Rafiki wrote:

You start the game off with an unskippable 10 minute train ride through some mountainside facility by the name of Black Mesa, where YOU, Gordon Freeman, are employed as a theoretical physicist, PhD. During the ride a robot voice explains various factoids about the facility that Gordon Freeman would already know, but YOU, the player, wouldn't, while you slowly meander through such jawdropping scenery as a room full of crates with giant worker robots moving giant crates. EVENTUALLY you arrive at your laboratory, located conveniently in front of a bottomless pit.

Upon entering you're informed that you're wanted in "the test chamber," and are then free to wander the facility and get accustomed to the controls. You also learn that, for a beardy intellectual, Gordon Freeman is kind of a juvenile asshole because he interrupts the video phone, sets off the facility alarm, and blows up someone's lunch in the microwave.

Once you make it to "the test chamber," you're briefed by three scientists about performing an experiement where you push a shopping cart of alien mineral into a giant laser beam. I don't know why you'd need a person to do this instead of a robot arm or something, but then I didn't build my fucking laboratory over a bottomless pit. One of the scientists mentions some concern over the safety of the experiment, but is then abruptly cut off by another one who states that you don't need to hear all that crazy talk. YOU, the player, might feel apprehensive over this, but since this is an on-the-rails linear shooter there's no keybind for faking illness and taking a sick day. If there were, the world might have been spared the ensuing chaos. But it would also mean Valve wouldn't have made a hojillion dollars from Half-Life sales, so you can thank the soulless corporate greed of Chetler and EriKKK when the entire planet's enslaved in Half-Life 2.

So you enter "the test chamber," accidentally initiate a resonance cascade (who didn't see that coming), and the world blows up. You spend the entire rest of the game fighting your way through Black Mesa's sprawling mountainside facility (having run-ins with aliens, the military, and the mysterious GMAN), trying to reach the surface and run free. Instead, though, you end up going all Bruce Willis and taking the FIGHT to the alien homeworld, Xen, where you nearly die from boredom and jumping puzzles to have a final showdown with a giant baby (not Binro).

Then the GMAN appears in a time-traveling subway car and gives you two choices: work for him, or be permanently exiled to ETERNAL DOOM.

Half-Life is one of the best games ever made.