This video is a focused look at Half-Life's worst add-on, and why its negative aspects only add to its charm. Hope you enjoy it! Another reminder that patrons who donate just 3$ a month on Patreon were able to watch this video one week ago, and they're already able to watch next week's video. If you're interested, consider becoming a patron as well! Thank you :)
man the title already got me hocked on this. even tho ill miss tf2 i like that you switch games. i can recommand some games that well... at least i would like to watch on your channel: postal 2 and 4. CS. Payday: the heist and Payday 2.
I always took it that the guard at the start of the game just missed the tram, prolly saving his life later on. If anyone ever made a co op mod for blue shift they should remove him.
My favourite parts are A. The armour mechanic is completely changed to scavenging non-shot vests from other guards B. That Barney's story ends long before Gordon and Adrian's and, as small as it is, he gets a victory. Gordon and Adrian are pawns of a higher power and their perceived use/threat gets them put on ice while Barney who's only where he is because he wore a helmet when the place came tumbling down gets to walk away after some legwork and goes on to use his unimportance to great effect in Half Life 2 by infiltrating the Combine.
Let's also not forget that Barney continued fighting for TWENTY YEARS after the Resonance Cascade disaster. Gordon saved the day for sure, but Barney never stopped doing it, always helping out in any way he could. That's only commendable.
@@GermanPeter he is also no doubt putting himself in very high risk by beeing a known important rebel leader at the frontline of the uprising, respect for barney, altho he never gets us that beer he promises so i guess that cancels out the respect he deserves
@@Helperbot-2000 Well it is hard to schedule a peaceful moment to drink a beer with a friend when said friend gets kidnapped by some mysterious guy every time he does something big and also always on the move because the world itself is after him.
I always liked the existence of blue shift and other half life games. They really help to flesh out the incident from different viewpoints the staff were experiencing
If I could choose another Half-Life add-on, I'd love to have one about playing as one of the scientists. Now THAT could have focused entirely on puzzles and no combat!
The Xen levels really are leagues better than the ones from Half-Life 1. Maybe it's because they had an actual clear vision for Blue Shift's levels instead of having to cut 90% of the original ideas and stapling everything left over together.
when i saw this momment myself on my first time playthrough i immedately thought "damn, that could have been me!" before taking his stuff to finish his adventure
It was GearBox and Randy Pitchford behind Blue Shift though. If you look through their track records then you'll see that their successes were generally accidental, and that they mostly undo their contributions with something irredeemably shitty -- like lifting the good versions of Duke Nukem 3D off Steam.
I think my favorite moment in Blue Shift is when you walk through one of the many tunnels of Black Mesa. It's quiet and dark, but in the distance you see a pair of red lights. As you approach, you see a car. It's still quiet, the only sound you hear being your own footsteps and clicking of the emergancy lights in the car. Next to the car lays a guard, who died/got shot whilst trying yo get out of the car. You expect a big moment, like the storm after silence, but nothing happends. No music, no enemies, nothing. Just you, a car and a corpse of your former colleague. This moment is just so personal, you have seen and made so many corpses, but never really looked back. But moments like this make you realize the little tragedies that happen behind the scenes, the lives that were lost. It's a little thing, but i dont think any of the half life games managed to execute this feeling with a comparable success
I loved that part! It's especially emotional because like you said, there's no enemies around. The soldiers aren't making any big deal out of whoever they're executing on the way. They just saw this guy trying to escape in a car, shot him, and moved on. Like he didn't mean anything whatsoever.
I like how you write about how you feel, and Black Mesa: Blue Shift also has this sort of subtle feelings! I suggest you play that aswell, or watch a good gameplay walkthrough, SexyNutella is recording nice ones
@@dustypaint Aww, thanks man And i might try it out when I'll have the time! Firstly i gotta finish the half life 2 stuff though, since i never actually got around to playing it. Also school is kicking my ass atm so maybe during the summer I'll finally have the time for it. But thanks for the recommendation either way!
Half-Life Blue Shift was always my favorite game, short and simple. You're just a security guard, you don't end up like Gordon or Adrian in the hands of Gman, you just survive and escape.
