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  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Is Freeman's aptitude for combat and his willingness to kill an indication that he is more than just a scientist caught in the middle of extraordinary events? G-Man's mention of his "employers" being impressed by Freeman's "limitless potential" also seems to hint at such.
    • Are the HECU and Black Ops really as ruthless and cold-blooded as they seem, or were they covertly assigned to protect Earth from an invasion by the Combine (as ultimately happened before the start of Half-Life 2) by terminating the science team because They Know Too Much?
  • Ass Pull: The Road Block between the "Power Up" and "On a Rail" levels is a pile of cement dividers blocking the tram rail. Despite that, the slow-moving flat-car tram that Gordon's riding in is easily able to bust through, and continue on like normal down the rail. Almost as if the cement dividers were made of styrofoam.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • Alien Grunts come in squads, have close to 100 hit points, fire bee projectiles that chew through your armor and health as fast as the soldiers' assault rifles, and can make said projectiles home in on you rendering cover effectively useless, take zero damage from bullets when shot in the armor, and can kill you in a few punches if you get close. The only safe way to deal with them is to use a powerful weapon with rare ammo (e.g. grenade launcher, rocket launcher, Gluon Gun), or circle strafe while firing your submachine gun/assault rifle or shotgun secondary fire, hoping that they miss enough shots so that they die before you do... if you hadn't taken out their buddies yet. Half-Life: Source on the other hand turns them into a joke, as now anything will stun them for at least a little bit, which combined with their larger profiles means that they won't even be able to fire back if you spray them with automatic fire.
    • While squishier than the Alien Grunts above thankfully, HECU Sentries are still absurdly deadly. They can fire a barrage of bullets with frightening accuracy. No matter how far you are and/or how good your stealth is, the turrets will see you. Even if they are squishy, turrets are hard to hit due to their small size and positioning while you're desperately taking cover and firing potshots at them.
  • Disappointing Last Level: There's a reason this trope used to be called "Xen Syndrome." Xen is plagued with annoyingly designed jumping puzzles seen throughout the alien world levels. While the Earth-bound potion of the game had players frequently interact with NPCs to relay bits and pieces of the story, point them in the right direction, and provide occasional comic relief, Gordon is, by design very much alone on Xen, leaving the player frequently bereft of a sense of direction, any idea of what they're supposed to do next, and in short supply of any real pause from the oppressive and alienating atmosphere of the border-world. A drastic Difficulty Spike due to the overuse of Alien Controllers didn't help either.note  Players do agree, however, that the artwork for Xen is unique and nice to look at. The Fan Remake Black Mesa took fixing the issues with Xen so seriously that they decided to completely rebuild the entire area effectively from scratch, which is why it delayed the completion of the game for over half a decade (the first half of Xen, up to Gonarch's Lair, entered public beta in July 2019 before the final version of the game finally released at the end of November to a widely acclaimed reaction).
  • Fan Nickname:
    • One of the rooms early on in the original game contains several cargo crates suspended over what appears to be a bottomless pit. Thanks to Freeman's Mind, it has become known to some as the box-smashing room.
    • Fans often call the Gonarch "The Gonad", for... obvious reasons.
  • Funny Moments: In the PlayStation 2 version of the Hazard Course. "I, Gordon Freeman, hereby agree to the following terms, Blah, Blah, Blah, in any case of serious injury, dismemberment, toxic poisoning, burns, rashes, blah blah, etc. etc..."
  • Game-Breaker:
    • In Half-Life: Source, it's possible to take no damage while fighting an alien grunt if you use....the crowbar. If you're right in front of the grunt, it will attack with melee. But if you hit it with the crowbar, it will restart the attack. Because you can swing the crowbar faster than they can swing their wrists, all they can do is repeat an animation over and over while you kill them.
    • In Deathmatch, expect the Skeleton skin to be banned or forbidden to use. It is notorious for how absurdly well it blends in with the mostly grey and beige surroundings, and because of the nature of the model, there is also far less to spot. Ultimately, it makes ambushing other players far too easy for the community to consider fair.
  • Gameplay Derailment:
    • For a rather literal example, while the idea of the "On a Rail" level is to ride a tram to the surface, it is found to be much easier to just walk on foot and destroy the train adventure. This can happen quite often with players.
    • In the original game (not the Source port), Laser-Triggered Claymores and Snarks could be used as solid objects to allow for the player to get boosted up to reach locations you wouldn't be able to get to until much later in the map.
    • Pro long-jump module users can skip having to traverse some sections of Xen, and bypass world triggers that would spawn new enemies; particularly when you're in the Alien Grunt factory.
