Firearms Expert Reacts To Half-Life Franchise Guns

this is Jonathan Ferguson the keeper of firearms and artillery at the Royal armories Museum in the UK which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history and this week he's taking a look at the weapons from the winner of our most recent poll the half-life franchise now the the elephant in the room is always an underbarrel grenade launcher on a submachine gun that subsurd the MP5 made lots of sense the grenade launcher made almost no sense until I came to the Royal armories and met this if you like this kind of content we've got a brand new season of Loadout airing on the channel and you can check out our most recent episode about the history and pop culture impact of the M16 right now right let's take a look at the iconic weapons from half-life [Music] so first gun up is the Glock fond memories of uh of using this I think it's the first game I ever played well definitely the first game I ever played to try to replicate a Glock and if we look at a real generation two Glock 17 you can clearly see that's what they're going for uh despite the limitations of the graphics we've got even got the um the point on the front of the trigger guard here bottom Edge General blocky shape of course is uh is iconically Glock so I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't taken a photo of a Glock and de-rezzed it and wrapped it onto the actual model minor Quirk of the Glock in the game and I think they did this just because they could so they weren't just inserting a black square into a black square is the magazine to the real Glock magazine that really is just a apparently from the outside lump of plastic the mag in the game is very skinny and has Windows in it it looks a lot like a mackerel magazine funnily enough which has a very long witness window so you can see how many rounds you have left probably the the main departure from the actual block design [Laughter] okay that's a surprise I did not expect a locker with my name on it and a picture of me in it in Half-Life does even if there's even a very low poly copy of my book that's very cool well you get points all right so we've got black Mesa uh the band remake remember rightly of the Glock next and it is way more glocky it's safe to say got lots of detail like the um whereas there's just like a square inset in the the back of the slide on the original engine version of the game this has the ribbed polymer back plate of a real clock with the different shapes the u-shaped version of the rear sight that's on this Gen 2 clock and it just it's model better it acts more realistically the magazines look like Glock magazines it's just better all around really [Music] right we're into Half-Life 2. the pistol's been replaced by an HMK USP match this is not a pistol unlike the Glock from the original game that would have just been lying around it's a specialist competition variant of not a she's not a hugely Gucci pistol but um but the one with the competition muzzle weight slash comp on the end of it is pretty Gucci so a little bit surprising and it's not something you're going to keep finding in this environment if you found one that would be it and you'd be finding different guns it's pretty good The Recoil seems excessive shouldn't really be jumping around as much as it is in terms of the detail of the model I don't have one to show you but the it should be cut away there should be a U-shaped channel in the compensator the big chunky bit on hanging off the front of the gun so that the barrel which has to recoil to operate the gun isn't impeded and also it doesn't affect the accuracy by contacting the barrel of the pistol so the it's sits around the barrel like this it's open on the top it's not on this version probably because they only had side profile images to work from uh the half-life shotgun um simultaneously one of the most satisfying shotguns in a video game and one of the more irritating for gun nerds because as I'm sure some of you know it's a pretty much as fast 12 very very closely based for the graphics of the time anyway on that gun and inexplicably it fires its alternate fire double barrel shots out of the magazine tube this is a closed off tube it houses your shotgun cartridges it's how they go backwards into the action pours into the chamber and get fired standard tube fed shotgun arrangement for a very non-standard convertible from pump to semi-automatic exotic shotgun it's conventional in the sense of the magazine tube um developers either didn't know or didn't care how shotguns worked and so they went oh two tubes may as well give it two shots but when you're actually playing the game it's pretty damn satisfying to lose off the the double double barrel so they wanted to have their cake and eat it too as far as the actual model goes it's not as close to the smash 12 as I remember I mean it has the double the double tube um it has the pretty close shape of the at the fore end the rest of it is a little bit far removed actually they've kind of foreshortened the whole gun so that the the bolts and ejection Port area on the receiver is shunted forward into the heat shield area and the basically this whole bit is missing this bit shunted forward the whole design is changed up interesting I've not seen the gun fired from a third person's use side on like that and when the double barrels are fired there is markedly more recoil animated into the gun yeah the doubled up sound effect sounds very impressive devastating effect on the Target and the gun rising up to imply power all right so I've not played Black Mesa and I've not seen their take on the shotgun it's substantially closer to this fast 12. proportions are more correct shape of the well the shape of the whole