I know the final battle against the soldiers in the teleporter room may have been kind of anti-climatic but in retrospect, that final stand shows Barney's commitment to making sure as many of his colleagues and friends get out alive before he makes his own escape. I think if they had kept this whole final sequence and combined it with the whole idea of making the majority of the game about puzzle solving and only giving you a very small arsenal, it would've given the teleporter room a much higher sense of desperation as you fight off wave after wave of soldiers with comparatively basic weaponry
I really enjoyed Blue Shift under the context of, essentially, Half Life DLC. The short story about Barney isn't world changing in any aspect, but it is a fun, short, sweet little expansion that doesn't overstay its welcome.
I guess in a funny way, Blue Shift kinda “Understayed” it’s visit- Had the game had more time to transition from an average day of Barney to suddenly finding himself having to escape black mesa alive, it would’ve been a much more immersive experience.
This game also kind of explains why Barney hated headcrabs so much. In every tunnel a headcrab is ready to jump on you, whether on xen or on earth. Sometimes its so sudden Barney might have had to fend of with arms. No wonder he hates them so much.
5:54 Honestly, this pretty much reminds me of what I am going through this week. For the first time in years, I attend a new school and I had to figure out how to get there by train, which one to take, when to leave home, so I am not late nor wasting too much time on just waiting around for things. But then, just this *Friday*... Construction work, so now no train will stop at my town, Bönen, so now I had to look at plans and everything to figure out how to get to school by bus, since trains don't work.
8:50 On this one we should give him a break. Like if i were working in secret government facility that does weird science stuff i would start to ask questions of how deep it is, and how much more there is, too.
Thinking back to Black Mesa Blue Shift, there's this encounter with the HECU where you and Otis rescue a scientist. After you cleared the first train yard, while Otis is bringing back the scientist to their group, the radio broadcast a conversation between a soldier who managed to survive you and Otis who contacted his superior for reinforcement, the superior who when hearing how 2 nobodies wiped out an entire squad gives a huge groan as a response. It's like he's not just surprised, but also extremely disappointed and sicked of it, before reluctantly sending in a squad.
The scientist is Ken Rosenburg, but yeah all the characters in Blue Shift are considered nobodies. Otis, Barney, aforementioned Ken, the scientists you meet up with later (Harry the one who dies, Walter, Simmons), all nobodies in terms of the franchise's story, and in terms of their motives and abilities.
Haven't started watching the video yet im going to say what i've been telling people for years. I love blue shift because even though it's the smallest half life game it has the least i dont like about it. It's a really neat short story and it feels like half life without all the fat.
You know, this really recontextualizes the game in an interesting way. I still may not like it that much, like with the environments and not much new content, but I really appreciate this because it made me think about the game a bit differently.
Thanks for showing this to me in a new light. I'm right in the middle of the game and got stuck wondering how I'm supposed to cross the pit of blue coolant, and then I find this. I just kind of chalked a lot of the game up to being rushed. (I mean... the crosshair is still orange and the full title doesn't even appear on the main menu. It just says "Half-Life"... TWICE!) But now I can see a lot of this was intentional... or at least the result of happenstance, cobbling together what they got, and making the most of it, much like preparing the teleporter in "Old Black Mesa". This is a game made from cobbling together old parts from another, bigger game, and it absolutely OWNS that fact, realizing there's nothing to be ashamed of. This all reminds me of the mindset that went into making The Mandalorian, as the thought process was very similar (at least for the first season or two), being likened to being the little brother, having to share the same Star Wars toys with him, but he takes all the "cool forefront" stuff, keeping Luke, Han, Leia, Vader, Yoda, etc. while you're left to make up your own adventures with the background characters. Heck, on a similar note, I always kind of perceived Doomguy this way, going by what little is described about his background and situation in the manual. In a way, I'd argue he's closer to Barney than Gordon. (The recent "Doom-Slayer" rebranding is far more "Gordon" though.) Dude was about to be court-martialed, but they changed their minds and more or less forced him to be a janitor (I think that's what it's implying) on the Mars Division of the UAC, which is considered at the absolute bottom of the UAC totem pole, as it's only used for toxic waste disposal, while all the other planets do more important things with greater prestige. He's not deemed important enough to deal with, so he's just dumped onto the most boring position in the solar system. Even when the demonic invasion happens, he's left behind for guard duty while everyone else takes the better weapons with them. Many of them are wearing the same armor he is. Everything about his situation has him set up as a background character, but he breaks through it all and stands out, not because he is given any distinguishing power or has any visible distinguishing features, but through sheer tenacity. He's not ALLOWED to be important, but he defiantly does it anyway. I've actually been on-again-off-again writing a Doom show script. I even made a sort of "Audio Drama Pilot" based on Knee-Deep in the Dead. I already had this kind of mindset for his characterization in the back of my mind, but now I can see it is absolutely something that should be at the forefront. th-cam.com/video/HkXS-8UGSAg/w-d-xo.html
I never played Blue Shift, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this video! Good job on it, it almost made me wanna check it out and almost inspired me at making such a game lol (which would've failed). Good job on it! Love your video essays!
