Bizarre Spots in Half-Life: Opposing Force
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- Опубликовано: 10 авг 2023
- Half-Life: Opposing Force is a game I didn't really expect to wow me as much as it did. It truly did have some unique environments. watch video and see them
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Music Used:
Intro - Planet (Half-Life: Opposing Force)
00:50 - Lost in Thought (Half-Life: Opposing Force)
03:23 - Name (Half-Life: Opposing Force)
07:03 - The Beginning (Half-Life: Opposing Force)
12:39 - Danger Rises (Half-Life: Opposing Force)
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Игры
Participate in #OpposingTheBar this Sunday at 11am EST!
We're gonna try to break the all-time player record for Opposing Force (620 players). I definitely think it's doable. Just make sure you're playing Half-Life: Opposing Force for an hour or so at the listed time.
🫡 Have fun soldiers.
Hell yeah I'm in! I used to play this so much even many years after it was released. Are you going to play on a multiplayer server?
Oh, I don't need to comment about it, alright.
I’ll do it for the cause
Happy to be part of history
I'll be on, doing my part.
the room at 4:46 always felt off , like its a chunk of another place unnaturally placed there . I played opposing force long before cs. always loved the bio dome areas .
also lots of real industrial places have those red lights in crappy places , its good for not messing with night vision , I'm sure theirs more reasons. oh and the water textures look better on direct draw vs direct 3d
I always thought the place felt strange, too. I’m surprised other people feel the same way
if you take it out of context, it kinda has that Backrooms vibe going on
It felt like a hotel
Doesn't the cafeteria area in HL1 close to the freezers have the same textures?
Just one thing to say about the video, in that while you are technically correct about Adrian being one of the soldiers sent in to clean up Black Mesa, Adrian was actually never briefed on killing Gordon or the scientists, so he’s just kind of there
You aren't actually told what Adrian does and doesn't know about his mission, including who he's supposed to kill. The game itself is ambiguous about it, which is one of its strengths. Secondary side material might say otherwise, but that's not part of the work itself. And there are necessarily parts of Adrian's pre-flight life that day that we don't see.
Man that one spot at 14:15 brings me back. That was the first time i saw a spot in a game where i got that weird "liminal" feeling, and i remember booting up the game just to have that area in the Background while i did Homework. Great video man keep it up.
I thought I was be only one
12:10 yeah it actually appears multiple times in Half Life 1, one is during the Gargantua chase where it uses this car to crush 2 marines. The other is in the room where some marines try to shoot you while you are in the vents
About that office, it definitely also caught me off-guard the first time. I think what did it for me was how claustrophobic it is. Just compare it to the entrance hall of the lab right before Surface Tension in HL1, and how giant and spaceous it is. But this? You immediately get met with a spiral staircase and exactly one (1) door at the other side of the room. And the little balconies above, it's like someone's just waiting up there to ambush you.
Also, if you're gonna make a video about Blue Shift, do let me know, because I'd love to join you for that one! There's a LOT of really unique and interesting rooms to talk about, in my opinion more than in any of the other games. But that's just my Blue Shift bias speaking :P
I wasn't planning on doing a video on Opposing Force after finishing HL1, but once I saw there was a community event going on, I thought it'd be fun to do a video covering it. And I wasn't planning on doing a video on Blue Shift, but people in the comments here REALLY seem to want it.
I have my next couple videos planned out, but maybe I'll put Blue Shift down as something to cover sometime soon™️. And if I do, I might just hit you up for that 😁
11:33 I think it's a set of large plastic pigeonholes used to store miscellaneous parts and gubbins in a workshop, the photographs used as source material for a significant number of textures and some of the image files with layers drawn over the photographs is available for download
Where can you download them?
If I could throw in a small criticism because I adore this whole video, the little scene loading bar you use to represent the quiet time could be a lil bit smaller because it pulls a lot of attention to itself if you have attention problems like I do, thank
🤔 Interesting, I never thought about that, but I kinda see what you mean. Maybe I'll change it or just make it smaller next video (if I remember).