thing is more correct it's got the um release catch on this side modeled in as well I think what we've done is model a spouse 12 but to make it fit the aesthetic of Half-Life where it's not quite the same gun they've added in attachment to the upper receiver which is also giving it a a rail on the top we still got the same double shot for alt fire and if they've tried to model the magazine shoe with an open muzzle as though it is a second barrel and they also didn't want to change the gameplay too much so we still have our old fire nice touch in the recoil is that not only we're seeing more recoil it's actually coming out of the support and which really emphasizes that you're firing an awful lot of lead down range all right oh this is this was an incredibly cool weapon in 1998 I think it still is that's a pretty massive prod the actual arms on the on the bow they look pretty substantial and the effect on the enemies implies something relatively powerful any crossbow you can [ __ ] by just pulling back on the string isn't going to be hugely powerful you can ramp up the power with cams which aren't on this strips of what look to be steel and then some sort of composite you'd have a job to do that traditional crossbows and one in particular the Chinese repeating crossbow so in that case you could [ __ ] it by hand without using a a windlass or a cranicain and it has a magazine of quarrels just like this does only it feeds using Gravity from the top for this to work the way this does it would need to replicate what a firearm does with a spring not impossible but um the Chinese did it with gravity feet which makes a lot of sense considering it just needs to drop onto the groove forgive me I'm not a curator of uh of archery the scope I guess gave this a bit more of a sort of modern tactical feel and and obviously affects the gameplay directly as well foreign upgrade for black Mesa they have put those cams in on the prod there to uh I guess modernize it a bit but otherwise the design is is pretty close to the original bolts look funnily enough more like this more like they might be explodey but they're not they're just um the physics of the game I guess different engine have them knock the target back with a hell of a lot of force far too much force it has to be said although a crossbow bolt or quarrel or an arrow is a quite a massive object compared to uh to most bullets it still doesn't have enough Mass to physically knock you down and certainly knock you head over heels like that and it's traveling way slower than the bullet as well [Music] oh okay this rendition uh it's half life two crossbow is looking well very different design wise it looks to be entirely homemade as the scope of the original but the we've lost the magazine we're now single loading some sort of metal rod that is being super heated by I guess a battery or capacitor or something that's on the weapon well I don't know why you're superheating a projectile heating heating up a projectile doesn't really achieve very much but it certainly looks cool sounds cool and the ability to pin the enemies to the background is looks like a lot of fun I have to say it really looks very very powerful very effective limited by the reduced capacity over the original right so although I'm uh MP5 obsessed as some of you know probably my favorite gun in the original Half-Life game was the Magnum this is the python I mean not sure the graphics are quite good enough to be able to say for sure which precise model it is but um for me it was a python I don't think I was aware of the cold Anaconda at the time this should be about the right barrel length obviously six shots double action real really Punchy sound effects high damage it's not been sort of fudged in the design so it has the it has the culch uh classic pullback and the shape of the cylinder latch uh shape of the trigger guard the barrel shroud it's all it's all very cult and it functions you know pretty much like a like it ought to do just a great video game gun there's not much I can say about it I've no real criticisms uh certainly not for the not for the the time okay here's one the way the rear sights depicted as being part of the frame and very open at the back is is not right revolver sights for these guns uh yeah okay the notch is quite wide because the front side is proportionately wide but um if there's a compromise made it's probably with that now with a graphical overhaul we get a closer closer rendition although the top strap if this is the pipe still a python the top strap is not the right shape but this uh the rear sight being an insert that's well the real gun is adjustable not obviously not on the real on the um virtual one but the configuration is closer to reality we do have a what looks like an axis pin for the hammer that doesn't exist it's not visible on the left side of the real gun it is on the right side in fact yeah looking at that we have two two pins that have been I guess probably mirrored on both sides of the frame and then the latch has just been put on on one side so a slight compromise it does have the night sight or all the high Vis I should say plastic insert on the front sight blade and it has uh glowing presumably tritium dots on the rear sight which you could replicate on this by changing the changing out the rear sight this has the standard u-shaped white notch all right foreign with sights option which is very nice couldn't do that with the original game and I see now that in fact both sides of the gun are mirrored so there's a cylinder latch and these pins that only appear on the on one only appears on the left side the other only appears on the right side on both sides a common labor and time saving device to just mirror both sides of the gun because