The closest game I can think of that’s like Blue Shift is Halo 3 ODST. Instead of being the one man army himself; Master Chief. You take the role of an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper referred to as “The Rookie”. Now ODSTs are the closest thing to being spartan without any of the enhanced abilities. Stronger than a marine but nowhere near as powerful as a spartan. The fights aren’t as big as past games and the scale of everything is nowhere near the spectacle of past games either. The game overall makes you feel small and insignificant as you trudge your way through an abandoned city all alone at night.
When put into the context of what we know happened elsewhere, it amplifies the fun of being unimportant to the *main* story ... you are important to your own story.
Barney is my 2nd favorite HL character, the first being Kleiner. i've always had a softspot for the badass everyman, someone who isn't as cool or given the most important roles as the main character, but someone who's got your back, and when the long day is over, he still remembers that beer he owes you, after you've both been through so much
Kind of a big brain move to make a console spin-off to your game that makes you feel like a nobody while the game tells you that the MC from the computer game is much more important and doing cool stuff
💛💙💛 Another banger as usual!! Makes me regret not getting into the series years ago tbh. I agree that there should be more just "average joe" games. I love when you can get another viewpoint of a series, fron the eyes of a non "super important protagonist/sidekick." It really helps flesh out the environment and make it feel so much more immersive (?) (Also love the switch to blue this video)
blue shift kind of felt like a round of engi in ss13 made into a game all of your problems are so mundane and there just happens to be disastrous events going on near you
Great video, I also suggest you check out Half-Life: Echoes. It's a mod made with so much polish that it actually feels like an official addon. It doesn't necessarily lean into the whole "you're a cog in the machine and an insignificant speck in this entire situation" thing, but it's more so a "shit going horribly wrong right in front of you from the pov of a random scientist trying to do his best to escape" kind of thing. It has a lot of heart, humour, and it feels like it fleshes out Black Mesa even more as a facility.
Bist jetzt seit 2 tagen ständig in meinen Recommendations hab dir gleich mal ein Abo reingedrückt ,und ich finde es erstaunlich wie gut dein Englisch klingt :)
Old Black Mesa reminds me of a story my father once told me, from his days working for the government. The building was too big for the agency in its modern form, so they just shrunk the available space. Like, they put vending machines in front of the doorway to one of the older dining rooms to block access.
I love Blue-Shift. Feels like a "greatest hits" album for Half-Life. One great set piece after another. And it's just as long as it needs to be. Whenever I get the craving for some good old fashioned HL I can just dive right in and be home in time for dinner. Also: as others have mentioned in the comments, it's the only game in the series with an unambiguously happy ending.
Ngl if they made a whole game just making normal tasks of a security guard in black mesa and on the last day was the incident I'll play the hell outta it.
That mounted gun is the vanilla half life mounted machine gun, not the M249 from Opposing force. looks like a M2 browning from what I can tell from the low poly.
it's a strange thing i like too, where just the simplicity of a day-to-day thing is something i want to see. how they work their job. i've always replayed the beginning of black mesa over and over wishing it was kind of the entire game bc of just how, well, mundane and "home"-y it felt to me. like i was apart of their world. another example would be SCP containment breach, simply i'd love to work as a black mesa researcher or an scp scientist. really, its strange but i love the concept of it.
