Half-Life: Blue Shift Is Underappreciated

hey guys this video is sponsored by nvidia and msi so stick around until the end to learn more about the msi geforce rtx 36 laptops regardless of how people feel about gearbox software or randy pitchford you can't deny that they gave us some pretty good content when it came to the half-life series not only did they create the awesome opposing force an expansion pack which still might be one of the best expansion packs of all time they also created the playstation port for half-life which is about as good a port as you could possibly ever hope for not to mention it also came with its own unique campaign putting two players into the hiv boots of the only other people lucky enough to don those iconic hazard suits forcing you to work together to complete a short campaign designed entirely around co-op play and then finally they gave us half-life's third and final expansion packed with blue shift one of the few times the valve has actually been able to count the three letting you see the events of that fateful day in the bowels of the black mesa facility through a third set of eyes this time those of barney calhoun about that beer i owed you yeah that guy another npc who despite existing in that game by the dozens got turned into a single stand-alone character in the sequel i know sir i know and i came to two startling realizations the other day number one that i'm losing more hair on my head daily than i'm comfortable with and number two that i still haven't done a video on this thing did a really crappy video on half-life a bunch of years ago i did a less crappy one on opposing force i've even talked about the port for the playstation 2 but for some reason i just never got around to blue shift well today i'm here to rectify that yeah have a good one now this expansion pack came out in 2001 and what it always reminds me of is that big combo box that all those original half-life games came in a pack that was basically that era's version of the orange box and blue shift i think complemented the whole thing really well being a short romp through the black mesa facility short being the key word here and it really was kind of swan song content for the first game i mean from this point on we didn't really get anything half-life related from valve until half-life 2 came out a bunch of years later yes gordon freeman i couldn't have asked for a final volunteer and even though it often feels like a bit of an afterthought it still fits in really well with the previous two entries and to this day i don't think there's ever been a game that's had its core narrative handled so well [ __ ] to this day i don't think there's ever been a game that's had its core narrative handled so well across three entirely separate experiences about freeman we're abandoning the base forget about prima we're abandoning the base now what i find so weird about blue shift is that despite it being pretty solid throughout its short tenure there was also something kind of boring about it i don't know man maybe it's got something to do with that old saying that familiarity breeds contempt but it is definitely the weakest out of all these three experiences and although you're seeing things from yet another perspective it's kind of hard to not feel a bit of a bean there done that vibe that's not to say it ain't fun though and part of what i've always loved about these expansions was the way that they always attempted to connect the dots into gord's storyline so that means that blue shift is jam-packed with lots of half-life stuff that people who are familiar with the other games are going to absolutely froth over like remember that bit in the prologue for the first game where you're riding on the tram and go past a platform where some poor security guard's trying to get into a locked door yeah well it turns out that that guard is barney and you'll even see gordon moving past you on the tram at one point from his perspective later on near the n2 you'll even see gordon being dragged away by those two marines after being ambushed on their way to dump him inside that trash compactor and then leave without checking that he gets squished to death which might be one of the dumbest moves in any form of media ever along with those idiot stormtroopers in star wars episode 4 who let's say three pioneer d23 if you don't mind i'd like to take him down to maintenance all right as you'd expect too you also see the g-man back at a time when this guy was still just supposed to be some random government employee before they turned him into whatever the hell he's supposed to be now honestly there's so many bad fan theories on his motives at this point it's the kind of stuff that just gives you an aneurysm it's kind of weird too how each of these games have gotten shorter and shorter i mean half-life was what like maybe 12 hours opposing force was maybe five and now this is around two i think by that logic that means if they hadn't made another expansion pack it would have been over in about 15 minutes maybe one where you played as a janitor cleaning up skid marks in the black mesa toilets or could have been one where you played as an it guy going around fixing faulty workstations and helping the scientists recover their login passwords hello i.t have you tried turning it off and on again now blue shift follows a similar pattern to the other games that being you're just beginning yet another ordinary day on the job before things go to hell they're waiting for you gordon in the test chamber in the base game you're obviously gordon freeman checking into the anomalous materials lab for yet another day of just testing samples adrian shepard was being sent on an emergency mission before his drop