Didn't bother me the first time around but now I can't look away from it. Thanks.
@@PretzelYT I agree, you could make it smaller and in white, then it wouldn't steal so much attention.
Not an issue.
What? That was one of the most random comments I've ever seen, lol.
Opposing Force is getting a lot of love from people in the community lately. Very cool to see.
what community? I hope you don't think people who play a video game are a community. They're fans
I'm really surprised that you didn't comment about how the giant containment tank at 3:05 is the same one that, during the opening ride of HL1, has a giant hole in it and is leaking toxic goo everywhere. In the time between Gordon's arrival that morning, to the Resonance Cascade event, someone got sent out there to clean the mess up an patch the hole... Sadly he didn't live long enough to get a pat on the back for doing so though, since his skeleton can be found at the bottom of the waste tank to the left of the ladder if you climb up there.
I love this small detail. He looks like he fixed it but then fell to his death into the radioactive pit using the ladder that is there.
@@makx303A shockwave from the resonance cascade probably knocked him in, but I like to think he died before the experiment even went wrong.
Facinating look at a classic game, great job!
I love how ingrained the ''ladder song'' has become, nice reference.
One spot you missed is right before you fight the final boss--After you descend on the lift into the giant ventilation shaft, once you go down some stairs, theres a door that leads to a very oddly-placed room under the first hallway with a single armor battery inside.
I was thinking about this one too. Don't you need to get on to a barrel to access it?
@@FlyboyHelosim thats right!
What I always thought was really cool about that CS Office-like indoor area (starting at 4:44) is that it's an environment designed to make the BM employees feel like they were working ABOVE GROUND. That's why that skylight is built into the ceiling! When you first enter the area, it even looks like you're above ground and the skylight is below the night sky, but then you discover that you're STILL underground! It was just a trick/mechanism to make the place feel more 'homey' for the employees. I believe the 2002 film 'Resident Evil' may have even been inspired by this section of the game, or by something similar.
That's a really cool observation, about wanting it to seem like an above-ground office. It makes a lot of sense when you explain it like that.
@@PretzelYT im 99% I seen that kind of stuff done in real life.
like I think there was not sure if actually built a nucular bunker large one.
That they carved out a decent half sized sphere that they then painted blue whit clouds and a spotlight in the roof lighting the room up like the sun.
just to try and mitigate the underground feeling. like they faked a outside space deep underground because they knew that would be needed even thought that was eating up recesses that could be use for more housing.
Yeah, the use of carpet and half paneling makes me think it's offices for the more high ranking staff, HR execs and the like.
Fun fact: the wavy water and other liquids is a feature only found when playing in OpenGL video mode. In Software Rendering and, I think Direct3D, it's flat with no motion.
Ah, someone brought up the potential differences between the two modes in the first HL video. I bet it definitely changes the vibe sometimes😅
@@PretzelYT Yes it does, and it 'broke' a lot of early custom maps too. Imagine creating levels in Software mode and having harmless features like sinks and toilets in your levels. Then you upgrade your graphics card and start playing in OpenGL mode only to find the water is now sloshing about all over the place by default. 😬
@@PretzelYTsoftware mode essentially makes some textures animated especially water. And turns off the texture filtering so the textures look pixelated but sharper.
Great video, subscribed! You said 'the early half life games' yet to me, those are the only true half life games. The Black mesa research facility was integral for the identity of the series. Half life 2 was good as well, but should have been a separate franchise in my opinion.
The first inatallment was a 'what if' scenario in the present world. It felt real, it was playing with our expectations and conspiracy theories. You could easily identify with the world as someone growing up in the 90s. Generic scientists and Barneys contributed to the feeling of being in a strange place and yet at home.
