“I take my mission seriously.” Said Civvie, playing as Adrian Shepard, who wasn’t given his mission objective before the crash, meaning he was killing everyone for no fucking reason, including scientists who helped him, can heal him, and guards, who help him get supplies to survive.
It _DOES_ raise the question of whether or not Adrian would be any more or less ethical if the only reason he wasn’t happily shooting the hell out of the Black Mesa personnel, was because he had not been directly told to…
It is the same, Gordon fought the boss in zen that I believe was opening portals. And Shepard fought the boss that invaded earth. I always liked to think that as the boss from HL was dying it lost control over its power and opened the biggest portal which allowed the boss from opposing force to teleport to earth
I recently replayed both of these and man is Blue Shift short. It's alright, although nothing to write home about. I do like Opposing Force though, especially some of those new guns and I love how the spore launcher will purr and you can pet it.
Opposing Force is iconic, but it tried to do too much and kind of came off half-baked, whereas Blue Shift is vintage Half-Life, a much smaller and focused story and it succeeds more overall because of it
You can pet it? 🤣 How did I miss Half-Life even on X-BOX? Granted I thought it was military and I only liked 1 military game ever so that maybe the reason why, but still it looks too epic to have missed it. 🤷♂️
Started watching this and was like "Oh man I forgot I never played Blue Shift" Finished the video having realized that oh yeah, I DID play through Blu Shift and promptly forgot all about it.
@@matthewgagnon9426 ok civvie tends to use hyperbole but you are forgetting a bunch of weird half life spin offs and ports. Blue Shift is the equivalent of a single slice of wheat bread so DONT agree with ecelebrities ever because they are exaggerating for comical effect.
5:05 I think the accurate laser sight gimmick is more for Deathmatch. The idea I guess is that your gun is more accurate, but players can see the red dot and thus it adds a risk-reward system for perhaps an otherwise overpowered weapon
How could you kill Otis? He's a saint. He's the only good thing Randy has ever given us, and you killed him Civvie. You killed that glorious cherub from on high.
@@mrbigglezworth42 listen, when a high tech facility is imploding from its own consequences, he’s gonna need vending machine food. That shit counts in the very moment
@@Zulk_RS yeah and there was a daughter who was spared from this unknown curse, then this infamous picture of her brother squeezing his face on her laying in bed.
@@BlatantThrowAwayI can't remember every example, but the scripted scene of Gordon Freeman running to the Xen teleporter is called "run Luke run" in the level editor
@@TheD736 Right on the money. He made a video covering entity names for Blue Shift, and yeah, whoever worked on the teleporter setpiece at the end of Blue Shift was definitely not happy about it.
The BFG as you call it is actually the exact same thing as a Zorch from Chex Quest in that it teleports Xen creatures back to their homeworld. Speaking of Chex Quest...
I seem to recall the angry video game nerd mentioning there's a Brutal Chex Quest mod that changes the narrative a bit so that your weapons teleport the enemy... straight to hell! In pieces! *_Maniacal laughter_*
I paid full price (50€) for Blue-shift when it came out and felt pretty ripped off when the game ended after 2 hours. However, when I some years later added my blue-shift cd-key to steam, it unlocked all the half-life 1 games and mods in the store which was a pleasant surprise.
Nothing wrong with jackin' it to 18 year old women; that's the legal age in the USA. But it is perverted to have porn on a flash drive and bring it with you in public. Keep that shit at home.
It really is total crap. The right way to do difficulty in an FPS game is typically to add more enemies or change weaker types of enemies into tougher ones. Not arbitrarily change damage numbers and health values around. Even on Nightmare mode in Doom, the game doesn't do that. It's a surprising flaw in an otherwise good FPS.
@@banaanzxcvbnm Yeah, not a fan. If you play New Vegas, be sure to download Josh Sawyer's (one of the official lead designers') mod. It has a difficulty mode called "Survival" which increases damage for both you and the enemy, which makes the combat feel less spongy and more like the classic games. Despite the name it doesn't force you to do things like eat or drink like in Hardcore.
