late it's still immensely welcome. You should know the plot already, but for those with their head in the gaming clouds over the millennium change-over, you take on the role of Gordon Freeman, a research associate at M.I.T.'s top-secret weapons research department, but just as the Einstein-like boffins are about to test the nuclear reactor, something goes heart-stoppingly wrong and you are not prepared for the bizarre alien invasion about to land on your doorstep.

When I played this on the PC and ventured through the entire game from start to finish, the 3Dfx graphics were, as usual, a wonder to behold. Colourful, sharp and inviting, the only reason for the slow-down was when I first played it on a PC that wasn't quite up to scratch. At the time, seeing footage on TV of how it should run looked like lightning by comparison. Thankfully, on the PS2, we have that lightning. I understand a higher polygon count has been used in this console release. For the sound, this game is almost perfect. The echoing voice of the tannoy, the clear dialogue of the characters surrounding you, but the only slight annoyance is the tendancy for a delay to occur between some action happening - such as firing a weapon - and you hearing the sound in question. Gameplay-wise, I thought I'd never get past the frequent combination of a PC's cursor keys and some general ASCII keys for a first-person-shooter (I never favoured the mouse much for these type of excursions, weird though that may sound to some), but I've really become accustomed to the freedom of movement allowed by the analogue joysticks (one to move and one to look around) as experienced to the full in Red Faction. Here, there are additional functions to take note of and thus a bit more practice will be required to keep up to speed.

The last three years have not been wasted though. In addition to improved alien A.I., not only are we provided with twelve PS2-exclusive deathmatch maps but an extra game entitled "Decay" which allows two players to take on the baddies together. Whether you purchase this title will depend on how far you got with the PC version. I played that one to death and reached the end after many a happy hour spent fingering the keys, so if you did the same then in that case I would advise a rental first to determine if the extras are worth the full retail outlay, given that for around £30 you can buy all of the PC Half-Life encounters (plus another tenner for Blue Shift) that have been released to date. When you read the scores below, the originality and enjoyment ones are for how I felt when I originally played it. Three years on and I'm not going to go back through the full length of the main game again, but if you didn't take the trip at the time, then cancel all your plans over Christmas and fire up your PS2 for the journey of a lifetime.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2001.