The second part was flat out science fiction in a completely artificial scenario with George Orwell mixed in. There's no feeling at home in those levels. It's more like a classic movie where a hero stops an alien invasion. For unknown reasons, the ubiquitous scientists and security personnel turned into well animated but shallow characters in half life 2.
For me that was the jumping the shark moment. That ramdom security guy is now a resistance fighter decoyed as an alien infiltration soldier? Okay, what ever. Barney could as well appear as a transformer in half life 3 by that logic.
Dont get me wrong, hl 2 is still a good game. Its just too loosely connected with the plot of the first, and in my eyes the only true, half-life 1. Its still my favourite game of all time as a 35 year old
That's an interesting perspective. I'm definitely with you in that hl1 FEELS kinda different than hl2. I'll have to hold out judgement on whether or not that's a bad thing until I give the game a serious try again after so many years.
I was having something of a panic attack before I saw this, and your gentle and engaging demeanor along with a video on my hyperfixation franchise helped me feel a little calmer
you’ve got a great niche, thanks for what you do and keep up the great work
Glad the video helped you out a bit, I will definitely keep up the videos. 🫡
@@PretzelYT you always manage to make the extremely dangerous active war zones of the black mesa facility feel so calming, like damn I wanna hang out there now
Abstract textures like that at 11:20 is one of many factors that makes the first Half-life game, its addons and overall Goldsrc mapping so appealing. Old graphics gave developers a limit on how detailed your work can be, therefore as a mapper you have to think creatively how you can present something good with little resources.
Take pixel artists as an example. When you are limited with how many pixels (or even colours) you can work with, you have to find a way to make the final product recognizable and appealing. A good artist will bypass these limits by using techniques that will cause the observers mind to "fill in the gaps" and form something recognizable despite the products abstract and limited form.
Now, the object at 11:20 is nothing special, just some basic brushwork and textures applied to it. I may even go so far and call it lazy; players will probably asume its some shelves with bunch of clutter stored in it. Other areas however, if you look at them from a whole perspective, you will see how beautifully crafted and consistent they are. Your mind will automatically fill in the gaps and form ideas what the computers and machines on the lab walls could be.
I cannot speak for all mappers, but this aspect of the Goldsrc engine made all the countless hours in Hammer Editor so fun for me. Cant say the same for Source mapping which heavily relies on models.
Yes, the old veteran developers from the 90s... those were the times. So many amazing PC games (and console games later in 2000).
Really enjoy your chill delivery, and the subject matter is brilliant. I love these sorts of tours. Like it’s not lore per se, it’s an examination of the environment. Anyway - just wanted to leave a little note.
1:14 I can imagine being a scientist and being used to how this room looks over the years and suddently there are two dead soldiers in it... must have been a very scary and weird experience
_Opposing Force_ has this great weird-comedy moment, when you're riding into Black Mesa and see a vortigaunt teleport in, ride a tram for a bit, then teleport out, like that's part of its daily commute
A note regarding your comment on the water towards the end of the video. When Half-Life and the expansions were released, the water was actually semitransparent. When the world shifted towards OpenGL and other future renderers and away from software rendering, the water then got its more solid appearance that we see today. I don't think the old look can be rendered on modern machines without modding anymore, but if you have a retail copy and play on the right settings you may see what I'm talking about.
This brings back a lot of memories. When i was a kid and had no clue what to do in Half-Life, i would just walk around and check the environment instead of do what i am supposed to do. Watching this video made me feel like i am that clueless kid again
1:47 because engineers always prove their stupidity in a clever way
Goldsrc games have their charm and the uniqueness of the levels are matchless. Opposing Force is a prime example of that.
4:47 I love this room... its like a calm empty library or hotel at night
I adore this series. Thank you for making it.
Great video! You should definitely do a similar one for Blue Shift!
Very good rating & thank you for addressing the Boid dilemma. Hopefully we see a Half-Life: Blue Shift, Decay & Uplink exploration?
