Half-Life
Half-Life, a term used to describe a first person shooter computer game, as well as the amount of life the basement dwelling nerds who play it often possess. Also, how long it'll take for that radioactive sludge to degrade into half. A Valve physics tech demo disguised as a first-person shooter that for some reason stars film director Jean-Luc Godard. The Half-Life games are universally regarded as the second best first-person shooting game ever, despite being repetitive, linear, overblown and almost as bad as Halo.
In this, the player takes control of Jean-Luc, who plays a personality-free bespectacled physicist called Gordon who works in some lab in the desert. After accidentally pushing a shopping trolley into a laser beam, Gordon fucks up the lab, steals a special robotic battle suit and kills hundreds of soldiers and innocent aliens.
This appeals to video game nerds because they too are glasses-wearing, socially retarded fuck-ups and it doesn't take too big a leap of their atrophied imaginations to see themselves running around the Black Mesa laboratories getting to massacre hundreds of people without their mothers grounding them.
It also appeals to twitchy, Call of Duty-playing, college fratboy sipping amphetamine pumped mountain dew type jocks because of it's simple representation of science in the only way they have the brain capacity to understand: ultimately, pushing a fucking cart.
In the sequel, Gordon proves improbably attractive to a hot gurl, thus increasing the loser appeal of the game tenfold, in a faux-Orwellian dystopian hellscape. That is the extent of the story, which proponents of the game seem to think is deep, even if there really isn't any character development, plot, or point. Apparently "deep story" means "potentially cool setting that nobody bothered to put a real story in". The whole reason the game exists is so the designers can show off their physics engine, which was cool at least 100 years ago, but now is boring as fuck. There are also parts where you drive vehicles that are as fun as getting your face chewed off by Nancy Cartwright's clam-cunt.
Both games have an online version called Counter-Strike. Beating someone at this is the Internets version of bustin' a cap in some Opie's ass, yo.
Half life is also used in physics to denote the amount of time that decaying discrete entities, such as radioactive atoms, take to reduce their mass by half. This of course does not apply when there is only one atom left, one atom will not decay into half an atom, but will rather Decay into 0 atoms, or not decay at all. tl;dr? See Physics.
Teh Gman
The Gman is ultimately, the koolest kid evar. He has the ability to shift through time and space, influencing every event that goes on in the mothafucking universe. He is like g0d in a way, except instead of a robe he wears a shitty value village suit. Around 9000 years ago, had a meeting with Santa himself and when asked why he was letting that fuckwit Freeman run around, he replied extravagantly; "My good sir, for what other reason does mankind do anything, other than to generate the life energy known as lulz". He is rumored to be at Xenus house right now, discussing ménage à trois over an intricate game of backgammon, while enjoying the finest of treats, chunks of spotted fetus-dick.
Teh Lulz
It is a well known fact that everything that took place during the course of that day was done by Gordon for the lulz. From shooting every guard and/or scientist execution-style, to pressing the buttons on the microwave so the food overheats and explodes. Some might even say Gordon is the lulziest man at Black Mesa. In fact, that very day, Gordon decided to have the most lulz any one man could ever have by pushing a non-standard specimen into the scanning beam of a Anti-Mass Spectrometer for analysis, thus creating a resonance cascade and opening a portal between Earth and some other worldly dimension (fact). He pwned over 9,000 innocent people as a result. Lulz ensued.
Weapons
- Crowbar: Melee weapon that is used by every n00b who has realized that the pistol does no damage, and going up close to the enemy with an RPG is suicide. It's also weird how the player swings it with one hand as if it was a hammer.
- Pistol: Puny gun, only used for killing headcrabs, zombies or sniping soldiers at long range. Your starting gun in multiplayer. TOTAL SHIT.
- Revolver: Good weapon in SP, shit in MP. The only way to kill people is with a headshot. It has an unnecessary zoom function that replaces your accurate crosshair with a nearly invisible laser dot.
- Shotgun: A Spas-12 that fucks up anything 6 inches in front of it. It has a super-awesome logic-defying double-barrel blast function to make sure anything standing in front of you dies. It also has a fuckton of ammo.
- Machine Gun: A oddly-shaped MP5 with a left-over suppressor from the Half-Life Alpha days, with extended magazines, which all army grunts carry (If you're using the HD model package with the M4, kindly fuck off). It's basically the most useful gun in the game. It also comes with a n00b tube that can actually kill stuff and make gibs fly everywhere.