And on a sidenote, at least HECU did more anti-alien/anomaly action than whatever the CIA/FBI/U.S. military did on Disney's Gravity Falls and Amphibia combined.
I really think to anyone going back and playing these, particularly if you're doing it for the first time like I did, do Blue Shift first. that's what I did and it makes it so that Blue Shift doesn't get outshined by Opposing Force, because Opposing Force is a tough act to follow... I really think Blue Shift gets a bad rep although the ending IS boring. I'm also more interested in the storytelling and atmosphere of Half-Life than the difficulty of the gameplay so maybe that affected my opinion too.
Blue Shift is a perfect game to start the franchise, because you don't really know what really happened, everything is a mystery, you enjoy the game, and when you play the original you can see what really happened, it's really cool.
I desperately want Civvie as a drill sergeant character. “You got a misaligned beret, your patches are tilted, and you didn’t even tuck in your shirt! *Nice Fucking Model!!* “
and the best part is, the *"NICE FUCKIN' MODEL!" **_honk honk_* isn't even Civvie doing it, that's just Beetlejuice appearing in a tear in reality just long enough to do the bit.
I just realized Opposing Force is Doom retold in the Half Life Universe. From the distress call, to the last survivor of your squad, to the literal BFG. Can’t wait for Adrian Shepherd to be given god powers by Satan God and skullfuck G-Man in Half Life Eternal.
You know, you'd think with Blue Shift the least they could have done was add in a BATON instead of the crowbar... Ya know, something a security guard might have. How about a particle based pepper spray/mace? A flashlight with fixed battery life? Something.... ANYTHING.
Ehhhhhhhhhhhh to be honest that would have looked like a dildo more then anything in Goldsrc. Tbh baton in games feel more like a toy then anything, except cry of fear its the only game that I've played were it feels like actual weapon.
@@fanowar772 They Hunger/TFC gave us an umbrella. A baton would not have been that hard to do. Ion Fury gave Shelly an electric one. It's doable. My whole point was... They didn't even do basic stuff to try and give Blue Shift a little more personality separate from Half-Life. The *ONLY THING* they did other than the hands was change the hud color and take away suit chargers. I'm not saying they had to completely redesign the way Half-Life played, but... At least something. Opposing Force gave us additional weapons, night vision, friendly grunts, ropes, an entire new alien faction, and black ops.
@@OpenMawProductions yeah I thought the umbrella in the hunger was ass too. And to be honest Blue shift wasn’t meant to stand alone and be its own thing. It was supposed to be a little exclusive content for dream cast players. Idk I just think it was a little slice of half life you know something apart of something much bigger.
What's better than Blue Shift? Basically everything. I remember when I was younger and I bought it when it Launched, imagine how bad I felt knowing in the future after fully playing it, that I paid $40-$50 for Blue Shift, a game you can basically beat in less than an Hour. That's how much it cost at launch. I was such a big Half-Life fan that I bought it thinking it'd at the VERY least be as good as Opposing Force, oh boy was I wrong. Mod-wise, I'd have preferred 'Absolute Redemption', cause there's a really cool/fun Carnival level in it.
It also felt like it moved faster, so if you were willing to get up close and personal, you could deal with enemies pretty decently with it and save ammo
When I registered my Blue Shift CD key on Steam back in 2007 it gave me every game in the GoldSource collection, so it’s still a good game in my book. Even if the only redeeming feature of it was that buying it gave me better games.
"I'm proud to say you are now a soldier!!!" Isn't... isn't he already a Corporal? Wouldn't that mean he's been in the military for at least a bit at that point?
24:00 - Hmmm, Gearbox made a game where a giant monster comes out of a portal and you have to force it back through to win. What an absolutely original idea that was never used again by any company named Gearbox.
The modern equivalent of Jon St John voicing all the characters in these games would be something like having Gianni and Fabino be the only two voice actors in some random game.