who's gonna care really nice animation of flicking out the cylinder which I won't do on this because I don't want to damage the gun in any way uh that's cool uh the whole all the animations the reload animation is is way Superior of course however it does not show operating the cylinder latch in order to open the cylinder it's just flick it out put it back in minor realism issue there getting very very nerdy here but for the most part cult revolvers rotate their cylinder clockwise as from the from the point of view of the user see that happening there and Smith Wesson rotate counterclockwise and although this is supposed to be a cult it's rotating the Smith and Wesson way around and I think that might be the nerdiest gun comment I've I've made I'm sure I've made nerdier thank you okay so I think I'm getting my chronology slightly uh mixed up in that black mice comes after Half-Life 2 as a remake of Half-Life one so the revolver in Black Mesa is based on the one in half like two that I'm now looking at what we have got in Half-Life 2 that we didn't in Black Mesa is a nod toward the cylinder latch however they're pushing it like with Smith and Wesson rather than pulling it as in occult system right this is a this is a quirky bit of video game gun history in that when I first first played Half-Life the iconic MP5 with underbarrel grenade launcher was was the perhaps the most memorable weapon in the game now the the elephant in the room is always an underbarrel grenade launcher on a submachine gun that's absurd the MP5 made lots of sense the grenade launcher made almost no sense until I came to the Royal armories and met this saw it on the wall and just almost literally boggled somebody had made a launcher for an MP5 I don't know I think I then tried to rationalize it and go I must be a flare launcher nope this is I mean it may not just have been for lethal purpose but primarily it's a it's a 40 millimeter grenade launcher for an MP5 almost identical to the half-life gun so this is incredibly cool it's just played by a UK company called istec and was sort of shopped around along with a version for full-length rifles and short story long story short well not very long story shorter still wasn't successful wasn't sold as far as I know there's no firing mechanism modeled on the gun if remember rightly but on the real thing you have to reach under here and it is a double action trigger which is pretty common for for ugls so there we are the half-life MP5 kind of exists if you'd like to find out more about this uh we will have uh Royal armories um what is this weapon video up by now where you can get a little bit more information on this thank you our remade MP5 so having had I think it was blue shift retcon the MP5 into a different gun we have in this remake gone back to the MP5 great love the MP5 we've got Picatinny I picatinny rail four end that's also adapted to take what must be a truncated version of the m203 we've got a full set of reload animations that were missing from the original game we've got a not the HK slap we have the look it out of the notch with your thumb approach which is okay and we see Gordon reach into the uh trigger the trigger guard of the grenade launcher to actually fire it something I've Just Seen there that I think was also true of the original game is that the grenades come flying out of the barrel tumbling in reality this uh or the m203 and this are both rifles and if you can see the rifling in the bore there and it flies it's a giant essentially the 40 40 by 46 grenade round is a giant cartridge so it should fly straight and true because it's spinning in that way it's not tumbling through the air if that's happening something's gone horribly wrong with your launcher and you're not gonna have the accuracy you need to try to place uh the round expect Ed all right this is wacky as heck for someone like me that hasn't played halfway too however um I have two confused observations firstly and most confusingly how the hell is this launching a grenade at least the MP5 had a launcher modeled onto it in in Half-Life one there's nowhere for a grenade to come out of so I have no idea I must be missing something I think I'll try and keep an eye out and the other thing is the shape of the thing the pistol grip is too far back and that's what we have here it's pretty close to an MP7 but the whole pistol grip with the magazine is all the way back here which means there's no room for the bolt to actually reciprocate and feed rounds it could not work which is weird because there's a lot of detail from the MP7 on this model though they've modeled this from life as it were in fact you can see when it's shaft the arms of the stock are modeled alongside the gun there is this hint of a second Barrel under the under the main Barrel but there's nowhere it's nowhere near big enough for a grenade round really quite a curious gun now this brings back a lot of memories the original Half-Life rocket launcher extremely cool in just about every way including the um quite faithful uh representation of a recordless weapon with a rocket assisted projectile where say you have that launch from from expelling chart and then the rocket motor firing up obviously somewhat cartoony by real life standards but kind of how they actually work I didn't automatically know this but uh someone else quite rightly has identified what I think rightly has identified this the armbrust launcher which is a recoiler is a recordless weapon looks a heck of a lot like the half-life launcher uh mainly in this front end but also in a few other design cues I think it's safe to say that somebody spotted this in I don't know copy of Jane's infantry ones or something and base the launcher on this because it's not particularly