My favorite bizarre room is in Vicarious Reality (same chapter as the biodome) with the flooded catwalk and the two water monsters, where the catwalk and the rest of the room have totally different water levels, breaking the laws of physics lol
I’m excited for you to cover Blue-Shift since it has some really interesting rooms with interesting amount of details
someone will have it pointed out, but as visible in the flyby, the leak we see on that silo in HL1 opening is repaired (crudely), but the repairman fell into the radioactive goop. he should be on the floor in the left corner, reduced to a skeleton
i've been binging your videos, what a lovely little corner of youtube this is!
if you'd ever consider it, i think monster hunter tri for the wii could make for an amazing world tour video. even moga woods alone has so many interesting details, sounds, and interactions with monsters in the world. the other areas are 'levels' as well, but locations like the flooded forest still feels so unique and lived in.
otherwise, love your content! there's something so magical about N64 games, or "lower graphic" games. i feel like the less information the game gives to you through detailed animation or graphics, the more you have to fill in with your own imagination. it's always helped to pull me in closer to a game and enjoy it at a deeper level.
The only monster hunter games I've played are Generations Ultimate, World, and Rise. I've had Rise on my list for a while, but it could be cooler to check out the older games... 🤔
6:38 ''Gordon Freemannnn... in the fleshhhh'' that was a quote I expected to hear
6:43 as funny as that was you sadly missed the fact that in that same room there is a framed photo of two babies who I assume are children of one of the developers and I think are in one of the filing cabinet drawers
Finally justice is served for our beloved boids!!1!
Great video! I wanna point out my least favorite level is that towards the end of the game after your deactivate the bomb and go down an elevator to a storage assembly thing. The machine noise there is so crunched and overlapped it hurts my ears. I thought you mention that but it's okay xd
I literally just finished this game, the vortigore introduction almost caused me to ragequit
Yeah, just good ol' familiar voltigores in the dark tunnel - nothing to fear. Except the fact those guys pack a punch and give as much. And there are number of them. Probably that was the nastiest part of the game for me back in the day.
If I was playing this as a kid, it definitely would have taken me a while to progress through that area 💀 I kinda brushed past it, but those big guys really are spooky. Especially when you're in one of their faces.
I never gave the observation area much thought until now, but how did they get all that Xen flora there? Can the ground just be dug up? What about uprooting the plants trying to kill you or the healing pool with hairs around it? It's a cool area, but I always get distracted by the Displacer Cannon.
Regarding the Office looking like a CS map, and this may be common knowledge, but CS started off as a Half-Life mod, then it just took off and Valve made a few official releases themselves. So it makes sense for a CS map to be referencing a map from this game as it's the same developer.
5:32 some vaporwave soundtrack and that was the nostalgia you were trying to remember.
Thank you for making this series of videos about the HL universe, these are truly amazing games
Amazing video as always! Would you by any chance do Blue Shift next?
I don't know. I honestly didn't even plan to do a video on Opposing Force once I finished Half-Life 1, but I saw the #OpposingTheBar event was going on, so I decided to give it a chance for this. I'm definitely not planning for a Blue Shift video in the immediate short term, but who knows what the future holds...
9:33 - probably putting too much thought into it but maybe it's simulated light bounce, big powerful florescent lights shining on the blue wall, bouncing off into the pump room and the water while picking up the blue tint from the wall. Real ray-tracing shit.
Nothing will match the atmosphere of the Originals.. Those graphics, those polygons that ambience god damn. It gives you the illusion of a vast unexplored place. The first trilogy still amazes me to this day. I can read for hours on half life wikia and play the games from time to time and I doesn't get old.
And to think, this is really the Quake engine! A heavily modified licensed Quake engine. I love making quake and half-life work together there is WAY too much that works in both games fine. It was used because it was incredibly efficient and it was modified in half life to look better and add immersion where Quake was MUCH simpler.
