Josh

Same universe, different franchises. There will be a Portal 2, and if it's as successful as the first game no doubt a Portal 3 as well, not to mention expansions like Still Alive etc, etc, etc. It's not a game in the Half-Life franchise, so it doesn't belong on the list!

Nah, Half-Life lacks a railgun. It does, however, have a Gauss Gun, which a different sort of weapon that operates on the same basic principles.

The problem, of course, is that I don't think Valve did a lot of research at the time on gauss technology, because the Gauss Gun in HL is some kind of laser weapon, that can pierce walls. Definitely not an actual gauss weapon.

In Half-Life 2, the same weapon is mounted on the buggy Gordon drives along the Coast, except it's called a Tau Cannon. So, I think we can consider that particular bit of HL trivia retconned.

If you want PC games to continue getting made, you'll buy the game. Do NOT pirate it, please. While the actual effects of piracy on the industry aren't fully understood, the perceived effects on the industry are far reaching and proven.

Example: Crysis was a success. It sold over a million units, and yet still Crytek says it suffered greatly from rampant piracy, and has since switched its development model from producing PC exclusives to cross platform development. This, obviously, is a direct result of perceived effects on the industry through piracy.

Another Example : Devil May Cry 4. The PC version of this game is fantastic. Better looking than either of its console counterparts as well as running smoother, this is a game worthy of purchase, and recently one of Capcom's head honchos has reported that the game is getting the ever loving crap violated out of it. While Capcom has been a general supporter of the PC platform for years, when they go to the effort and cost of porting a game to the platform and it gets rampantly stolen, what, if any, motivation remains for them to continue supporting the platform? Even if they just break even after the cost of the port, no company on the face of this planet has a business model that hinges on breaking even.

I'm a PC Gamer first, and a console gamer second. I own every platform currently available except for a PS3, and even I am starting to get frustrated with the piracy scene. PC Gamers are constantly complaining that the number of great games being released on their favorite platform is getting less and less every year, but when a new, good game does get released, those same PC Gamers descend upon it as would a school of sharks on the corpse of a whale, and it gets pirated an incredible number of times. We are murdering our own platform, and it's not through any actual loss in profits. I see it more as the perceived loss in profits on future attempts to produce PC games that are convincing more and more developers that it's just not worth it.

Thankfully, there are amazing people out there like Will Wright, Gabe Newell, Chris Taylor, the staff at Blizzard, EA's Command & Conquer team and others that persevere in the face of incredible negativity for their chosen platforms, and hopefully, as long as these people and their companies continue to support the PC, the platform will never really die.

But we will continue to see a hell of a lot less games coming out on the PC. So, again, please do NOT pirate this game. Buy it. It's worth the money, if for no other reason than to support the PC gaming scene. The fact that it's also a great game helps a bunch too.

This became more of a rant than I intended!

Yeah I was looking at this and thought instantly that it was lifted verbatim from another site. Google returns no such results, however, and so by process of elimination it must be legit. I comment you, Cook, for writing of this quality. I'm glad a talented writer took on the task of doling out a description for this amazing game.

I seriously doubt it.

SPOILERS BELOW READ NO FURTHER

1) The fact that Alyx's dad was just brutally murdered + had his brain sucked out by a couple of Advisors probably would make her more angry than in need to "get it on".

2) Gordon isn't in control of his life. As long as the Vortigaunts are protecting him he's momentarily free to do as he wishes, but the G-Man has significant powers and could probably just wipe out the Vortigaunts entirely if he was allowed to wield the full extent of his abilities. As we saw in Ep 2, the G-Man is always watching, always there. So I see no reason why he wouldn't simply pluck Gordon out of his universe as soon as he has the chance. After all, he all but left Alyx to die in the explosion of the Dark Energy Reactor at the top of the Citadel, so obviously he doesn't seem to care. 

Technically it's both.

It's a location in that it's, well, the Black Mesa Research Facility is a location, and it's a concept because Black Mesa itself it's a company/organization. Like SHINRA is an organization. Additionally the Aperture Science Enrichment Center and Aperture Science itself would be separate location and concept pages.

The slugs were the source of ADAM in the first place. initially Rapture's plasmid industry harvested the slugs but they just couldn't produce the volume needed to support a plasmid industry.

Tenenbaum figured out a process to graft the slugs into the digestive tracts of little girls. Initially they were kept in confinement as their bodies produced massive amounts of ADAM, but during the Rapture civil war they were repurposed to extract ADAM from the dead by ingesting their blood, and given Big Daddy bodygaurds. Since the slugs were embeded in ttheir digest tracts, when the Little Sisters drank the blood of people with ADAM in their systems, the slugs were capable of processing the ADAM from the blood. The Little Sisters' bodies were saturated with ADAM from this process.

This is why when you save the Little Sisters, you're using a Plasmid created by Tenenbaum that kills the slug and siphons the ADAM from the girl's systems. Alternatively by killing the Little Sisters you're basically ripping the slugs from their bodies to get at the more potent ADAM reserve.

I'm on a 3 year old system with an 8 month old vid card but it can run Crysis as max detail settings (non directx-10) very smoothly, and I've got 4 gigs of ram, but I'm running XP 32 so I probably won't bother with it until I build my new system or decide to find a copy of XP 64...sigh

You would be absolutely surprised to know how many times in a week we say Hudson Horstachio around the office.

"I would imagine that the Vortigaunt condition as a whole would have improved after becoming freed in the first Half-Life.  Perhaps the independence allowed them to resume practicing old Vort traditions of some kind (i like to pretend they play some kind of energy ball soccer).  Perhaps they are just better nourished?

anyway, in episode 2 it sounded like they were looking for something.  i can't remember exactly what they said, but it seemed like they were either looking for more of their kind, or some sort of leader.  am i misinterpreting?
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"The updated Vort textures were added to the PS3 and 360 version of the original HL2 and Ep1. The PC version has yet to get the graphical update for HL2 and Ep1.
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"Errorsol said:

"The updated Vort textures were added to the PS3 and 360 version of the original HL2 and Ep1. The PC version has yet to get the graphical update for HL2 and Ep1.
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We have mods, so its already available really. And specifically we have FakeFactory's cinematic mod :D!
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