ship was shot down and then he landed in a war zone get down and now with barney he's just reporting for security duty and helping out with a malfunctioning elevator yeah yeah i know problems with the access system which ends up turning into some kind of theme park right or something as you watch that resonance cascade occur from this new perspective and it is definitely the weakest out of all the three events i mean to be fair you can't really compare with actually causing the cascade in gordon's case or being inside a military drop ship that gets shot down in shepherds but it is still a pretty cool opening sequence and has a really awesome scripted animation with this high speed cart flying off the rails and exploding even more impressive considering i'm assuming that's all been animated by hand then after that the elevator drops like it's disneyland's tower of terror ride and then you wake up and you're tasked with somehow finding your way out this brings up one of the main things i dislike about the expansion is how they give you a crowbar as your melee weapon now i know that in a facility that requires constant maintenance that crowbars would be a dime a dozen but i mean at this point they really had to know the status that this item had as being gordon's iconic melee weapon in opposing force they had the good sense to replace the crowbar with a combat knife and a wrench and i just really feel like they could have given barney something else that fit his role more as a security guard maybe like a night stick or a baton it'd make more sense and also be in line with his job role within the facility they at least had the right idea with how armor works because instead of being able to charge arama at the hev stations which wouldn't make a lick of sense you instead now have to pick up body armor on the ground often from fallen security personnel and that's also pretty grim coming across the corpses of all your colleagues most of whom you probably owe a beer to about that beer i owed you that's also part of what i think that blue shift does really well the way that like the other games it really seems to capture that feeling of being stuck inside a real place how's it going where events have often happened that you might not have been privy to but the evidence remains in the world building like early on in the campaign you come across a vehicle that's been shot to [ __ ] and it's pretty obvious that these guys were trying to make a runner in the driver's seat is the corpse of a scientist who obviously died first and then on the ground near the car is a dead security guard who's obviously fallen out of the car and then crawled for a bit before buying the farm later on during a shootout inside a warehouse if you go to a nearby room you'll find the corpses of a bunch of executed scientists which i always thought was pretty [ __ ] metal these are environmental storytelling elements that half-life introduced opposing force then built upon and that i think blue shield absolutely nails i mean even right from the get-go when you first rock up to work you can go into the locker room at one point watch a guy come out of a toilet stall after taking a [ __ ] wash his hands and then even use the hand dryer [Music] these are the kind of small menu details that go overlooked but they're the reason why i think so many of these old games still have so much soul now if you played half-life or opposing force you're going to know exactly what you're in for when it comes to the combat which is mostly shooting head crabs and vortigaunts and then occasional squads and marines most of whom still show off some basic artificial intelligence and in the case of the vortigaunts and the marines even self-preservation running away when they're injured it's just the blue shifters condensed what really could have been an eight or so hour-long campaign into a two-hour one getting rid of a lot of the filler content that they might have otherwise included kind of skips overall that initial borderline horror stuff you know where you were running around under-equipped avoiding headcrabs and headcrab zombies there still has a couple of sections inside a pitch-black vent with headcrabs lurking around the corners but that's about it surprise [ __ ] in the base game it was easily an hour or more before you even first encountered the marines and got your hands on the mp5 here though that process is much quicker i mean within an hour you'll have the magnum the shotgun mp5 and grenades and already have engaged in combat with plenty of marines a bunch of whom are just stationed around the facility and begging to be put out of this misery thing at one point within the span of like 15 minutes you go from fighting easily a dozen of these guys manning a 50 cal to mow down even more to blowing up a tank with an rpg it's like they took all the best parts of surface tension from the base game and packed it into a metaphorical sardine tin having said that though i think it is definitely the easiest game out of all these three now i don't know if i just feel that way because i've played these games more times than i've had hot dinners it also might be the absolute abundance of ammo you get particularly for the magnum and the grenade launcher but i just find that none of the combating kianas really give you all that much bother you know unless you want them to it also offers up some surprisingly clever puzzles not to mention they're puzzles that aren't annoying or tedious to get through like at one point you've got to shoot these wooden wedges causing these giant wooden spools to roll off the back of a train carriage and it's such a simple puzzle to the point that you can easily overlook it if you're not familiar with wood