The source engine, or more specifically the half life engine, has always had a sort of, eerie vibe to it, like some kind of bizarro universe, everythings dark and dirty, it has a certain charm to it, reminds me of John Carpenter’s The Thing.
You mean goldsrc
@@DeanAmx Yeah that
half life 1 games are actualy more complex then you would think of it times. many enemies like bullsquad has their own animations where they would smell blood spots on floor and munch on dead bodies. but we player mainly miss so much of the small details of it. hl1 was even suppose to have growing moss in some places as gabe wanted it. but it was not capable at the time.
I love studying the cleverly implied worldbuilding provided by well-designed environments.
Underground pools are definitely one of my top 10 places I'd smoke crack at in real life, 10/10 choice
9:08 was so abrupt and threw me off 😂
I'm surprised that you didn't look into the teleporter gun much here.
the really short snippet of snake eater playing when you climbed up a ladder was kinda funny to me
fun fact a ton of HL1 textures are taken from actual photos IRL.
Luv the vid man! U should do this for all half life games and even portal too, both games have tons of hidden obscure places. I would say portal has more of these than HL, they're creepier too IMO.
5:15 It helps that cs_office includes all the assets to make a destructible computer setup in whatever GMod machinima you happen to be making, i.e Angry German Kid.
9:08 "Got anything imported?" ... "Beer!!! Imported *beer*!!!"
Decay has lots of bizarre spots as well, my favorite being the broken version of the HL1 tutorial
I'm shocked how you aren't more popular! Your videos are amazing man, keep doing what you're doing!
🫡
@@PretzelYT I can't believe you replied that fast lol
oh HELL yeah, this is gonna be the comfiest friday in a while
7:38 that texture was head of its time, desperately screaming for bumpmapping
The sound, the eerie environments, the fact that those are based on existing stuff but seen under the Attack of the Aliens...none of this Is present in hl 2.
I love this serie so much man
Weird rooms like that happen all the time in confined spaces with lots of utilities. They have to go around the existing pipes and infrastructure. Just take a walk around the project 401 Titanic demo and you'll see what I mean.
Wait...Do a "Weird places in the Titanic" video with the 401 demo. It'll be amazing.
Honestly that looks like a really cool project. I'll add it to the list, that'd be a weird one to cover.
@@PretzelYT I'll hold you to that, doctor.
Worlds collide was such a missed opportunity. The whole chapter feels so rushed and out of proportion, especially when you get down the elevator. The huge rooms with waaaay out of proportion vents just before the final boss would have really fitted here.
Oh boy I can’t wait for blue shift. It arguably has one of the strangest spots in any half-life game
9:45 - Nothing about this room makes sense. The blue light coming from nowhere. The intake and outflow pipes right next to one another so you have a toxic cesspool below a walkway with no railing for no reason....a box with gears that's exposed for no reason...
9:20 I always lile to think about this as an easter egg for the studio that made the expansion called Gearbox
My favorite Expansion Pack of all time. To me Opposing Force is to Half-Life as Aliens is to Alien. It’s a little more kinetic and action packed than the original.
4:03 _"Lower resolutions of the day"_
1400 x 1050 4:3 res most voodoo cards of the day could render: _LOL_
Ned Flanders playing half life, i didn’t know this would be something I’d enjoy
banger video, there is something so charming about 90's graphics
Opposing Force doesn't do just toxic waste... It's usually also electrified. Because one hazard wasn't hazardous enough.
0:32 I wouldn’t say that Adrian shephard was sent in to kill freeman since his helicopter crashed before he could receive the orders. Adrian was saved by a scientist and as a result goes his own path without going out his way to kill freeman or scientists
5:41 the Black Mesa facility is dug into a mesa, that is to say a large geologic formation composed of rock. You are undoubtedly correct assuming its a dev choice for visual variety, but it's also a world building reminder that you're underground. The "big dangerous science facility under a mountain" is a holdover trope from the cold war due to the United States Space Force facility in Colorado (Cheyenne Mountain), formerly a nuclear bunker.
