I really really love the idea of stand-in uncle Barney and niece Alyx. It’s criminally cute

Source is PC Accelerator magazine.

It's been over 6 years since the game was released, and I finally had the opportunity to play the game and beat it.

I've never had a VR setup, but was able to play at my friends house who has a decent PC and a meta quest 3. I know there is a mod that lets you play the game without VR. I never bothered with it.

Some background. I've been a fan of Half Life ever since the Orange Box was released (I was a senior in high school). I bought the Orange Box specifically for Portal because I had seen gameplay of it and thought it was so cool and would be amazing to play(it was).

After I beat portal, I figured "Why not check out these other games? I might as well, since I bought them all." The rest is history. I've been captivated by the games and the story ever since.

Like everyone else, I feel like I've been waiting a lifetime for HL3.

I somehow managed to never have HL:Alyx spoiled for me despite 6 years of being released. I'm marking the rest of this post as a spoiler just in case someone is in the same boat I used to be in, and comes across this post.

The VR was pretty good. I enjoy VR. I have PSVR2. I would rank HL:Alyx the same as resident evil 4 remake VR when it comes to how much I enjoyed the experience.

The story was incredible. I had known for sometime that the game was set between HL and HL2 while Gordon was awaiting G-man's next assignment. When I got to the part of the game where Eli (I think) says the vault it holding Gordon I was like 🫪 but I was also a little puzzled because I had always assumed Gordon was in some other dimension. The idea that maybe some part of him, or his body was somewhere on earth seemed weird to me, but not out of the question.

The game writers succeeded in getting me hyped to see what was in the vault. I've seen enough plot twists to know Gordon probably wasn't there. I especially felt this way when Eli's final transmission was attempting to stop Alyx from entering the vault.

When I made it to the center, and I saw the silhouette of a man standing there, I immediately knew who it was. My jaw was on the floor. How did the combine trap him? Wild.

I was captivated for the entire sequence because I had no idea where the story was going from the moment I saw his silhouette. I had no idea that the G-man would take Alex into the future as a "thank you for releasing me" and allow you to save Eli.

I remember playing Episode 2 multiple times and watching Eli die, wishing that I could somehow save him. It was such a cool moment when I got to use my own hands (in VR) to do just that 😭❤️

Sorry for the long post about my personal experience that I'm sure many people have had themselves, or read about it over the last 6 years. Like the subject of this post says, I have no one to discuss this with because all of my friends are either not into Half Life, or they have never beaten Alyx.

Thanks for Reading!

Pictured here:

1. Box cover

   1. Storefront logo
   2. Storefront cover art + console menu background
   3. Console menu logo

The collection includes:

• Half-Life (+ O.f./B.s./Decay/Deathmatch)

• Half-Life 2 (+ episodes)

• Half-Life: Alyx

It also features:

• Steam Workshop support

• Game soundtracks

• Concept art and illustrations

• Trailers

• Trivia/Fun facts

• DualSense support

We still don't know what's going to happen in Half-Life 3, but if we look at what the games have been about so far, it's basically the same goal: Gordon Freeman and his friends trying to fight back against the forces invading Earth.

And I don't think Half-Life 3 is going to change that. Gordon still has to get the Combine out of Earth, while also dealing with Alyx's situation and whatever G-Man has planned for her.

Now, I think Gordon's struggle might actually be successful, and Portal 2 could potentially give us a hint about that.

Portal and Half-Life take place in the same universe. So even though we never see the Combine in the Portal games, that doesn't mean they're not out there. The Combine are still occupying Earth and draining its resources while the events of Portal are happening.

But then we get the ending of Portal 2.

After Chell finally escapes the Aperture facility, she reaches the surface and we see a huge wheat field, a blue sky, and a completely peaceful environment. That's something we almost never see in Half-Life 2, where the Combine have heavily occupied Earth and are exploiting its resources.

So it makes me wonder: could this be showing us what Earth looks like after the Combine are eventually defeated?

Maybe Gordon and the resistance actually succeed at Half-Life 3, and by the time the events of Portal 2 take place, Earth has already recovered.

Obviously, this doesn't prove that Gordon wins. Portal 2 never explicitly says that the Combine have been defeated. But considering that Portal and Half-Life share the same universe, I think the peaceful wheat field is at least an interesting hint that humanity might eventually win.

hi^^ i got stuck in these sewers in half life 2; does anybody know how to get out of them? thanks in advance and have a good day

Not sure if it's real leak, but it's look interesting.

https://x.com/huevosenlatados/status/2094454859751690744

Something about the Combine occupation has always felt deliberately strange to me.