@@MrDevious88 Got to the last boss on hard and discovered that all the ammunition for every weapon I had was not enough. Then it became a noclip affair
14:03 Fun fact, You can get in front of the engineer soldier the moment he breaks down the door and destroy the turret so he lives, then you, the engineer, and medic can link up with the two soldiers you blew up with c4 and you then have 4 AI soldiers to fight the spec ops guys in that challenging part, making it a lot easier
10:47 "My brother Mitchell is on that chopper!" Funny thing is that chopper ends up exploding if you wait around. You can noclip through the door to see it more clearly. And I feel like Civvie knew that.
There's a major continuity error at 25:25. In the real Half-Life experience, Gordon is supposed to shout, "SUCKER!!" at Barney as he goes by on the train. ;)
I'm surprised no mention of the ropes in Opposing Force was made after it was mentioned in a prior video. Even back in the day, the ropes were some of the jankiest controls I ever recalled.
I can see in the future as Civvie complains about everybody telling him that the Wrench is one the best meele weapons on OpFor You can GIB a Black Ops with it!!
@@intecrisis It's still faster to smash boxes with the knife. Because it (and the wrench) do double damage compared to the crowbar, yet the knife swings just as fast.
I have a fond memory of my first playthrough of Opposing Force when I was a kid, and I got to the scientist at 9:45, and decided to try the fully charged wrench attack. He instagibbed and I laughed my ass off.
My favorite part of HL and Opposing Force is that the games can never decide if the troops are Army or Marines. The vehicles are 90% Army and everyone calls you soldier, except the Cpl Shep lore says marines so. Whatever. Just storytelling right
@@CH47Flyingtwinkie Yeah right? If it's like A51 the security should all be airmen. That said it makes sense if they were sending an Army hazmat team to respond with a more combat-oriented capacity... it's really sort of a joint force, there are Air Force jets, the CV-22 is an Air Force not Marine helicopter, and the troops all look like soldiers (only Army has those maroon berets, even if you'd never see them in combat) plus the Abrams and Bradley vehicles! The Marine stuff is 100% just Opposing Force doing its own thing.
Civvie talks about downloading a fan mod in 2001 that probably would've given a better experience than Blue Shift... yep! Check out Azure Sheep, hopefully that's been updated to work on modern OSes. Other fun ones that still hold up: They Hunger (a zombie mod), and Sweet Half-Life (a fun fan campaign with two different crazy branching paths and endings)
Other great mods: Invasion, Poke 646 and its sequel, Echoes, Caged, Paranoia, Someplace Else. There's even a total conversion called Gunman Chronicles, it's pretty cheesy but oh boy the weapons were wonderful and inventive, and it has space cowboys and dinosaurs! One of my guilty pleasures!
I recognized his Rosenberg voice because it sounds like his normal voice with a "classy" accent, but I've also heard his voice a lot. He's also the main antagonist in Ion Fury.
It's only for character and weapons. I also like how the PS2 models never came to PC, those were even more high definition with actual moving fingers and eyeballs instead of a flat texture. It even updated the health and charger station that looks sort of like Black Mesa.
Y'know, the Voltigore actually scared me off completing Opposing Force when I was a kid. There was this one section with a big dark tunnel, and 'cause I was a complete weenie I couldn't bring myself to go inside. Mainly because I'd got it in my head that if a Voltigore got into melee range, they'd latch on and dissolve my insides like a spider. I came back to it when I was a teenager, and turns out they don't kill you like that. They're just spongy.
@@RainingMetal Plus you didn't have a flashlight- you had that terrible "night vision" that made you a point light source and filled the screen with static.
@@tehbigshow I had a similar situation in the original Half-Life. It was that one room near the start of Questionable Ethics, with the Alien Grunt in the tank. I thought he was gonna break out of the glass when I was in his line of sight, so I ended my playthrough there. Yet again, I came back later and he wasn't shit except for those homing bees. I guess it goes to show how Half-Life's vague essence of survival horror got to young me. Because in a way, Half-Life is sort of like survival horror.
I really liked Blue Shift, but mainly because I played it before Opposing Force. I really liked the idea of playing as a regular dime-a-dozen grunt and seeing the original story from another perspective, but of course, OF did that but with more stuff in it.