Barney and Half-Life: Blue Shift is what I think is the golden standard for a '2nd person narrative.' You literally play as a nobody staring on on a situation being dealt with by important people. Gordon Freeman, Adrian Shephard, Gina Cross and Colette Green all have a mission: to save the world from the impending alien attack. That's why they all fight off the aliens, whether Xen or Race X. Sure all their attempts fail in the end, but through their efforts they all prove themselves worth something to G-Man, which is why he takes all of them and puts them in his weird stasis dimension. Barney on the other hand, his goal is just to save himself, and since he's with some helpful scientists, to save them too. Between Barney, Ken, Walter and Simmons, you can tell their goal is really just to save their own ass. They want to live, they aren't heroes, their just trying to escape. That's where it comes into play, their (metaphorically) watching from the sidelines while main characters like Gordon and Adrian and Colette actually try to be the hero.
Even in Half-Life Decay, I'd say you play as "main character material." Colette and Gina are literally trying to save the world, without any idea about Gordon or Adrian's attempts at the exact same goal. With Barney, his only goal is to save himself, he's not "main character material", he doesn't act for the greater good, he's self-centred like a real everyday worker would be in this situation. Same goes for the scientists you meet in Blue Shift, Ken Rosenburg, Walter, Harry and Simmons all just want to live, they don't care about trying to save the world from aliens, their happy with escaping the facility alive.
@@koolaid33 I was talking about the fact that at the beginning, he mentioned Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and the original Half-Life; completely skipping Decay. You are correct however.
THANK YOU! Finally someone else likes Blue Shift as much as I do. Maybe it's because Barney is my favorite character in the series, but I truly love the expansion.
Blue shift and, to a greater extent, Black Mesa and Black Mesa: Blue shift, do an excellent job at making the facility feel lived in. It makes you kind of wish you worked there, and the catastrophe of the resonance cascade and how it affected the people who worked at Black Mesa makes you feel the pain that someone like Gordon or Barney must have felt when they saw the aftermath of the Resonance Cascade.
Enjoying the half-life content, because at some point I would eventually like to learn German. Seeing how media gets altered for Germany is very interesting, and in the case of video games, important to video game history. I’m curious to see more.
Someone’s gotta have a Half Life mod that’s just simulating life before the resonance cascade in as realistically boring detail as possible. Call it “Half Life: Control Group” or something. The entire time, it keeps hinting at the resonance cascade happening at the end, but then at the end there’s just an announcement that the experiment got postponed lol.
When I first played Blue Shift and Opposing Force, I definitely liked Blue Shift much more than the other game. The way it felt was more interesting to me (Maybe because I played Half-Life 2 before playing Blue Shift and just was interested in Barneys story). I didn't like Opposing Force so much, though I can't tell that it's a bad game, it just doesn't feel like a Half-Life game, it was too long, and I was kinda bored while playing it. In conclusion: Blue Shift - Short, cool, Barney is awesome as always. Opposing Force - Long, difficult, but Shephard is a great character.
I got stuck at the stupid puzzle where you have to climb a ladder after moving boxes. Then moving cranes and then it just kept falling me off the ladder. No matter what I do I couldn't f****** finish the puzzle and I just quit. And then I played opposing forces.
Thanks, this puts my question about the game "just ending" to rest. To be fair, I probably shouldn't play Blue Shift right after Opposing Force, it kinda mashes everything together, especially on the hardest difficulty (the game flow certainly didn't have difficulty settings in mind). By the way, Barney does get an alien (weapon) right before the end, it's just super easy to skip if you figure out the puzzles instead of scouring every notch and crany for hidden path :D.
Banrey has to be the Hal-life character with the most hard character development, from the average and boring security guard that G-man even ignored, to the military commander of the rebellion against the combine.
I mean, to be honest, four people is probably still more than Gordon or Adrian ended up saving! Gordon didn't save anyone 'cause the aliens ended up overrunning the whole planet anyway, and Adrian was just lucky to miss the part where he was actually sent there to kill everyone.
Adrian did shockingly little in his adventure, honestly. I mean, did he even make any impact, other than killing people? He didn't even stop the nuke from going off. If he hadn't appeared, nothing would have been different.
@@GermanPeter In my own headcanon even Otis's mom did more :) Could say that's the nature of having a follow-up story take place during the events of the original -- you can't change the outcome. Except Opposing Force did, and they made it even worse XD
Without blue shift how would we know properly about Barney in the Half Life 2 series and forward “Without the past there would be no present and future.”