I would love to see a world tour of Red Dead Redemption 1 or 2
You should do a video on Half-Life: Blue Shift too, it has its bunch of Bizarre Spots aswell.
I wish you didn't skip Friendly Fire. People complain about On A Rail as being way too long and boring, and yet Friendly Fire takes the same idea and manages to make it feel new again. Perhaps it's as simple as having the HECU buddies with you, but compared to On A Rail (especially with a few poorly placed loading zones,) Friendly Fire feels like it was built for combat. From a video game designer perspective, this is obvious, but it shouldn't feel this way canonically. Similar issue to the wrap around hallway at the beginning of the game as you discussed. I love your analysis though. Keep it up!
14:16 im sure the water effects used to be transparent back in the day. If I don't remember incorrectly you had the ability to change the transparency property of water/liquid brushes (or funcs?) in Hammer Editor.
It's transparent in software mode
Boids is actually an industry term for simple algorithmically controlled non-interactive entities that exist solely to enhance the aesthetics of a level environment by making it seem 'lived in' by small critters. The Boid system models flocking behavior via coordinating separation, alignment, and cohesion between non-interactive objects and controls the 'behaviors' of not just birds in games, but also fish, insects, rodent swarms, and if you were to stretch the definition only a little bit, it'd also describe the behaviors of traffic in various infrastructure management games like Cities Skylines or Sim City.
This isn't a criticism, btw, just further elucidation on the topic.
Yeah, that office area felt wrong, even back in 1999.
9:02 I love it. I love that reference.
Increase your FoV, the default one doesn't work as good in widescreen mode.
And you definitely should do one of this for F.E.A.R.
I miss everything about late 90s early 2000's level design especially lighting that part overall was just better. Nowadays devs just slap a color filter over the entire game and call it a day or just opt for white lighting like everywhere is lit by fluorescent light bulbs including the sun. You rarely see them using colored lighting with tinted textures to really give special feelings or highlighting to certain areas burning the visuals of what would often just be the interior of a low res low poly cube into your memory forever. Brb gonna go stare at deus ex human revolution with it's peepee yellow tinted everything lmao
3:04 i love how NOBODY gives a damn about a human skeleton at the bottom of this acid vat ,
i can imagine it was some poor maintnence worker who sealed up the leak and resonance casscade made a small earthquake and he just fell in
Poor guy, he must have died even before resonance cascade happened!
You should explore the environment of “cry of fear” due to its real life models and sounds (pls make a vid abt it 🙏
1:23 it doesn't really matter how hard I try
Damn, you made me re-install this game. AGAIN! :D
Ive been wanting something just like this and the algorythm brought me your channel, Hail the digital goddess!
11:31 It looks like someone's junk shelf in their garage. I see a piece of machinery, a red toolbox And various tools and spare parts.
4:15 great question. Made me think of modern photo scans and the megapixel environments. Would those be considered pre-rendered backgrounds since they’re literal pictures as the ground and textures?
Just watched while im playing it on my phone it's so freaking cool ❤
I love Opposing Force so much. Canon or not it's such a fun game.
1:45 yep, this is gonna be right upy alley
Doing water in games was always tricky.
Underrated channel
cara, definitivamente precisamos de "areas obscuras" de Half Life 2 e Halo, principalmente o primeiro. Saudações do Brasil 🇧🇷 suas análises e perspectivas são profundas onde você explora até a última gota do que tem, principalmente nos vídeos de Half Life, que você continue com esse ótimo conteúdo!
1:48 Kubrick's shining vibes
Can make an episode on Unreal 1 next? that game's atmosphere is the best in videogame history
I've played my fair share of older shooters, but I haven't checked that one out yet... I should sometime. 🤔
1:23 it doesn't even matter how hard u try
Keep that in mind, i designed this rhyme to explain in due time
The 5 star ending for the boids is prefection.
yeah baby opposing force episode!