Opposing Force, taught me, if anything, to always run to my destination in straight lines and right angles to make sure the ally AI could enter doors correctly Edit: also, fan wikis try to explain the HECU as being a interservice unit, but you can tell that the scriptwriters were going off of the pop culture understanding of the military, which is why the _Marines_ keep calling each other “Soldier” and they keep addressing _Corporal_ Shephard as “Sir.” Oddly enough, they correctly identify your trainers in Basic as “Drill Instructors” instead of Drill Sergeants.
One of my favourite things from the original Half Life is the way the military absolutelly hates the way they are being told to kill a bunch of weak, scared and pretty much defenseless scientists. The military in Opposing Forces might aswell be from an 80s action movie.
Blue shift could have been much better if they had played to the "hapless rent a cop that only trained enough to qualify for his service pistol" trope instead of the typical FPS "weapons expertise polymath who downloads training manuals directly into his consciousness like Neo". That might have been an interesting survival horror spin on the game play.
At the beginning when Otis lets you through, you could glitch the door by pushing the chair after it opens, grab the wrench, clobber Otis unconscious, and boom, free Deagle at the start of the game, 1 bullet for each scientist that saved you.
I usually kill them scientists with pipe wrench. Bullets are for zombie. Plus, cage scientist is not killable. When this all over, my Adrian Shephard gonna join Civil Protection. Because people suck.
The only thing that sets Blue Shift apart from the rest of the series is the ‘attempt’ the game makes in having a vulnerability aspect to it, where you are playing as a mere security guard just trying to escape with more basic equipment and tactics than Gordon or Adrian, and while this is technically the case they absolutely underachieved and its a shame because while Blue Shift was never going to be like the main game or the first expansion, it could have been something a lot more unique like attempting to ground out black mesa with more interesting interactions finding out a little more about the facility and again really double down on the feeling of being under equipped in most fights, which is actually somewhat the case in Half Life Alyx, which worked very well for VR and is why a VR game about Barney would also be an excellent choice.
The more vulnerable horror element would have definitely been the direction to go with Blue Shift to make it not more of the same, too bad they undercut that by giving you 60 armor per pickup and most of the same strong weapons as usual.
The Black Mesa remake of Blue Shift definitely feels like it's taking this approach so far. You're notably squishier than Gordon, and you can neither swing the crowbar nor fire your glock as fast.
@@LordoftheLightskins It only has 3 episodes (the tram ride and gearing up, fixing that elevator, and part (or all) of duty calls). I think it's even voiced by people the creator knew/knows or himself (I think he voices Otis). I'm not that well versed on it, so I could be wrong about that last one; but compared to the still unreleased "Operation: Black Mesa" (that remakes Blue Shift and Op For, like Black Mesa did for HL1), it's worth a ~2-3 hr play and it's free.
"In 2001 I probably could have downloaded a fanmade campaign that was just as good" Yes, yes you could have Civvie. It was called Azure Sheep, and was 3x aslong and 5x better lol.
@@peppermillers8361 Which is why we have to say it is indeed better, because thats ALL blueshift was whereas AzureSheep is corridors and good set pieces XD Like the on-foot portion of the tram ride route, finding the chumtoad ( still want him in the universe somewhere damnit... ), the comically goofy blue security HEV suit lol.
@@CrashHeadroom The Chamtoad appears two times in Blue Shift and once in Opposing Force. The appearance in Blue Shift is honestly pretty great and doesn't take away from the moment compared to the Opposing Force one which is just weird. I don't know, I remember Blue Shift having some decent set pieces but that's just me.
Azure Sheep is a better "security guard perspective" of the Black Mesa incident but it takes A LOT of liberties in storytelling. Also, half of the mod is an escort mission. And while the 2 unique weapons are cool, they didn't really feel to have a defined role that isn't covered by the default arsenal.
2:40 My Pentium II 350 MHz with 128MB RAM and onboard motherboard sound chip couldn't handle all those wav files. This video is literally the first time I've ever heard those soldiers sound off like they've got a pair at this point.