surfaces being destructible at one point there's like a rotating grinder in these waterways you need to get by and this is done by dropping an explosive crate in the water which destroys the half of it so you can swim on by this expansion pack could have easily been a two hour long corridor shooter but you can tell that some degree of effort has gone into making the field a little bit less routine plus it also has a very clear objective from almost the get-go if you still want to get out of here alive your only hope may be to find my friend instead of just mindlessly moving from area to area to try to make sense of things you see the main objective in blue shift the goal that you get very early on is to find someone named dr rosenberg and i want to stop there too and say that this must be a real common name for doctors because if you google that name you get about a bazillion search results anyway this guy's been kept hostage somewhere so you're going around trying to find him looking in cargo containers and broom closets then once you've found this guy you'll need to escort him all the way back to this hidden entrance to an underground lab or whilst keeping him alive during a bunch of shootouts yes here it is we'll need to break through this to get to the elevator now this could have been a hell of a lot worse and anyone who's tried escorting npcs in a half-life game i think is going to agree that the path finding leaves a lot to be desired here though this section is short and pretty easy and it's simple enough to make rosenberg hang back here when you need to oh i see rosenberg's plan is to then use a teleporter to get him and his buddies off the base and this sequence in particular feels very similar to that one from half-life 2 which barney coincidentally also was very hands-on with all right barney your turn gee thanks only before they can do this someone needs to go to zen and activate some kind of power generator otherwise there's not going to be enough juice to get the teleporter running oh and by someone i obviously mean the player now unlike the zen chapters in the base game which were about as fun as plucking out your nose hairs blue shift treats zen exactly as it should be treated that being nothing more than a theme park ride through this bizarre looking alien world doesn't force you to stuff around with annoying and clunky platforming and it just adds in a bit of combat to serve as a side dish to the weird main course which is your detour through this otherworldly location i think it also has some of the best looking zen environments as well like i really like how these waterfall sections look and it goes on long enough to be an enjoyable side piece without being long enough that it just starts to wear out it's welcome then once you're back in the land of the living there's a final chapter where you've got to finish powering up the teleport up because it wouldn't be a half-life game if it didn't have at least one chapter where you need to turn the power back on seriously it's like an unwritten rule or something this i think that was easily the best part of the game and the combat against the marines here is where it's at its absolute peak simply because it takes place in smaller environments where you can easily break line of sight and just punish these guys at close range with a weapon like the shotgun [Applause] [Music] plus it also had what i thought was one of the hardest puzzles of all time where you've got to use a metal barrel as a makeshift fuse connection to blob a door with explosives this is as simple as just pushing the barrel onto the broken fused line and you think that that would be obvious but i got stuck on this bit for i think literally hours back in the day anyway then after all is said and done you wait while rosenberg and his boys escape one by one before then making your own harrowing escape as the marines close in and then that's it game over now the main thing i dislike about blue shift apart from its obviously short length is that it really does kind of feel like half-life light it's like the margarine of half-life games or the diet coke of half-life games just one calorie not half-life enough this is obvious from the limited enemy lineup but also the lack up of the full weapon roster opposing force at least added in a bunch of new ones but here you're just using the same old weapons that even gordon got his hands on well mostly anyway i mean i get the reason behind why you don't get the gas gun kinda makes sense considering that that thing was a prototype one-of-a-kind weapon that gordon was lucky enough to even get his hands on and off the back of that logic you're not gonna come across the gluon gun either but i mean surely they had another crossbow lying around the facility somewhere and at least a single sequence involving a rampaging gargantuar again would have added a hell of a lot to the campaign just giving it some much more needed variety i've always kind of thought that the ending was also oddly optimistic we made it mr calhoun we made it i mean compared to the base game where gordon's just left in stasis without any real idea of how long he's going to be there or with opposing force where shepherd was left in stasis again without any real idea of how long he's gonna be there i'm sure you can imagine there are worse alternatives barney on the other hand is outside in broad daylight like there's not a single care in the world there's no soldiers or aliens nearby that's about as far removed from a threatening environment as you could possibly get we made it mr calhoun we made it did kind of seem like barney got things pretty cushy too right i mean in half-life 2 he seems to have a stable job as a metro cop at least in the