The whole experience is over pretty quick. At the end you'll have to spend some time on Xen, crawling through tunnels and fighting off at least one ambush, to reactivate a device that will help you and a few of your fellow employees get out of the Black Mesa facility alive. The story is good and weaves another layer to the Black Mesa incident. And it is satisfying to solve a puzzle and blow something up at the same time. Completing the circuit isn't as complex as puzzles found in Myst III but it does present a challenge. For instance, some explosives attached to a big door need to be activated to advance but the wire from the plunger has been severed. There are a few puzzles to overcome but none are obtuse enough to have you running to the on-line walkthroughs. At every open environment I always expected to hear those thunderous footsteps that made me jump when playing Half-Life. (Remember this was to be a Dreamcast exclusive.) It's disappointing that none of the really big aliens show up. The aliens are all here - but no new creatures or aliens from Opposing Force appear. Everyone raved about the opening sequence of Half-Life and those people should also remember the lone guard pounding on a door as the car whisks Freeman to his job. Looking at the car reveals Gordon Freeman on his way to work. First clue: Barney pounds on a door only to have the guard on the other side saying, "Just a minute, there's something wrong with the door." As Barney stands there a transport car passes. There's no mistaking that BS is part of the Half-Life universe. You'll even catch glimpses of Freeman and the mysterious guy in the black suit. To do so, you'll have to enlist the help of the Black Mesa staff, avoid or obliterate the military personnel sent to sanitize the facility, solve a puzzle or two, and blow away lots of aliens. The main objective, as in Half-Life and Opposing Force, is to get out alive. You've played Half-Life to death so you know exactly what has happened: the experiment, with Gordon Freeman at ground zero, has gone phenomenally wrong. It's during the elevator trip down that things go all pear shaped - the lights go out and the elevator plunges to the bottom of the shaft. You come on shift, get your bulletproof vest, find your gun, then escort a couple of scientists to a lower level. Playing as Barney, your shift starts normally enough. This explains to a degree why BS is the way it is.īarney Calhoun, community college graduate extraordinaire, is the protagonist of BS and the third member of the Half-Life triumvirate. For unexplained reasons, Sierra dropped the hammer on the Dreamcast version shortly after announcing BS was coming to the PC. BS was to be an addition to the Dreamcast version of Half-Life, a kind of "secret" level unlocked after you finished the game. When playing Half-Life: Blue Shift (BS) it helps to understand the history of how it came to the PC. Half-Life: Blue Shift is a stand-alone product and does not require any previously released version of the Half-Life. The maps were created by designers with credits for games such as Quake, Thief II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, SiN, Unreal and Shadow Warrior. In addition to the two expansion episodes, the original Half-Life: Opposing Force missions, and the High Definition pack, Blue Shift contains a collection of online multiplayer modes OpFor: On-Line that includes team play, deathmatch, and capture the flag levels. In Half-Life: Opposing Force, which was named PC Action Game of the Year in 2000 by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, you play as Corporal Adrian Shephard, a military specialist assigned to eliminate Freeman. Half-Life: Blue Shift puts you in the role of Barney Calhoun, a security guard and ally of Gordon Freeman (from the original game) who infiltrates the Black Mesa Research Facility to explore previously unavailable areas while dealing with an entirely new storyline. The 3D-accelerated High Definition pack upgrades weapons and characters in the original Half-Life as well as the new episodes. Gearbox Software follows their commercially successful Half-Life: Opposing Force with a "complete expansion set" that includes not only the Opposing Force game and the Half-Life HD pack, but an additional two episodes.
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