Lol the way Civvie talked about that slimy Randy, perfection xD 3:18 Wait it's not stupid? Patrick lied to us Adrian Shephard deserved better, we totally need a sequel. It's canon for me :(
@@carcinoGetenicist It's not amazing. It's basically hl2 with a few new levels and very little story. You don't get any of the weapons from Opposing force, don't see any of the iconic characters and a few other problems. It's not bad per say as it's built off the core of hl2 but it lacks anything that really stands out and there are free mods that play better. It's ok if you get it super cheap and love hl2 but it's by no means the sequel that everyone wants.
Hunt down the Freeman expanded on the story of Adrian Sheppard, his brother though. I heard the story is fantastic and from many people that's it's one of the best games released on the source engine.
I myself like to think that all the CSCZDS missions take the perspective of the same person, in the same day, scrambling all across the world whilst hastily changing their uniform from Kidotai to SAS or whatever
From what I dimly remember, the CZ levels had cool-looking scripted events, but weren't especially fun to play. I recall the environments feeling weirdly linear and the enemy AI just standing in one place and only moving due to scripts.
14:00 is one of the funniest things ive seen in a half life game. The way the chunks of viscera just flop out of the doorway is hilarious, the guy had no chance.
Hard difficulty absolutely destroys Blue Shift's pacing. Sure, it was always "eh not much of anything" but it was at least a fun, punchy not much of anything, not the absolute slog I'm seeing here that just exacerbates its lack of ambition.
@@RickJaeger Half-Life 1 on hard actually wasn't as bad as I expected when I played through it on that difficulty for the first time. tbh I think Opposing Force on easy is about on par with HL1 on hard.
@@TechnologicallyTechnical YMMV. I've had runs where it wasn't too bad. I had a couple that fucking ate regurgitated shit with nails in it. But YMMV. No idea what you're talking about wrt OF. I don't remember that being any _more_ miserable on Hard than HL1, except the grueling, long Shock Troop section through the container yard.
@@RickJaeger I don't know how much harder OF is on hard compared to easy, I just know that even on easy, OF is a ballbuster. Half-Life on easy I can breeze right through and even speedrun, but not OF. OF I have to carefully tiptoe through with constant quicksaving, even on easy.
Wait, if Katie is CV-16 does that mean she's also kept there? I always thought she was there by choice, I kinda wonder what she did to deserve becoming Civvie's editor
I already liked Jon St John cause he was the Duke but civvie keeps mentioning him whenever he shows up and it makes me appreciate him even more. For even more proof he's good at what he does, Jon St John is also Axe and Kunkka in dota. The man of a thousand voices.
Okay so here we go... The wrench, when compared to the crowbar, is a far deeper tactical weapon - the slow attack speed coupled with its charge swing make it better for dealing with heavier enemies the player can bait more. This is best seen when fighting genomes, whose attack cycle gives the player only a very short window to land melee hits before needing to retreat. Being able to instagib blackops with a charged swing is also fucking baller. Coupled with the knife as a more generalistic melee option, it's a fantastic variation away from HL's crowbar.
@@SecuR0M I always used to think that the way the knife jutting out of vort at the start meant it was meant to have a throwing mechanic - Like a sort of replacement for the crossbow.
@@ZigealFaust No it's just a crummier knife. Knife should have had some sort of secondary where it stabs out and you poke things far away, as an alternative to just dashing in and out with the power wrench. Make it hit as hard as a crowbar or something.
@@DrWhite This would be kinda cool but I'd think you'd need to make it limited ammo at that point. A melee weapon with an ammo use mode for range attack. Though with the wrench that wouldn't necessarily be bad a thing. Maybe dead marines could give you more knifes or something idk. Pokey knife with half damage and slightly slower speed makes more sense imo since it gives you reach cos it's a knife. Wrench gives you power if you're agile or good at timing, knife is speed and range crutch. Putting this idea (either throwing knife or pokey knife) in Gearbox's head is in the top 10 of time machine uses now maybe.
Opposing Force is a great expansion, it's just that with my experiences with the soldier AIs and rope physics shows that the Goldsrc engine is just not suited to deal with these mechanics.
@@guilhermehank4938 Never said it wasn't. I'm just saying that as flexible as the Goldsrc engine was, it probably isn't polished enough for Gearbox to work on to add new features.