You're like me when it comes to Opposing Force - I used to have this huge elaborate theory about the themes of the game extrapolating from the meaning of the title and running all throughout Adrian's adventures, wish I could remember it because it was really fun to think up but I never wrote it down other than in scattered TH-cam comments which I hope are lost to time and space by now. Anyway, I kinda realize now that the disparate threads that seem to connect to an overall tone or a set of themes probably came last in the development of these first few HL titles. Like, they had a premise, they did a bunch of game dev stuff, THEN found ways to incorporate larger themes that meshed with the already extant gameplay sections in a way that could be used to diffuse potential criticisms and build towards a more cohesive product in keeping with that initial premise. The game devs were working backwards from how you and I interpret their work, basically. There almost certainly was no grand design in which breadcrumbs were seeded in order to lead the observant to a better understanding of whatever Valve's thesis happened to be for that game. It's a little more like someone was eating a sandwich and sloppily dropped crumbs everywhere, then said it was a trail of breadcrumbs - which is technically correct, the important distinction is time-order. It is fun to dream though.
If I can say anything positive about the really uncanny HD models that came with Blue Shift, it's the weapons that got changed. Though some of them are cursed looking, namely the MP5 getting changed to an M4, some of them are legitimate improvements. The glock didn't look that great in the original game, but the M9 Beretta looks surprisingly good. The Colt Python may be the best weapon in the game, but that barrel just looks wrong. I know it didn't look right with an accurate model in testing, but the Colt Anaconda it was changed to actually looks accurate. And then there's the shotgun. The new model is pretty take it or leave it for me, but that sound effect when you shoot it makes it feel amazing. Otherwise, Blue Shift isn't that great to me. I get the appeal, but it's not what I'm looking for in a game.
This video is a focused look at Half-Life's worst add-on, and why its negative aspects only add to its charm. Hope you enjoy it!
Another reminder that patrons who donate just 3$ a month on Patreon were able to watch this video one week ago, and they're already able to watch next week's video. If you're interested, consider becoming a patron as well! Thank you :)
man the title already got me hocked on this. even tho ill miss tf2 i like that you switch games.
i can recommand some games that well... at least i would like to watch on your channel: postal 2 and 4. CS. Payday: the heist and Payday 2.
What about hunt down the freeman?
I always took it that the guard at the start of the game just missed the tram, prolly saving his life later on. If anyone ever made a co op mod for blue shift they should remove him.
Needed more game footage
Now that BM: Blue Shift chapter IV has been released, do you think the remake has done the original justice?
My favourite parts are
A. The armour mechanic is completely changed to scavenging non-shot vests from other guards
B. That Barney's story ends long before Gordon and Adrian's and, as small as it is, he gets a victory. Gordon and Adrian are pawns of a higher power and their perceived use/threat gets them put on ice while Barney who's only where he is because he wore a helmet when the place came tumbling down gets to walk away after some legwork and goes on to use his unimportance to great effect in Half Life 2 by infiltrating the Combine.
Underdogs are always more than they are originally perceived
Let's also not forget that Barney continued fighting for TWENTY YEARS after the Resonance Cascade disaster. Gordon saved the day for sure, but Barney never stopped doing it, always helping out in any way he could. That's only commendable.
@@GermanPeter he is also no doubt putting himself in very high risk by beeing a known important rebel leader at the frontline of the uprising, respect for barney, altho he never gets us that beer he promises so i guess that cancels out the respect he deserves
@@Helperbot-2000 Well it is hard to schedule a peaceful moment to drink a beer with a friend when said friend gets kidnapped by some mysterious guy every time he does something big and also always on the move because the world itself is after him.
now i want hl3 to be about Barney
I always liked the existence of blue shift and other half life games. They really help to flesh out the incident from different viewpoints the staff were experiencing
If I could choose another Half-Life add-on, I'd love to have one about playing as one of the scientists. Now THAT could have focused entirely on puzzles and no combat!
@@GermanPeter
I'd put _money_ on that.
@@GermanPeter Why not check half life echoes? Is a mod that lets you play as a scientist, athoulght is not that filled with puzzles
@@GermanPeter Well Half-Life as a series is an FPS game first and foremost. Check out Portal series if you want story+puzzles only.
@@GermanPeter Isn't that kinda portal lol
Despite how simple and "boring" Blue Shift may seem, it actually does have some good looking Xen levels.
The Xen levels really are leagues better than the ones from Half-Life 1. Maybe it's because they had an actual clear vision for Blue Shift's levels instead of having to cut 90% of the original ideas and stapling everything left over together.
for half a second I thought I commented this
@@mr.k4918 probably just the logo.