    • The same can be said about using weapon explosions such as grenades and satchels to propel the player to areas much earlier than they are supposed to. A good example is the first map of "Interloper" by grenade jumping to the island with the teleporter to the next area; effectively skipping to have to traverse that entire map.
  • Genre Turning Point: For the First-Person Shooter genre.
    • Before Half-Life, gameplay in First-Person Shooters generally boiled down to "shoot everything you see" with no sense of tactics or strategy, and the extent of puzzles were just simple "search for the key and lock" puzzles. Half-Life changed that with a stronger narrative focus and more complex enemy A.I., requiring much more care on how you progress.
    • The duelling philosophies of shooters in the 90s could generally be divided into a Technician Versus Performer debate: on the one end, games like Quake and Unreal, which had highly advanced tech but didn't do anything particularly creative with it beyond their core gameplay loop, and games like Duke Nukem 3D and Blood (1997), which lagged technologically but compensated by using that tech to show more realistic and highly interactive environments with a strong sense of character. The idea of a game to try to be as cutting-edge as Unreal and as characterful and interactable as Duke Nukem was therefore downright revelatory, and became the standard from that point on.
  • Goddamned Bats: While not the most dangerous enemies in the game, The Alien Controllers, Mini Mook versions of the Nihilanth with small bodies and big heads, are rather annoying. They're one of the few enemies in the game that can attack and move at the same time, making them mildly more difficult than usual to take down. And while their projectile attacks are not that strong, their damage output can pile up over time, especially since they're often encountered in groups. Worst of all, these are late-game enemies, so most of the challenge surrounding them is combined with Xen's tricky level design.
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • In the unpatched first version of the game, it was almost a certainty that scientists would randomly die for seemingly no reason. This could happen as soon as you begin "Anomalous Materials" where you'll walk in, listen to the guard at the front desk...and see the scientist to your left suddenly fall to the ground like he had a heart attack. Suffice it to say, this turns the action FPS game into a Survival Horror game.
    • Also in the unpatched retail release, it's possible to cause a resonance cascade by throwing a snark into the anti-mass spectrometer (the same result also happens if you shoot at it with the Hivehand). While it's been patched in the Steam version, the bug remains present in Half-Life: Source.
    • Near the end of Surface Tension, you reach a map layout that requires you to find, and escort, a security guard to open a door to the next area. Getting stuck in doors usually does a slight bit of damage to you. However, due to an error in the scripting for this map, the doors instead do the exact opposite and HEALS you; to the point that purposefully getting stuck in the door will allow the player to obtain health levels beyond the 100 health limit. Want 4000+ health? Just get yourself stuck in the doorway. This tends to be a commonly used bug for speed-runners as it allows for players to explosion jump all over the place, and not have to worry about dying to the self-explosions.
    • While the act of destroying a body is itself intentional to help give more impact to explosions if one uses the crowbar to attack a dead body in a specific spot (Which has an added bit of hilarity of being around the crotch on humanoid characters.) then the Crowbar will start hitting them as fast as the framerate will allow. The result is Gordon hitting someone in the crotch so fast that he reduces them to chunks. It's an economic way of destroying corpses that may happen to be blocking doors.
    • Due to the game using scripting quite often, scripted behaviour can be heavily abused. Especially useful with one Gargantua - it's spawned neutral and if you remove the chasing script trigger (which can be done with the pistol), it will remain as so. This can be done twice in the whole game. Mini-Boss fight easily averted.
    • Ichthyosaur. There are generally two strategies for how to fight it: either jump after it into the water and start frantically firing your crossbow while avoiding being eaten, or bug it above your head and kill it with the crowbar.
    • The Gonarch will get transported with the player to the next chapter if it happens to be on top of the teleporter to the next level. The moment you realize that you just glitched the Gonarch into the Interloper chapter is not only a huge WTF moment, but it's downright hilarious.
    • Tricks that allow the player to skip entire sections of the game:
      • Near the end of Office Complex, you can push a security guard towards a locked exit door to open it from the locked side, allowing the player to skip having to traverse through the freezer portion of the level.
      • At the very beginning of We've Got Hostiles!, you can glitch the scientist to open the security door which will allow you to click the button to open the silo door to the Blast Pit; effectively skipping the entire chapter.
      • You can climb the cement divider barricade at the start of Power Up to skip the entire level (While this is still possible in the Source version of the game, you can no longer squeeze your way through the tram-drop elevator to get to the next area, so you'll need to go back to get the tram working this time around anyway). Also, due to an overlap oversight between the first map sections of Power Up and On a Rail, it's possible to glitch the crate items from the Power Up area to duplicate into the On a Rail map for extra health and trip-cameras.
