We may be none the wiser for Half-Life 3, but that hasn't stopped the community from finding cool, new ways to play the original Half-Life. The latest is Half-Life GB, a Game Boy-style remake that makes Valve's FPS game even more surreal than usual.
Made by developer Jackarte, Half-Life GB supplants the typical browns and greys of Black Mesa for multiple shades of green, in a 3D environment that, missing many of the finer details, is just a bit unnerving. A 15 minute demo, viewable below, shows a play-through of Half-Life's iconic opening, wherein Gordon Freeman finds himself in the middle of an inter-dimensional invasion after one of Black Mesa's experiments malfunctions.
Wielding Freeman's trusty crowbar, you batter headcrabs and headcrab zombies, wandering through corridor after corridor in hopes of escape. The demo stretches as far as Freeman getting to the outside world, where a platoon of marines has been sent to kill all survivors and cover-up the incident, and you battle helicopters and tanks and such. This is definitely stretching the capabilities of the base handheld, but it does strike a Wolfenstein 3D-like middle-ground that has its charms.
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Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on.
Two of the most iconic and beloved FPS games ever made, together at last. Half-Life: Crowbar - Deep in the Dead is a Half-Life mod that transforms Valve's classic from a hellish survival game on Earth to, well, a hellish survival game on Mars.
The mod converts id Software's Union Aerospace Corporation's waste facilities into the cleaner, greyer corridors, offices, and parking lots of the Black Mesa Research Facility. In the demo, you play-through a melding of Half-Life's opening chapter with Doom's E1M1, wherein some scientists open an inter-dimensional portal for horrific creatures to break through and, when you really get down to it, there's not a huge amount of difference in context between the two old games, is there?
A cool thing about Half-Life: Crowbar is that you aren't Gordon Freeman, or Doomguy, you're engineer Dr. Stan Blazkowicz, an homage to Wolfenstein protagonist BJ Blazkowicz, who adorns the Doom suit where Freeman got his HEV outfit. You're not the one who pulls the lever like in Half-Life either, rather just someone stuck in the middle of a very unfortunate situation, having to crowbar and shoot your way through a large number of headcrabs.
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Sometimes it isn't just the game you're playing, it's all the surrounding factors that determine how and why you're playing the game at that exact moment. The idea that external factors might affect enjoyment levels isn't something people often concede in game criticism, nor in pub arguments, because if you admit it that judging one game against another is anything other than a scientific process, the whole house of cards falls down. Personally, every time I think about Half-Life, the greatest game I have ever and will ever play, I see that house of cards levelled in front of me.
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