@@EnclaveSOC-102 yup
I can’t wait to see them in the Black Mesa version
I love how you changed everything to blue. Like your intro.
Well, the video is about *Blue* Shift, after all. It's not a permanent change though.
@@GermanPeter should’ve changed your nose to red tho. >:c
(This is a joke-)
Dare i say he "shifted" everything to blue
@@limeangelo6019 now this pun blue me away
when i saw this momment myself on my first time playthrough i immedately thought "damn, that could have been me!" before taking his stuff to finish his adventure
Finally someone who stands against the Blue Shift slander.
It was GearBox and Randy Pitchford behind Blue Shift though. If you look through their track records then you'll see that their successes were generally accidental, and that they mostly undo their contributions with something irredeemably shitty -- like lifting the good versions of Duke Nukem 3D off Steam.
@@RdTrler I'm not here to praise Randy Pitchford, I am just saying I like blue shift.
I think my favorite moment in Blue Shift is when you walk through one of the many tunnels of Black Mesa.
It's quiet and dark, but in the distance you see a pair of red lights.
As you approach, you see a car. It's still quiet, the only sound you hear being your own footsteps and clicking of the emergancy lights in the car.
Next to the car lays a guard, who died/got shot whilst trying yo get out of the car.
You expect a big moment, like the storm after silence, but nothing happends. No music, no enemies, nothing.
Just you, a car and a corpse of your former colleague.
This moment is just so personal, you have seen and made so many corpses, but never really looked back. But moments like this make you realize the little tragedies that happen behind the scenes, the lives that were lost.
It's a little thing, but i dont think any of the half life games managed to execute this feeling with a comparable success
I loved that part! It's especially emotional because like you said, there's no enemies around. The soldiers aren't making any big deal out of whoever they're executing on the way. They just saw this guy trying to escape in a car, shot him, and moved on. Like he didn't mean anything whatsoever.
I like how you write about how you feel, and Black Mesa: Blue Shift also has this sort of subtle feelings! I suggest you play that aswell, or watch a good gameplay walkthrough, SexyNutella is recording nice ones
@@dustypaint Aww, thanks man
And i might try it out when I'll have the time! Firstly i gotta finish the half life 2 stuff though, since i never actually got around to playing it.
Also school is kicking my ass atm so maybe during the summer I'll finally have the time for it.
But thanks for the recommendation either way!
I think the guard running at the start is actually running because he just missed the tram ride, which is another relatable experience :P
Half-Life Blue Shift was always my favorite game, short and simple. You're just a security guard, you don't end up like Gordon or Adrian in the hands of Gman, you just survive and escape.
I know the final battle against the soldiers in the teleporter room may have been kind of anti-climatic but in retrospect, that final stand shows Barney's commitment to making sure as many of his colleagues and friends get out alive before he makes his own escape. I think if they had kept this whole final sequence and combined it with the whole idea of making the majority of the game about puzzle solving and only giving you a very small arsenal, it would've given the teleporter room a much higher sense of desperation as you fight off wave after wave of soldiers with comparatively basic weaponry
I really enjoyed Blue Shift under the context of, essentially, Half Life DLC.
The short story about Barney isn't world changing in any aspect, but it is a fun, short, sweet little expansion that doesn't overstay its welcome.
I guess in a funny way, Blue Shift kinda “Understayed” it’s visit-
Had the game had more time to transition from an average day of Barney to suddenly finding himself having to escape black mesa alive, it would’ve been a much more immersive experience.
This game also kind of explains why Barney hated headcrabs so much. In every tunnel a headcrab is ready to jump on you, whether on xen or on earth. Sometimes its so sudden Barney might have had to fend of with arms. No wonder he hates them so much.
5:54
Honestly, this pretty much reminds me of what I am going through this week.
For the first time in years, I attend a new school and I had to figure out how to get there by train, which one to take, when to leave home, so I am not late nor wasting too much time on just waiting around for things. But then, just this *Friday*...
Construction work, so now no train will stop at my town, Bönen, so now I had to look at plans and everything to figure out how to get to school by bus, since trains don't work.
8:50 On this one we should give him a break. Like if i were working in secret government facility that does weird science stuff i would start to ask questions of how deep it is, and how much more there is, too.