sense that the combine trust him and you'd have to assume that the dude is being fed well he certainly looks happy and has an optimistic attitude you know considering the state of the rest of the world yeah longer if we're lucky and maybe cushy is the best way to describe his journey in total yeah you and me both doc he didn't have to take on an island or a giant space worm coming out of an interdimensional portal to make his escape he just started to fight back against a bunch of marines and the odd vortigaunt here and there so barney mate i don't think you just owe gordon a beer i think you owe him an in type brewery still though as a shooter that takes the better part of two hours to get through blue shift is a tight solid little expansion pack clearly put together by people who know that gold source engine in and out like a bob ross painting it's not going to show you anything you haven't seen before but there's a sense of proficiency and capability with what the engine's created here that makes it possible to overlook the technological shortcomings considering i think by this point that that gold source engine was well and truly past its prime at the time this thing came out it received a bit of negativity for the dated visuals but it's kind of interesting in the way that time has really been kind to these older shooters with the resurgence of ironically simple graphics coming back now as a purposeful design choice still though they did try to update things back then with the so-called hd models and yeah man i could talk about these things all day long if i had to these hd models encapsulate everything that i hate about that old adage where people just assume that because something is newer that it's automatically better now i want to say i'm not entirely against the new hd models that blue shift added in and i think in some cases it actually looks better like the first aid in the hev wall chargers are definitely improved now and compared the original spaz 12 model to that high resolution one i mean the difference is just huge and much like the newer version of the magnum i think i actually prefer it lord knows they did some weird perspective black magic to pull off that magnum in the original game even if it is an anaconda now instead of a magnum with the scientist models they manage to look more detailed but also stay true to the art style of the base game and the zombie models are also a lot more improved coming off a lot more detailed you can even now see all these gnarly teeth coming out of their chests and all the appendages coming off their mutated bodies and now more pronounced the thing that really chaps my ass though is how they've changed the mp5 to an m4 now i get why they did this i've encountered enough gun nuts online as it is going on about how that mp5 would never have an underslung grenade launcher but when i think of half-life's guns i think of the mp5 it's one of the most common workhorse weapons and the sound that thing makes is burned into my brain so changing it to an m4 just makes no sense to me and having the marines use it again makes no sense considering all the marketing material for opposing force showed shepard clearly holding an mp5 same thing with the pistol it's now gone from being a glock to being replaced with beretta and this is probably the weirdest one too because looking at that cover art for blue shift i mean barney's not even holding either one of these now apparently we have the dreamcast support to thank for all of this so should i say the cancelled dreamcast port it said that these models were originally intended for that version and i guess they got carried over to blueshift when that version got [ __ ] canned a choice which i think is incredibly odd and made by someone who i don't know i guess just hated the smell of money the ps2 port for half-life is this weird amalgamation of the original and hd models and i think manages the best of both worlds in terms of the detail and aesthetic and i know that i've used the hd models in all of my footage but i compared to george lucas throwing a bunch of cgi shared on the original star wars films and i still think the best way to play these games is with those original models from back in 1998 you know along with seeing han shoot first in 1977 but i'll be honest right one of the main reasons i wanted to talk about blue shift was so i had a reason to talk about this new black mesa mod that's in development called black mesa blue shift developed by hgcu collective and in lieu of black mesa opposing force well this thing's gonna have to do well if you're familiar with black mesa well then this is pretty much just the exact same thing it's something made by a bunch of very talented modders and map makers trying to recreate the original campaign but updating it visually and making it feel more modern crowbar collective achieved this to great effect with black mesa and from what has been completed so far here is these guys seem to be on the same trajectory they even managed to keep in the glock pistol instead of a beretta and i mean that right there alone earns them all the kudos in the world you want to squeeze in a few shots in the range plus i really like this animation of barney putting on his security vest and helmet feels like a really cool modern inclusion making you feel like you're really assuming the role now the first thing you notice about this version is just how gorgeous the whole thing looks and it's kind of crazy to think that this mod is available to play for free considering the detail and polish in some of these areas especially with the lighting effects some of which just look amazing it's also really fun going through this thing and comparing the original sequences