Yeah I bought the expansions during the summer sale but yeah I honestly thought my game was just buggy, had no idea that it was actually just the gold source engine
@@isaiahjoseph7352 I wouldn't say buggy, but more like janky. Like what Civvie said previously, the base game is full of jank, but OpFor is by far the jankiest despite being a quality expansion.
Opposing force has a surprising number of techs. Weird glitches or strange design decisions that suddenly become useful in specific situations. -The wrench can be pulled back and then swung for a heavy melee. It kinda sucks because of the wind up, but you can actually wind it up by holding left click, and switch to a new weapon. Then when you switch to the wrench it'll instantly hit with the hard attack because you skipped the frames for the charging time -The magnum can have the laser turned on and off. The laser on makes it basically the HL1 revolver with more ammo, but the laser off makes it unusably inaccurate against anything not in your face. That'd be bad but those massive Race X voltigores they added appear in those shitty ass caves in close range, and by that point you have a sniper rifle to fill the accurate niche. It does a lot of DPS, and it's a good close range alternative to the machinegun which doesn't always have ammo -You can use the barnacle to attach onto organic targets. Because of this you can skip multiple fights or segments in the game such as the mortar segment infiltration. Normally you have to get into the building the mortar is sitting on through a pipe but you can skip that whole fight and sequence by just barnacling onto the mortar operator and going straight to the gun
21:42 Ok now we need 1 hour version of it. Just like the *"Enfoncer Dance party"* xD 22:19 *"I should handle this delicately since there's a nuclear warhead involved"* **proceed to use rocket launcher*
The one thing I'd say is missing from Opposing Force is a good sense of progression. In Half-Life, you start by fighting your way through labs, then have to survive big open combat-ravaged areas, before ending up on another planet: you face up tougher and tougher foes and get bigger and bigger guns, and when you get to the Nihilanth's chamber, everything you have been through has been building up to it. In Opposing Force, you just go from level to level without much of a sense of escalation, you get your BFG in the first third of the campaign, then at some point you stumble across the final boss who was just kind of there, aaand it's over. I definitely have more fun playing Opposing Force than the base campaign, but in the end, it's a lot less memorable for me, just because its sense of buildup and environmental storytelling is not as good.
@@kakizakichannel And I unironically love it. It's not technically impressive anymore, but it's a great way to put you in the shoes of some guy who's just getting ready for another day at work, without knowing that shit is about to hit the fan
@@HerculeDevantrien When I was a kid and played Half-Life for the first time, I was extremely confused and wondered if the game was even about shooting.
Useful tip; in that opening part of Opposing Force with good ol' Otis, you can kill him by pushing that office chair into the path of the door and it will allow you to jump over the chair after you get the wrench and take Otis' desert eagle
Holy shit, i was thinking "I bet when Civvie is doing Opposing Force or Blue Shift he will add "grease" on the title". And lo and behold, he actually did it!
Actually, it's really good idea to play BS first, because you enjoy the game, and when you play the other two then you know what caused the disaster and how it happened from Gordon's perspective.
Blue Shift is a decent tech demo that is tragically overshadowed by Azure Sheep, Half Life 2, and even Counter-Strike Condition Zero Deleted Scenes. If you managed to play it at the time, it was like a short but cool side story with a few neat moments that made it stand out from HL and OF. Too bad all the connecting bits between those neat moments were just as meh as Civvie points out. But on the bright side, the modders were so disappointed that they made Azure Sheep, and AS is much, much better than Blue Shift.
Eh, Azure Sheep hasn't held up so well either. Levels were mostly made up of corridors just like Blue Shift and most of the "new" stuff they added were just reskins of existing weapons and enemies.
Only thing Blue Shift did better than Azure Sheep was the difficulty scaling since you actually had mundane armor pickups in the former. Going through Azure Sheep's first half without any armor is a real nightmare.
Literally the only thing that I remember about Azure Sheep is both Gordon and Adrian having a really thick Danish accent because the lead developer *really* wanted to cast himself as both characters.