Thinking back to Black Mesa Blue Shift, there's this encounter with the HECU where you and Otis rescue a scientist. After you cleared the first train yard, while Otis is bringing back the scientist to their group, the radio broadcast a conversation between a soldier who managed to survive you and Otis who contacted his superior for reinforcement, the superior who when hearing how 2 nobodies wiped out an entire squad gives a huge groan as a response. It's like he's not just surprised, but also extremely disappointed and sicked of it, before reluctantly sending in a squad.
The scientist is Ken Rosenburg, but yeah all the characters in Blue Shift are considered nobodies. Otis, Barney, aforementioned Ken, the scientists you meet up with later (Harry the one who dies, Walter, Simmons), all nobodies in terms of the franchise's story, and in terms of their motives and abilities.
Haven't started watching the video yet im going to say what i've been telling people for years. I love blue shift because even though it's the smallest half life game it has the least i dont like about it. It's a really neat short story and it feels like half life without all the fat.
Even if we're all Barneys together we can make an unstoppable army of Barneys
A Barmy if you will
So real
Barney Calhoun Last seen: 2006.
The dude never makes it to White Forrest and not a single damn character asks where the hell he is.
he was sleepy
and no hl3 😔
laidlaw was talking about how in epistle 3, Barney mightve showed up
You know, this really recontextualizes the game in an interesting way. I still may not like it that much, like with the environments and not much new content, but I really appreciate this because it made me think about the game a bit differently.
Thanks for showing this to me in a new light. I'm right in the middle of the game and got stuck wondering how I'm supposed to cross the pit of blue coolant, and then I find this. I just kind of chalked a lot of the game up to being rushed. (I mean... the crosshair is still orange and the full title doesn't even appear on the main menu. It just says "Half-Life"... TWICE!) But now I can see a lot of this was intentional... or at least the result of happenstance, cobbling together what they got, and making the most of it, much like preparing the teleporter in "Old Black Mesa". This is a game made from cobbling together old parts from another, bigger game, and it absolutely OWNS that fact, realizing there's nothing to be ashamed of.
This all reminds me of the mindset that went into making The Mandalorian, as the thought process was very similar (at least for the first season or two), being likened to being the little brother, having to share the same Star Wars toys with him, but he takes all the "cool forefront" stuff, keeping Luke, Han, Leia, Vader, Yoda, etc. while you're left to make up your own adventures with the background characters.
Heck, on a similar note, I always kind of perceived Doomguy this way, going by what little is described about his background and situation in the manual. In a way, I'd argue he's closer to Barney than Gordon. (The recent "Doom-Slayer" rebranding is far more "Gordon" though.) Dude was about to be court-martialed, but they changed their minds and more or less forced him to be a janitor (I think that's what it's implying) on the Mars Division of the UAC, which is considered at the absolute bottom of the UAC totem pole, as it's only used for toxic waste disposal, while all the other planets do more important things with greater prestige. He's not deemed important enough to deal with, so he's just dumped onto the most boring position in the solar system. Even when the demonic invasion happens, he's left behind for guard duty while everyone else takes the better weapons with them. Many of them are wearing the same armor he is. Everything about his situation has him set up as a background character, but he breaks through it all and stands out, not because he is given any distinguishing power or has any visible distinguishing features, but through sheer tenacity. He's not ALLOWED to be important, but he defiantly does it anyway.
I've actually been on-again-off-again writing a Doom show script. I even made a sort of "Audio Drama Pilot" based on Knee-Deep in the Dead. I already had this kind of mindset for his characterization in the back of my mind, but now I can see it is absolutely something that should be at the forefront.
th-cam.com/video/HkXS-8UGSAg/w-d-xo.html
I never played Blue Shift, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this video!
Good job on it, it almost made me wanna check it out and almost inspired me at making such a game lol (which would've failed).
Good job on it! Love your video essays!
The closest game I can think of that’s like Blue Shift is Halo 3 ODST. Instead of being the one man army himself; Master Chief. You take the role of an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper referred to as “The Rookie”. Now ODSTs are the closest thing to being spartan without any of the enhanced abilities. Stronger than a marine but nowhere near as powerful as a spartan. The fights aren’t as big as past games and the scale of everything is nowhere near the spectacle of past games either. The game overall makes you feel small and insignificant as you trudge your way through an abandoned city all alone at night.