from blue shift to those in the remake yeah have a good one calhoun have a good one [Music] and the resonance cascade event is a perfect example of how they've taken the concept of the original and then shot a lightning bolt up its ass plus they just go way more overboard on all the world building details even including some more npcs for the play to interact with duck like the third chapter for instance judy calls there's a scripted sequence where a jumpy scientist knocks you over the back of the head with a crowbar and then another extended beat where you're being assisted by another security guard who i really hope you meet up with later on because this guy is an absolute g man sorry about the friendly fire you're the first familiar face i've seen in hours it also recreates a lot of the same puzzles but makes them more complex like with that explosive crate puzzle now instead of only needing to find one on that nearby freight elevator you've now got to find three even going off on a whole little side mission to repair the freight elevator to begin with there's a whole sequence where you've got to get the power back on in this area that's half flooded and then survive an ambush against a dozen vortigaunts and it's just a cool way of making these familiar chapters sing fresh but also throw in a few curveballs that you might not see coming about the only thing that still puts a thistle up my pee hole is how black mesa kind of [ __ ] around with how the balancing works you know with like the head crabs and the vortigaunts both attacking way faster which is something that kind of ruins the pacing of the combat of the original games and again this is all present in this version but it also adds back in what i think is the most important stuff and it's all those light horror elements people often forget i think how tense those first few errors for half-life and opposing force could be before you had all that many weapons or ammo and had to make your way past throws of head crabs and headcrab zombies these new areas that they've added in build upon that adding back in a few more spooky areas where resources are tighter than a duck's [ __ ] and you're in tight corridors against all these enemies with a massively dwindling ammo supply and i think getting through the third remake chapter alone took me longer than the entirety of the base game so clearly they're also going to build up on the biggest criticism that that version had you know being its short length this thing is still a ways off being finished though i mean it took them a whole year just to get chapter three finished so i don't know what that says about how long it's going to be until we can play chapter four which i think is easily the longest in the entire game took the black mesa guys the better part of a decade to finish that and while blue shift is a fraction of the length of half-life so i'd imagine two is hscu collective's team i still don't think we're going to see half life 3 in the near future in fact i don't think i'll see another game in the rest of my lifetime so going back and replaying a fan made campaign based off the original trilogy's third best entry might be the best you're going to get for the time being and at the end of the day it's still gonna be better than hunt down the freeman gee thanks right so thanks for sticking around and now that i've got your attention let me tell you about msi's new ge76 laptop now this thing right here is the ultimate gaming laptop msi were nice enough to send me one that had an nvidia geforce rtx 3080 ti and i got to say that this thing is just an absolute beast as you'd expect from a 30 series it also has the latest nvidia rt cores for ray trace gaming plus performance boosting features like dlss and nvidia reflex the g76 uses nvidia max q technology to optimize performance across the gpu and the cpu which means more fidelity in frames yeah and speaking of fidelity and frames you get a bunch of display options for that 17.3 inch screen and then online gamers that want to max out that fps can opt for the 1080p build that goes up to 360 hertz yeah [ __ ] now in the time that i got to play with this thing i threw a few games at it just absolutely maxing the maddie and the performance across the board was just really damn solid doom eternal maxed out for instance just ran like absolute grease lightning he was also able to handle ra2 with all its new bells and whistles that they added in with that latest update but then even going back to playing something like quake 2 rtx which is something you wouldn't think would be all that resource intensive and yet still managed to pretty much brick my desktop well this laptop just makes the whole thing a [ __ ] all that power needs plenty of juice and the g76 has a 99.9 watts per hour battery plus it also detects and adjusts system performance between these modes to find the right mix between performance and longevity if you like to match your gear you can pair that g76 with all the other exclusive msi gaming too so if all of this is sounding like your jam well check out that link in the description to find out more [Music] you

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 446,679

Keywords: half-life review, blue shift review, half life 2, barney calhoun, half-life blue shift review, half-life retrospective, half-life 2, half-life opposing force, opposing force, half-life expansion, half life blue shift, blue shift, half life, video review, half life review, opposing force review, blue shift remake, half-life dreamcast, blue shift ost, half life 3, half life alyx, blue shift vs opposing force, hunt down the freeman, gmanlives, gggmanlives

Id: thn50qOeASU

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022