  • It Was His Sled:
    • The Marines that arrive are there to kill you, not save you. Their Cavalry Betrayal in We've Got Hostiles was played as a shocking turn of events that is cemented by one of them mercilessly gunning down an innocent scientist. Pretty much every review spoiled that, and Opposing Force makes no effort to hide that the HECU are on orders to silence the Black Mesa Staff because of what they know.
    • Also, near the end of the game, you go to Xen.
  • Memetic Mutation: See the series' page.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The sounds made by the Health Charger and HEV Charger give the player a satisfying sense of relief.
    • The sound of a high-explosive(s) going off in general, sending any nearby NPC flying in pieces.
    • The giblet sound when a living or dead organism gets hit with overkill, usually accompanied by an amusing method like heavy machinery, Energy Weapons (including environmental weapons), explosives, or even the crowbar among other methods.
    • The Xen healing pools. Someone even liked them so much they made an hour-long video of just the sound
  • Narm: Especially these days, the largely amateurish voice acting combined with poor audio quality and clunky animations can cause a fair bit of Narm. Many of the death scenes are rather chuckle-worthy as a result. In particular, the infamous Elevator Failure scene is quite slapstick in its timing, with the Doppler Effect of the screaming scientists inside, the fact that they just stand there in perfect formation with no movement whatsoever while falling, and the Ludicrous Gibs once they hit the bottom. Not to mention that if you get close enough to the elevator as it falls down the shaft, it's quite possible to trigger the elevator scientists to say their casual voice lines. You could very well hear a scientist being all "Ah, it's good to see you!" as he's falling to his death. Interestingly, the remake, Black Mesa, makes this moment more upsetting and removes pretty much all the Narm factor.
  • Narm Charm: On the other hand, some enjoy the subpar voice acting/dialogue (see the Memetic Mutation section) and audio quality for the late 90s video game vibe it gives.
  • Once Original, Now Common: The vast majority of the game's innovations have since been copied by every single first-person shooter to come since, which can make it difficult for newcomers to appreciate what a landmark title it was in 1998. Perhaps most noticeably, the opening "Welcome To Black Mesa" train ride where you can't do anything except wander around the confined space you're trapped in looking at things outside while you're carried through the facility would seem painfully quaint to modern gamers, unaware of how creative this kind of environmental storytelling was at the time, or how mind-blowing the graphics were compared to what had come before.
    Yahtzee Croshaw: <describing the intro> "Ooh, look at all the crazy shit we've done with the Quake engine! Is that a big thumping laser machine being presided over by a dude with skeletal animation? I THINK IT BLOODY IS!"
  • Polished Port: The PlayStation 2 port, released three years after the original, runs very well and features updated graphics superior to the Blue Shift High Definition Pack. It also adds a nifty (and toggleable) lock-on feature, a co-op multiplayer expansion (Decay), a couple of secret levels, and a cheat code that lets you play as a Vortigaunt. Overall it was one of the best shooters on the system. Its only real problem is that it doesn't include the other add-ons (which were never ported), even Team Fortress Classic which came free with the original PC version. Though given the lack of online support for the PS2, the then-lack of bots for the multiplayer add-ons, and the fact that Blue Shift was originally supposed to be a Dreamcast exclusive before that port was abruptly cancelled, this is understandable. Opposing Force never being ported is the only glaring issue.
  • Porting Disaster: Zig-zagged with Half-Life: Source, a 2004 remaster of the game released before Half-Life 2. While it does sport better lighting/water effects and converts everything to use ragdoll physics, the game itself is something of a broken shadow of the original. Several glaring bugs and glitches exist in this version that don't elsewhere, and the actual quality of the remaster attempt is debatably on par with the colourization of film. Even patches that mysteriously rolled out in 2013 did little more than fix an ammo count oversight and add official support for the Blue Shift HD models (which can look worse than their originals with how shiny and fake they look in Source). To get an idea of how phoned-in the gameplay aspects of the port are, the attack helicopters don't have armor against small-arms fire like they did in the original game, meaning that they can be killed with a handful of pistol shots. Issues like this served as part of the motivation behind the Fan Remake Black Mesa. Speaking of which…
  • Remade and Improved: While Half-Life is still beloved and considered one of the most iconic First-Person Shooter games of all time, many Half-Life fans consider the Fan Remake Black Mesa to be a massive improvement over both the original and especially 2004's Half-Life: Source, the latter of which just ported all of the original game's assets to the Source Engine, with little effort made to improve it. The Xen levels of Black Mesa in particular are seen by fans as the best improvement done by The Crowbar Collective, effectively averting the Disappointing Last Level sections of the original.
