Half-Life

Jean-Luc Godard, the star of Half-Life.

Gabe Newell, creator of Half-Life. Need we say more?

When Jean-Luc manages to get lupus, House often takes on the burden of covering for him, and memorizing the many lines spoken throughout the game.

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 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

Prepare for unforeseen consequences.

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, whilst 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.

The Weapons

Crowbar: Melee weapon that is used by every n00b who has realized that the pistol is shit and going up close to the guy with an RPG will kill him, also headcrabs.

Pistol: Shit only used for killing headcrabs or zombies, and one of the guns that you spawn with in MP. TOTAL SHIT.

Grenades: Green things that explode, but usually useless, due Gordon failing at PE and the highest distance you can throw one would be 10 feet.

Shotgun: Gun used to fuck up anything 6 inch in front of you. It has a double-barrel blast function to make sure anything standing in in front of you dies. Also has a fuckton of ammo.

Assault Rifle: Guns with extended magazines that all army grunts carry. It's basically an auto-fire 9mm caliber shotgun. Also has a n00b tube that can actually kill stuff.

Crossbow: A makeshift MLG PRO xXxXxSNIPERxXxXx that is for some reason everywhere in an scientific research facility. The only way to kill with is to use the scope, and click on anyone for instant 1-hit kill. You can't no-scope with it, because without the scope it's basically a revolver with explosive bullets.

Revolver: Good weapon in SP, shit in MP. The only way to kill people is with a headshot, and has an unnecessary zoom function that replaces your accurate crosshair with a nearly invisible red dot.

RPG: Rocket Lawnchair with LASERS. Unfortunately 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 to evade all the faggotry happening down there. It's primary fire is used by dumbasses who suck at 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 the lazor in 1 second, and it's fucking accurate.

Satchel Charges: C4 that people place on spawn points for spawncamping.

Alien Hive: Useless gun which regenerates ammo, don't ask me how. Xenu's servants drop this.

Snarks: Little alien midgets with AIDS coming after anyone, but die after 15 seconds.

Mortar: TEH EPIC GUN OF LULZ. Stationed next to the bunker in Crossfire. It has no crosshair, but anything it hits dies, it has infinite ammo, giant explosion range, and the kills do not count to your score, therefore it's a lulzgun. Except 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, except if you are faster than them. For more cannonfodder:

1. Kill any Tau/Gluon faggots (usually camping in the supply rooms or in the camping spaces)

2. Press the big red button

3. Place Satchel charges at all entry points

4. Keep other faggots off bay with the mortar or some other gun (Note: With some skill, you can tau jump directly into the mortar) room

5. Go back into the bunker when you hear JIHAD JIHAD JIHAD and airplanes

6. ???

7. PROFIT

The Modding Community

Average Half-Life discussion.

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

• 
  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.
• 
• 
  Came with the Half-Life 2 Special Edition.
• 
  Where to go to verse Gabe
• 

See also

• Doom
• Quake What the Half Life engine is based on
• Half-life 2
• Cry of Fear An abomination made especially for Half-Life
• Left 4 Dead
• Team Fortress 2
• Steam
• Squirrelking
• Freeman's Mind
• Zoy's official fansite
• Natural Selection Mod
• Charlie Cleveland
• Neotokyo
• Best Half-Life modification ever
• The Specialists (specialistsmod.net down) like ahl+cs, only more haters.

Half-Life is part of a series on Gaming Visit the Gaming Portal for complete coverage.