- Grenades: Most of the time useless, due to Gordon failing at PE and the highest distance he can throw one would be 10 feet. It also feels like you're throwing huge coconuts. Hold the trigger for suicide bombing funtimes.
- Satchel Charges: C4 that people place on spawn points for spawncamping. You can drop this on elevators in MP to make it stop working until you leave.
- Laser mines: Pointless in singleplayer. In multiplayer they are mostly placed by assholes somewhere in the water areas where you can't see the blue beam.
- Crossbow: A makeshift MLG PRO xXxXxSNIPERxXxXx weapon that is, for some reason, available everywhere in a scientific research facility. Usually instant 1-hit kills anything while scoped. You can't no-scope with it, because without the scope it's basically a revolver with explosive bullets (in multiplayer).
- RPG: Rawkit Lawnchair with a LASER. It spawns everywhere in MP, and most people will shoot others with an RPG, even if they are in narrow corridors or right in front of them.
- Tau Cannon: Epic gun that is a deadly killing tool in the hands of a pro. Only has to charge up 0.5 seconds to kill anything, and if fully charged, goes through walls. It's also used for Tau jumping which is done by charging it and firing it in the opposite direction where you want to go to evade all the faggotry happening down there. It's primary fire is used by dumbasses who suck using this gun.
- Gluon Gun: The overpowered gun you need to win, that anyone can use. It fires a DEADLY LAZOR OF MASS DESTRUCTION which guarantees to disintegrate anyone being hit by it for longer than 1 second, and it's super fucking accurate.
- Hive Gun: Useless gun which regenerates ammo, don't ask us how. Xenu's servants drop this. The little hornets make pretty colors, though.
- Snarks: Little hyperactive alien insects coming after anyone, even you, but die after 15 seconds.
- Mortar: TEH EPIC GUN OF LULZ. Stationed in the bunker lookouts in the "Crossfire" map. It has no crosshair, but anything it hits dies. It has infinite ammo, a giant explosion range, and the kills do not count to your score, therefore it's a lulzgun. If you are using it for longer than 10 seconds, some butthurt faggot with a long-range weapon will try and fuck your shit up.
For more cannon fodder in "Crossfire", press the big red button in the back of the bunker (sometimes it takes time to open if it already has been pressed, or the admins disabled it). A loud siren will sound in the whole map. Hopefully you have a long-range weapon to snipe, but if you don't, use the mortar to keep everyone away from the bunker. After a while the doors close off the bunker and people will fall through the lookout trapdoors to enter the bunker. Keep going until everyone but you is dead, and watch as the chat explodes in vulgarities.
The Modding Community
Half-Life is one of those ancient, shitty old games that despite really looking like crap compared to newer games, still attracts 12 year old little kids and oldfags who like to "mod" it, or in other words design levels, create models, textures and code. Most of these tend to have abysmal quality even when compared to the engine itself, and these losers tend to bitch when others criticize their work. Most of the forums are also full of trolls who use any opportunity to milk lulz from other modders' weak egos, ensuing epic butthurt.
On most forums like HIT, most of the "modellers" are actually just talentless hacks who wank models and characters together from others' original works, and bitch about almost anything, erupting in endless flame wars where eventually people start bitching about how much the site sucks. In fact, people can get banned for almost anything, as the mods there are trolls. This place is the guide line to all the modern Half-Life modding forums, all of them have gone down the same way, if not outright deleted for their level of fail, like the VERC forums.
The community used to be good once, with modifications like "Spirit of Half-Life", which introduced all kinds of useful entities that helped imaginative mappers invent all sorts of complex elements, but it died after the lead programmer realized that nobody used his mod. Sometime after this numerous mods became hellbent on coding modern graphics into the 13 year old game, but most of these improvement mods eventually dumped Half-Life's original file formats and relied on their own, essentially not resembling Half-Life at all but still relying on it, instead of doing their game from scratch.
Half-Life mods are born every day and fall every day, to some this happens on in one day. They tend to be all fan wank with no imagination, with Gordon Freeman as the protagonist, because most of the community is made up of lifeless, loser geeks who see their father figure in Gordon, and wank to Alyx-Gordon and Alyx-Vortigaunt porn all day in their basements. In fact the modding scene is just so dry of originality and so full of aids, most mods just straight out rip content from other mods and mangle it all over, ensuing epic butthurt when the original creators find out, but some mods go to the point of stealing content from copyrighted games. There is no Half-Life mod with an original storyline and original content, everything is stolen out of commercial games or from previous mods. The worst failures of these are the mods that port content from the later Half-Life 2 and respective games, essentially making Half-Life 1 look a lot like Half-Life 2, despite the 5 year gap between the two. However even most community members tend to flame these and their faggot creators to death, resulting in lots of butthurt and fail.
