Blue shift unlocked installation

This explains to a degree why BS is the way it is. Barney Calhoun, community college graduate extraordinaire, is the protagonist of BS and the third member of the Half-Life triumvirate. Playing as Barney, your shift starts normally enough. You come on shift, get your bulletproof vest, find your gun, then escort a couple of scientists to a lower level. It's during the elevator trip down that things go all pear shaped - the lights go out and the elevator plunges to the bottom of the shaft.

You've played Half-Life to death so you know exactly what has happened: the experiment, with Gordon Freeman at ground zero, has gone phenomenally wrong. The main objective, as in Half-Life and Opposing Force, is to get out alive.

To do so, you'll have to enlist the help of the Black Mesa staff, avoid or obliterate the military personnel sent to sanitize the facility, solve a puzzle or two, and blow away lots of aliens.

You'll even catch glimpses of Freeman and the mysterious guy in the black suit. There's no mistaking that BS is part of the Half-Life universe.

First clue: Barney pounds on a door only to have the guard on the other side saying, 'Just a minute, there's something wrong with the door. Looking at the car reveals Gordon Freeman on his way to work. Everyone raved about the opening sequence of Half-Life and those people should also remember the lone guard pounding on a door as the car whisks Freeman to his job. Well, that's Barney. The aliens are all here - but no new creatures or aliens from Opposing Force appear. Remember this was to be a Dreamcast exclusive.

It's disappointing that none of the really big aliens show up. At every open environment I always expected to hear those thunderous footsteps that made me jump when playing Half-Life. There are a few puzzles to overcome but none are obtuse enough to have you running to the on-line walkthroughs. For instance, some explosives attached to a big door need to be activated to advance but the wire from the plunger has been severed.

Completing the circuit isn't as complex as puzzles found in Myst III but it does present a challenge. And it is satisfying to solve a puzzle and blow something up at the same time. The story is good and weaves another layer to the Black Mesa incident. At the end you'll have to spend some time on Xen, crawling through tunnels and fighting off at least one ambush, to reactivate a device that will help you and a few of your fellow employees get out of the Black Mesa facility alive.

The whole experience is over pretty quick. In terms of the timeline, it ends just as the two soldiers are heaving Freeman's body down a hallway, laughing, 'What body? I'm on the other side of the argument. The real reason for getting BS is the included high-definition content and added multiplayer maps. The high-definition content won't give you volumetric fog or curved surfaces - it's more of a facelift.

It's like an old house getting a new coat of paint. I'm sure that one day, far into the future Half-Life will be totally upgraded to whatever the latest and greatest engine is, but for now the facelift is a great addition. Blue Shift is an expansion pack for Valve Software's science fiction first-person shooter video game Half-Life.

Blue Shift is the second expansion for Half-Life, originally intended as part of a Dreamcast version of the original game. Although the Dreamcast port was later cancelled, the PC version continued development and was released as a standalone product. The game was released on Steam on August 24, As with Gearbox's previous expansion pack Opposing Force, Blue Shift returns to the setting and events of the original game, but portrays the story through the eyes of a security guard, Barney Calhoun, employed by the Black Mesa Research Facility.

After a scientific mishap causes Black Mesa to be invaded by aliens, Calhoun must fight his way to safety. The game received mixed although mostly positive reception.

Many reviewers were critical of the short length of the game and the lack of new content, although the inclusion of a High Definition pack that upgraded the models and textures in both Blue Shift and the preceding Half-Life games was praised. The overall gameplay of Blue Shift does not significantly differ from that of Half-Life: players are required to navigate through the game's levels, fight hostile non-player characters and solve a variety of puzzles to advance.

The game continues Half-Life's methods of an unbroken narrative. The player sees everything through the first person perspective of the protagonist and remains in control of the player character for almost all of the game. Story events are conveyed through the use of scripted sequences rather than cut scenes. Progress through the game's world is continuous; although the game is divided up into chapters, the only significant pauses are when the game needs to load the next part of an environment.

The player battles through the game alone, but is occasionally assisted by friendly non-player characters. Security guards and scientists will occasionally help the player in reaching new areas and convey relevant plot information. Blue Shift also includes a substantial section dedicated to keeping a major character in the story safe from enemy characters, and escorting him to a specific location.

A selection of enemies from Half-Life populate the game, including alien creatures such as headcrabs and Vortigaunts. The player also encounters human opponents in the form of a detachment of US Marines who have been sent to eliminate the alien threat and silence any witnesses.

As Blue Shift does not elaborate on the storyline in Opposing Force, no enemy characters from the preceding expansion pack appear in the game. Likewise, none of the new weapons introduced in the expansion can be used by the player, they are instead given access to a limited selection of Half-Life's weaponry to defend themselves with in the game.

In Half-Life, the player takes on the role of Gordon Freeman, a scientist involved in an accident that opens an inter-dimensional portal to the borderworld of Xen, allowing the alien creatures of Xen to attack the facility. The player guides Freeman in an attempt to escape the facility and close the portal, ultimately traveling to Xen to do so. The player assumes the role of Barney Calhoun, a security guard working near the labs where the accident takes place.

Calhoun is responsible for the preservation of equipment and materials and the welfare of research personnel, and after the accident plunges Black Mesa into a warzone, he must work with Dr. Rosenberg, a high-ranking scientist involved in the experiment, to evacuate the facility. Blue Shift begins in a similar manner to Half-Life, as Barney Calhoun rides a tram through the Black Mesa facility to reach his place of work.

After reporting for duty, Calhoun is instructed to assist in maintenance on a malfunctioning elevator. As Calhoun finishes repairs, however, Freeman's experiment takes place and results in a "resonance cascade", causing massive damage to the facility and teleporting alien creatures into the base. The elevator is badly damaged and fails, sending Calhoun plummeting into the depths of Black Mesa. Calhoun regains consciousness at the bottom of the shaft and begins to fight his way to the surface to escape.

Emerging near Black Mesa's classification yards, Calhoun learns that a Dr. Rosenberg and his colleagues plan to escape the facility using teleportation technology. After freeing Rosenberg from the captivity of the US Marines detachment sent to silence the facility, Calhoun escorts him to a decommissioned prototype teleportation laboratory, where several Black Mesa employees have already gathered.

Rosenberg then teleports Calhoun to the Xen borderworld to calibrate research equipment needed to pinpoint a teleport destination outside of Black Mesa.

Upon his return, Rosenberg informs Calhoun that the teleporter's battery power has been exhausted, and contact has been lost with a team sent to acquire a new power cell. Calhoun travels to the power generators on a lower level to find a fresh power cell while firefights rage between the Marines and the forces of Xen. After returning with a new power cell, Calhoun assists Rosenberg in evacuating the few surviving personnel through the teleporter.

Calhoun is the last to enter the portal and as he does so, Marines breach the laboratory and fire on him, causing the teleporter to explode.

As a result of the teleporter's destruction, Calhoun enters a "harmonic reflux", causing him to be rapidly teleported to a variety of locations in the facility.

At one location, he witnesses Freeman's capture by Marines mid-way through Half-Life, before eventually stabilizing at the intended teleport location with Rosenberg at the outskirts of Black Mesa, where they then escape the facility in a company SUV. In August the Half-Life Improvement Team released a mod that ported the legacy version of Blue Shift to Steam, allowing the player to play it as a fully working mod for HL1 rather than its own stand-alone game.

This had the added benefit of letting Blue Shift take advantage of features that had been added to the GoldSrc engine since then, such as detail textures. Almost immediately after, Valve made Blue Shift officially available — but it used its original engine, and suffered from many of the same bugs as the legacy version.