6
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183
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Recent reviews by Vince

Showing 1-6 of 6 entries
3 people found this review helpful
14.6 hrs on record (14.6 hrs at review time)
Valve respect Half-Life!!!!!!
Posted 22 November, 2022.
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7 people found this review helpful
1,000.2 hrs on record (0.7 hrs at review time)
A legendary continuation of the no less legendary Half-Life game!
Posted 23 August, 2022.
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2 people found this review helpful
1,094.5 hrs on record (1,056.8 hrs at review time)
Min Lee explained how the 1.6 version of Counter-Strike was created.....
Posted 19 July, 2021. Last edited 29 January.
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3 people found this review helpful
4,747.6 hrs on record
respect valve HL1 forever forever............The 20th anniversary of the Half-Life series is a great industry event, because exactly 20 years ago, Valve revolutionized first—person shooters. But it's just pointless to talk about only one Half-Life without Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, Portal, etc., since each of them has revolutionized its genres. And even without games, Valve has made a very big contribution to the industry. I want to tell you about all this contribution. The first issue of Valve's History is presented to your attention.

Gabe Newell is a programmer who worked at Microsoft on the first versions of Windows, who left it to start his own game development company. That's how Valve Corporation came into being in 1996.

Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington wanted to make a scary shooter by licensing the Quake game engine from id software. At first, it was difficult for the company to find a publisher, as everyone believed that this was too ambitious a project for newcomers to the industry. But Sierra On-Line was interested in creating a 3D Action game and took Valve under their wing.

The game was originally called Quiver. And initially, the story was about Ivan, a space biker who got into a space military laboratory captured by aliens and had to defend himself in order to survive. The developers were inspired by Stephen King's novel "The Fog".
All the maps that were presented in the game at that time were drawn on paper by a group of designers, programmers and animators, whose task was to make interesting levels, while making full use of all the technologies available to the company.


Initially, the guards and scientists working at the Black Mesa Research Center, where all the action took place, were supposed to be the player's opponents. But artificial intelligence developer Steve Bond used them to conduct experiments on enemy command behavior. He made the guards follow the player instead of fighting him, so it was easy to test their ability to navigate in space. And the developers liked the unusual idea of the player's allies so much for that time, which as a result forced them to change Ivan to Gordon Freeman, and radically redesign the game.

In an interview, Gabe Newell explained that the name Half-Life was not chosen by chance and it perfectly suited the concept of the game, was not cliched and had its own Greek symbol, lambda, which stands for a constant in the equations of radioactive half–life. Hence the name of the game. And yes, it was translated not as half a life, but a half-life. There's a hyphen for a reason.

The game was first publicly demonstrated at E3 in 1997 and immediately became a hit at the exhibition. Animation and artificial intelligence in the game were something incredible for that time.In August of the same year, the company hired writer Mark Laidlaw to work on the game's plot and characters. And the game was originally supposed to be released in 1997 to compete with Quake II, but then the company realized that the game was not ready yet.

In one of the magazines, Gabe Newell talked about the difficulties associated with the design of levels at an early stage of development. The designers were constantly putting together a level that includes all weapons, all enemies, and scripted scenes. This single level inspired the developers to continue working on the game, because they could feel how far they had come. As a result, in the year of the game's release, the refinement of the artificial intelligence of the monsters and all the levels were completed. At E3 1998, the game won the Best PC and Best Action Game awards. The release date was postponed several more times, shortly before the game was released, its demo Day One was released, which included the first 4 levels and training, and on November 19, 1998, Half-Life was released. And I think it's time to talk about her.Half-Life

Plot

Gordon Freeman is a physicist-engineer who... is late for work at the Black Mesa research center, but despite this, he puts on his work suit and goes to conduct experiments with a piece of unknown matter, which he introduces into a special device, however, something goes wrong and, suddenly, everything starts to explode, strange creatures appear, and Gordon is constantly teleporting somewhere.
Before it all started, it was over... well, almost.

When Gordon wakes up, he sees the consequences of what he has done. And, making his way through the laboratories, he finds a crowbar, which clears his way in the form of scientists who have turned into zombies and ends up in an office complex.


After passing through it, he enters the storage rooms, where he meets the military, who clearly did not come to evacuate the scientists. Having rebuffed them, along with walking along the surface, Gordon finds himself in an abandoned part of Black Mesa, where he encounters three huge tentacles, one attack of which will be fatal for the hero. After restoring the supply of electricity and fuel to the rocket engine hanging above the monster, the latter burns down, and Gordon opens the way to the tunnels for draining radioactive waste.

Trying to get to the surface again, we witness how the warriors are fighting with a huge creature, from whose claws flames come out. Gordon reaches the control room and discovers an injured guard. We learn from him that you can turn on the monorail by turning on the electricity. Along the way, we lure the monster into a room with two huge arresters and kill it. After that, we'll take the monorail.
After driving around them for a long time, Gordon manages to get back to the surface, launch a satellite into space and open his way... back underground.

However, the trip is quickly cut short by the military and Gordon makes his way through the laboratory again, only this time everything is flooded and there is a monster in the water. After finding the crossbow, we quickly deal with it and, leaving the laboratory, pass through a hall with huge pistons and get to a room with containers where people like ninjas are operating. After dealing with them, Gordon falls into a trap and is knocked out.
Waking up in the trash compactor, Gordon quickly finds his tire iron and gets out through the ventilation.


After getting out, Gordon realizes that the only way out of here is to go through the recycling complex. Passing through it, he gets on conveyor belts connected to other parts of Black Mesa and already makes his way through them to secret laboratories.In the labs, Gordon discovers that research on creatures from another world was conducted here long before the incident. There is also a new monster dressed in armor and armed with a biological cannon. On the upper floors, Gordon finds a prototype Gauss Cannon and activates a laser installation there, which will break his way to the lower floor, where he will find scientists opening the door to exit the complex.

And here we are on the surface, but things are even worse here, because now the soldiers are fighting not only with us, but also with the aliens. Gordon has to circumnavigate part of the complex's territory along the outer cliffs of the canyon and, climbing higher and higher, he gets to a relatively safe place.

The military begins to evacuate and, realizing that they are losing to the aliens, they say: "Forget about Freeman" and go to hell. Gordon descends into an underground storage facility in order to hide from the bombardment that Black Mesa is subjected to, and goes into underground water channels, through which he reaches the Lambda building.


Once there, a group of scientists are discovered hiding from the aliens and who tell Gordon that they need to get into the teleportation laboratory, simultaneously flooding the reactor core. After doing this and going through several teleports, we get to another group of scientists, from whom we learn that all this is not just a random incident, but an entire offensive operation of the Zen world........
Posted 19 July, 2021. Last edited 29 January.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
0.6 hrs on record (0.5 hrs at review time)
NEED FOR SPEED UNDEGROUND THE BEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted 19 July, 2021.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
1.3 hrs on record (1.1 hrs at review time)
Top,1995 mk1.
Posted 9 July, 2021.
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Showing 1-6 of 6 entries