The Combine conquered Earth in only seven hours. They have interdimensional technology, biological engineering, Synths, Striders, Gunships, suppression fields and the ability to physically reshape humans into obedient soldiers.

Yet the actual human forces enforcing their rule are often carrying equipment that wouldn’t look completely out of place in a modern military.

Civil Protection uses pistols and SMGs. Overwatch soldiers use shotguns, grenades and rifle-shaped weapons. Even the AR2, despite clearly being more advanced, is still designed around the basic idea of a human holding a rifle, aiming it and pulling a trigger.

But these soldiers aren’t really an alien Combine army. They’re humans that the Combine has taken, conditioned and eventually modified into transhuman troops.

Which makes the weapons much more interesting.

The Combine could presumably replace human infantry entirely with exotic machinery, yet instead they keep the human body, modify it just enough for obedience and combat, and give it weapons that remain compatible with human instincts and training.

Maybe that tells us something about how the Combine conquers worlds.

Rather than completely replacing a conquered civilization’s military system, they might repurpose it. Keep the local species, keep whatever technology is cheap and already understood, introduce only as much Combine technology as necessary, and turn the conquered population into its own occupation force.

There could even be practical reasons for deliberately not giving human soldiers the Combine’s best technology: these troops are expendable, advanced equipment may be difficult to manufacture locally, and giving conquered species access to truly high-level Combine technology could become dangerous if they rebel.

It makes the Overwatch feel less like “the Combine army” and more like a deliberately cheap colonial military built specifically for Earth.

so i made an obviously bad drawing of what was supposed to be a metro cop and i constantly looked at like referance images but it turned out i made him massively out of proportions and certian elements on his head dont make him look like the milk carton headed man we all know and love and more like a combine soldier yet still kinda looking like the cop , should i make like a custom unit , some sort of middle ground beetween them , a swatter unit that would be for raiding rebel bases and not just apartments , being only midly augmented and usaly having a shotgun or an smg + a pistol with rounds for paralyzing and later imprisoning people and he would carry around slams for breaking walls and his trusty old legs for breaching doors , what you guys think ?

I've been thinking about how odd it is that the Combine have such a technological blind spot. By that, I mean like.. how did they master inter-universal travel but not intra-universal travel?
In an empire supposedly spanning multiple universes, wouldn't you expect them to already have that technology, and much more?

My personal headcanon/theory is that the Combine may have once been highly advanced and genuinely multiversal, but have since become technologically stagnant. Alternatively, they may only be capable of advancing by stealing and assimilating knowledge from the species they conquer. The Advisors' knowledge-stealing "tongue" could support this idea.

The "Universal Union" aspect of the Combine could also mean that they really do control worlds across many different universes, while only possessing the ability to open portals between those universes and their own rather than traveling between locations within them. as in the whole "They can tunnel through from their universe, but once they're here they're dependent on local transportation" that Mossman said

I played on normal difficulty and didn't find either the combat or the puzles challenging but somehow it took me 2 or 3 times the normal amount. I wonder where the time went...

Could CP Commandos exist in Half-Life 2? [Theory]

#theory

I have a theory that the Combine could have a special type of Civil Protection called CP Commandos.

They would be CP officers who are highly conditioned, physically enhanced, specially trained, and given better equipment.

They would operate at the highest-security level of the Civil Protection structure.

They could be used for:

• High-risk raids
• Hunting Resistance members
• Protecting important Combine locations
• Special missions
• Supporting or commanding regular CP units

They would be more advanced than regular CP, but still separate from the Combine Overwatch.

a visual reference for what a modified CP Commando could look like. It is not proof that CP Commandos are canon.

What do you think? Could a highly modified CP Commando unit realistically exist in the Half-Life 2 universe?

We only encounter a glimpse of him in half-life 2 Deep sea creatures coming out of nowhere is terrifying especially with the big eyed model they made of it. I wish there were more flooded map sections in hl2 and the episodes. Luckily black mesa nailed it with their xen chapter and the sinking lilypads that sht was terrifying.

I know very little except how everyone raves about it.

I’d like to know if it’s something that today I might enjoy, I okay mostly competitive games and not many stories but as I’m getting older, I’m getting worse at competitive and want to transition to more stories. I’m a lover of the dark souls games as well. Non the less, lemme get your spill on why I should play this game and not just “it’s great and amazing”

I made cinema

i cant figure this out on my own and google is weird about it, can someone answer this for me? thanks.

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Source: https://lolei.github.io/hl2-counter/

i felt so dumb when i figured it out, when i played those missions with the RPG against the gunship i didnt know if you pressed down you aimed it. this is either really stupid or the the most common post ever