Also after. 
But yeah, this is a typical classic game that depends on save scumming. Of course I often wish that save scumming were possible in modern titles lacking previously standard saving at will, but I considered it as annoying then as I do now. It’s worse because HL implements some kind of autosave system that initially tries to fool you into thinking you don’t need save scumming.
Just as an example of me messing up the scripted events, near the beginning there’s this facehugger hanging out by a shelf that’s going to fall over because of an explosion. It’s very easy to die there by being too quick at the game when it’s supposed to be helpful and cinematic at the same time. But when I’m being careful it’s blatantly obvious that I just triggered an invisible tripwire, while if I’m being a shooter player I die in the cinematic in ways that have nothing to do with my skill or lack thereof. It’s just about whether I know what’s coming. And that right there is the problem with an awful lot of post-Half-Life games in a nutshell. You have to stand a little further this or that way to avoid the scripted explosion.
I guess part of my issue with the game comes from it trying to hide it being a game yet still having all of the same mechanisms. In Doom I don’t mind health management too much because it’s just a thing alongside ammo management. In HL they do this thing with “natural” first aid stations and I think it does the exact opposite from what they were going for.
- Why are there first aid stations littered all over the place?
- Really, some disinfectant and bandages can heal me from major injuries sustained while fighting aliens?
All a realistic first aid kit does is keep me from bleeding out. Making it more “realistic” makes me painfully aware of the fact that I seem to be gaining health.
I also have some tangential issues that probably didn’t bother me at the time. Like scrolling through weapons requires an attack action to actually switch. Back in '99 I didn’t even have a scrollwheel, so switching was done by numbers. I don’t even like switching weapons by scrolling that much; I still use numbers too and it doesn’t bother me in older games without scrollwheel support, so I was somewhat surprised to see this bother me. But it does.
[Edit: same issue with numbers actually. Just annoying.]
To be fair to HL, the ladders were also a bit finicky in Ion Fury.
Exactly why mid-'90s shooters made it so that you could easily commit suicide by not going exactly straight on a ladder was never clear to me. I guess you need at least a Pentium 3 for non-lethal ladders.
I like Counter-Strike though. 