Recently, the community devolved so much into crap, that not even the oldfags have any original ideas anymore, and instead they decide to turn already shitty mods into even worse pieces of shit, in the name of improving them. Despite the fact that there's an endless war between the oldfags and the newfags, the fact is that most of the oldfags are 30 year old manchildren and basement dwellers with weak but large egos, who need the constant praise from the newfags, it's the only thing keeping them from becoming an heroes and banning themselves irl, that is why they still cling onto an easily moddable, crappy engine instead of moving to Source, or the fact that Gabe Newell's new diet deprived the funds previously devoted to fixing their useless, buggy Source SDK toolkit. The only reason this entire community of failure is still standing, and had not devolved into pure cancer is because there is one thing common among all of the modding community members: they don't have the skill to work with modern game the engines that would actually yield something that a modern gamer could look at without his eyes bleeding out, and that the level of expectation is just so low in the entire community, they can easily grow their e-penises just by hacking something completely unoriginal together from others' original works, thus helping them feel like they can make be productive, but really they are not.
The most special type of Half-Life modder is the programmer, they tend to be very proud of their hard work, and always bitch about it when the newfags use their code without giving them any credit, also they tend to have no life and that is why they spend months just trying to figure out how to actually program, as most of them are just 13 year old boys who are too stupid to read a book on programming. They tend to have egos the size of the moon and bitch about code theft, when in fact most of them also steal code from all over the place and usually get away with it, because most of the community is too stupid to notice the similarities. However since they know how to handle something higher than just playing lego with maps and stolen model parts, they also tend to be smarter, thus they are harder to troll, but if you manage to leak their code somehow, it can result in epic butthurt and BAWWWWWW, but this tends to be hard. Also if the programmer's work obviously sucks, you can just go on and criticise the shit out of it, over time the programmer will surely get butthurt and write long posts on why you're a dumb evil troll. The most annoying of the programmers are the graphics programmers, who tend to whore around with their new effects and not actually share it's source code, proving that they are just attention whores.
Near Bankruptcy
Although the game was successful, Gabe Newell's celebration of the game's success nearly caused the company to file for bankruptcy. Gabe's celebration included fat hookers, eighty of Subway's foot-long Italian BMTs (without vegetables) and honey-mustard sauce, pink colored chocolate, blow-up dolls which resembled the 3-boobed chick from Total Recall and shares in the scat-porn industry. Two years after the release of the game, Valve was down to just a few hundred dollars. Gabe sought to make a couple thousand by whoring some of his employees to junkies outside clinics.
Gabe's actions nearly caused support for Half-Life 2 to come to a halt till he found out he could make money on the internets by claiming he was an ex-Nigerian prince. Although this attempt was unsuccessful to most people in the United States, United Kingdom and those countries with the funny hats, gullible people in Australia were the first to hand Gabe over the millions he needed. Although Gabe got the money back and the company was back on it's feet, this still wasn't enough to have development start on the now mythological Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Although he promises an Episode 3 WILL be made, we all know he's just eating, sleeping and pooping and even all at once on a daily basis.
Gallery
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Typical Half-Life player. -
The most effective weapon on Half-Life. -
The final boss of Xen is none other than a giant aborted fetus with telepathetic powers....and a spikey penis. -
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Where to go to verse Gabe -
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Eric and Dylan co-op together -
Videos
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See also
- Half-Life 2 - The cinematic sequel with virtually no replay value or good mods.
- Steam - Steam killed off the old WON network version and forced everyone to switch.
- Quake - What the GoldSource engine is based on.
- Cry of Fear - An abomination made especially for Half-Life
- Doom - Half-Life caused the end of the Doom clones.
- Freeman's Mind - Extremely unfunny fanfiction.
- Natural Selection Mod - Literally the only mod that outlived Half-Life, and wasn't bought up by Valve.
External Links
- Best Half-Life modification ever - Definitely
- The Specialists - Like Action Half-Life + CS. Still the coolest FPS mod of all time, unfortunately even the original website is dead now.
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