  • Rooting for the Empire: The HECU frequently get this treatment, having a not-insignificant fanbase who is quite happy to gloss over or even justify their slaughtering of Black Mesa's science team. Their macho personalities and challenging AI play a large role in this, along with their sympathetic portrayal in the Opposing Force expansion and the post-2001 rise of militarism and nationalism in popular culture.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • You very soon learn to quicksave before trying to get on or off a ladder, because both have a chance of misbehaving which increases linearly with the likelihood that such misbehaviour will get you killed. The ladders in "Blast Pit" are a particularly lovely example.
    • The game's close-range combat is generally believed to have aged poorly, due to how difficult it is to judge the distance between you and the target, the weapons being weak, enemies often having fast reaction time, and the game not being balanced around close-range combat. It's to the point that if a Game Mod features strict ammo management in its gameplay, forcing you to rely upon close-range weapons, it's very likely going to be marked down or criticized in a review for it.
  • Scrappy Weapon:
    • The Hivehand, aka the Hornet Gun. The only good thing about it is that it can regenerate ammo and that the hornet ammo can home in on targets around walls and such without the enemies ever being alerted to the player. Other than those, it's the most ineffective and useless weapon in the series, to the point where you'll hardly be using it at all and instead be using all the other, more superior weapons, though it can be surprisingly handy when it comes to killing enemies without putting yourself in harm's way.
    • Given how Gordon is on the move all the time and how it's not too easy to predict an enemy attack wave for the first time, Tripmines are more or less useless too. Though it is quite easy to take advantage of Artificial Stupidity to bait enemies, such as HECU soldiers, into Tripmines you've set up as they're never smart enough to know that they shouldn't be crossing the Tripmine laser. Or setting up for engagements that you know are going to happen after experiencing them in previous play-throughs, such as the Backtracking segment of Power Up after getting the flooded power generator working.
    • Snarks are probably the most useless weapon in the original game. Since they're Xen aliens, they don't chase most of the Xen enemies (Vortigaunts, Bullsquids, Alien Grunts or Alien Controllers), only attacking Headcrabs (the weakest enemies in the game), Houndeyes and Zombies (who don't appear after "Apprehension"). Hence, they're mainly effective against human enemies. Unfortunately, Snarks are first obtained late in the game, inside a cage in "Questionable Ethics", and human enemies vanish from the game almost completely after "Surface Tension", with only some HECU soldiers in a few spots in "Forget about Freeman!" and a squad of Black Ops Assassins at the beginning of "Lambda Core". While there are several spots where they can be used, they're quite limited.
  • Signature Scene: The Resonance Cascade: an experiment goes wrong and causes an alien invasion, thus putting in motion the events of the whole franchise.
  • So Bad, It's Good: Half-Life: Source is a notoriously broken and messy port of the original game which is bad enough to spawn a few memes of its own (floating scientist, seizure-inducing geometry leak in Residue Processing, eternal Barney vs. Tentacle battle, etc) but it's still entertaining just because of how janky it is.
  • Special Effect Failure: If you pick the bad ending and get stuck in front of an army of alien grunts it's painfully obvious that all the grunts behind the first row are just static sprites (essentially the video game equivalent of "cardboard cutouts").
  • That One Boss:
    • The Gonarch, which also doubles as That One Level. Some people even take the time to blow up the hole in the floor in the final section of the fight themselves to teleport to the next levelExplanation  so that they wouldn't have to deal with the Gonarch anymore.
    • The same goes for the Nihilanth due to the repetitive nature of the fight.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Vortigaunts are slaves to the Nihilanth, which the game doesn't really allude to, or delve further into in any way, that it's something that can go completely unnoticed by the player. Even when the player comes across that one group of Vortigaunts who don't attack you in Xen's Grunt Factory, it doesn't tell all that much. It's for this reason that it comes as a complete surprise to some people when they first witness the Vortigaunts now as allies in Half-Life 2.
  • Underused Game Mechanic:
    • The Long Jump Module. You get it so late in the game that the only time you can use it on Earth is within the final teleporter room of the "Lambda Core" level. One can only imagine how fun it would have been to long jump on the earlier levels, such as the long stretches of "Surface Tension."
    • Using Snarks starts to become rather pointless once the HECU starts to drop out of being an enemy to fight. From "Lambda Core" onward (except for a second run-in with a female Black Ops group), there are no enemies that the Snarks will outright choose to attack since they don't view the Xen aliens as enemies to eat away at. Thus, you're usually just left carrying around a bunch of Snarks with nothing to use them on. This is especially odd when you consider that it's still possible to come across additional Snark ammo in these later levels.
  • Unfortunate Character Design: The Gonarch's egg-sack looks like a huge scrotum, which is completely deliberate. Quoth Gabe Newell in Raising the Bar:
    "Sometimes we're just sitting around and we're tired and somebody comes up with a goofy idea like, "Why don't we put a giant testicle on a 20-foot-tall armoured spider?"


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