well known the black Mesa remake is pretty much fitting the theme of all the others it's the same basic weapon enhanced there's a little little display screen I didn't see that doing anything just more detail overall really no no change to to functionality they haven't tried to make it more like an armbrust I think it might lose a little bit of punch in the way they've sort of moderated the delay it's not quite as satisfying I'm doing impressions of weapons on camera now Half-Life 2's rocket launcher we've got some changes here looks more like an 84 equipment hanging underneath is to do with the later guidance so they're not sure what they're still not sure what the big green cylinder is there for but the main thing up front there is your grip stock it's not a million miles away from from this setup on the on the um inspiration for the original Half-Life weapon but they've built they've done I guess a better job of showing you where your laser guidance system is although the main webiness there would have to be built into the the Warhead to be able to communicate with the weapon and steer onto Target which is a in Broad terms a real functionality that exists for anti-tank weapons well there isn't much expertise I can bring to bear on the angry alien bee gun which I remember pretty clearly from from the original game either didn't I don't remember all possibly never even realized that this was actually well it's obviously the arm of an alien actually but I haven't realized that you were shoving your own hand up the arm it's a little bit uh David Cronenberg seen in profile attached to your arm like that oh this is a really weird one I'd heard of the combine assault rifle never actually seen it in use so this is this is a first it's really strange so it's feeding it's got a sort of motorized like an or like a tank Auto loader system to get around more of a magazine really into the chamber straight into the barrel I don't know and then some it's hugely bulky at the back and yet all the action is happening at the front it's like the mullet of of video game guns and then some sort of massive firing pin is just slapping the back of the magazine thing and it then sounds like and works basically like a normal rifle kind of exciting and disappointing all at the same time but the disappointment is obliterated when the alt fire is used and it's not clear to me where that's coming from it's a separate ammunition pool which then bounces around the room and vaporizes stuff which and you kind of go ah there's the half-life oh all right that seems to work all right we are back to a game that I have played albeit only only about a third of I'm I was quite surprised that the gun was really old school in terms of being a 1911 pattern handgun with some weird future changes I think something I did appreciate about the the route this game took with the handgun is that you're almost replicating the experience of a movie armorer certainly one from the 80s 90s where they're taking a base gun in this case a 1911 and then they're disguising it with sci-fi stuff where in this game you start with pretty much a 1911 with a couple of bells and whistles and then you are doing making those changes to make it more sci-fi so I don't think that's what they were trying to go for but it's a frame of reference that I bring to the table and I thought it was quite a cool cool aspect oh all right this shotgun or shock pistol is really odd in this game a lot of thoughts gone into the the look of it it's quite industrial but sci-fi at the same time sort of look the mechanism for breaking it open it's kind of weird that a shotgun like this would break open I don't think there's any reasonable way in which this could feed and work we've got a a slightly weird double load I'm sure you've seen certainly in John Wick multiple rounds being loaded in one go so you hold two or even four in your hand and shove them all into the tube and here we've got um Alex holding two like a syringe and shoving them into the magazine that way I think I understand the the in-game justification for having this be a such a short weird shotgun with such a weird mechanism and that is that they made this the decision to make all the weapons one-handed so you've always got a free hand to interact with other stuff in VR and you're not constrained by having to sort of lock your hands together to a two-handed gun I must admit as a enthusiastic of these things um I would prefer to be able to have the two-handed aiming experience right those were the guns of the half-life series I hope you enjoyed those I know I did as always there are ways that you can support the work that we do here at the Royal armories Museum we have our various social media outlets and our own YouTube channel which includes a fair bit of yours truly as does an event coming up on the 11th of March um where you can actually depending on which ticket you purchase see our website or social media for details um you can actually come and say hello to me whatever you do join us again next time for another one of these [Music] thank you

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 662,291

Keywords: half life, half life 2, half life black mesa, half life alyx, half life expert reacts, half life firearms expert, half life 2 expert reacts, half life 2 firearms expert, half life weapons, half life weapons breakdown, half life weapons explained, half life alyx expert reacts, half life alyx firearms expert, expert reacts, jonathan ferguson, royal armouries, firearms expert, firearms expert reacts

Id: Edpl_uwNa_E

Length: 26min 16sec (1576 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Lee1100]

So it is possible to put a grenade launcher on a MP5. Very cool gun.

[u/Ahnengeist]

Neat video!