ODST was a great game :)
Odst was absolutely fire
When put into the context of what we know happened elsewhere, it amplifies the fun of being unimportant to the *main* story ... you are important to your own story.
Barney is my 2nd favorite HL character, the first being Kleiner. i've always had a softspot for the badass everyman, someone who isn't as cool or given the most important roles as the main character, but someone who's got your back, and when the long day is over, he still remembers that beer he owes you, after you've both been through so much
Kind of a big brain move to make a console spin-off to your game that makes you feel like a nobody while the game tells you that the MC from the computer game is much more important and doing cool stuff
💛💙💛 Another banger as usual!! Makes me regret not getting into the series years ago tbh.
I agree that there should be more just "average joe" games. I love when you can get another viewpoint of a series, fron the eyes of a non "super important protagonist/sidekick." It really helps flesh out the environment and make it feel so much more immersive (?)
(Also love the switch to blue this video)
I love that you're looking to work on stuff other than tf2
Gj and I hope you thrive in the change!
blue shift kind of felt like a round of engi in ss13 made into a game
all of your problems are so mundane and there just happens to be disastrous events going on near you
Blue Shift is just the perfect thing for when you need just a little more vanilla Half-Life.
i absolutely adore blue shift for the boring worldbuilding it does, this vedio is the perfect description of everything i love about it
Absolutely charming. And I agree-the world-building sections before the proverbial hits the fan are always my favourite parts of games like these.
Of course a German likes the dull one about someone doing his job 😂 Is Germany just wildin’ and the normal is fantastical over there?
We take comfort in the mundane :)
Great video, I also suggest you check out Half-Life: Echoes. It's a mod made with so much polish that it actually feels like an official addon. It doesn't necessarily lean into the whole "you're a cog in the machine and an insignificant speck in this entire situation" thing, but it's more so a "shit going horribly wrong right in front of you from the pov of a random scientist trying to do his best to escape" kind of thing. It has a lot of heart, humour, and it feels like it fleshes out Black Mesa even more as a facility.
Yes, absolutely this! It was excellent.
This has such an amazingly high production quality, especially for a small channel. Großartig, weiter so.
I always thought a huge full model of black mesa you could just explore woukd be awesome
Bist jetzt seit 2 tagen ständig in meinen Recommendations hab dir gleich mal ein Abo reingedrückt ,und ich finde es erstaunlich wie gut dein Englisch klingt :)
I thought this would be absurd logic leaps, but in the end you're actually right. It's remarkably unremarkable! :D
"blue shift is awesome because it is awesome"
damn peter you truly are a genius (and german) with this one
The slick animations are quite a good add to the videos!
0:11 my dumbass ears cant tell if intentional reference or accent im going to be thinking about this for a week
Judging by the subtitles this is a reference to how the scientists pronounce it.
@@timurtheterrible4062 thank you youve saved the back 30% of my mind a week's worth of deliberation
@@cardboardturtle5470 👍
Old Black Mesa reminds me of a story my father once told me, from his days working for the government.
The building was too big for the agency in its modern form, so they just shrunk the available space. Like, they put vending machines in front of the doorway to one of the older dining rooms to block access.
Blueshift was definitely my favorite game and not because I happen to be a Security Guard myself...
You gave me a new perspective on a game I already loved it didn't make me feel like a super soldier
hearing the word "passport" in a half life video triggered my fight or flight instincts
You would need it to fly
While I didnt really enjoy it gameplay wise, I really did love the intro for all the reasons you described.
I love Blue-Shift. Feels like a "greatest hits" album for Half-Life. One great set piece after another. And it's just as long as it needs to be. Whenever I get the craving for some good old fashioned HL I can just dive right in and be home in time for dinner. Also: as others have mentioned in the comments, it's the only game in the series with an unambiguously happy ending.
Ngl if they made a whole game just making normal tasks of a security guard in black mesa and on the last day was the incident I'll play the hell outta it.
Most underrate youtube channel to date
Maybe Black Mesa needs a Ethics Committee
Interessantes Video! Mach weiter so.
That mounted gun is the vanilla half life mounted machine gun, not the M249 from Opposing force. looks like a M2 browning from what I can tell from the low poly.
Found your channel randomly. And glad I did. I enjoy your videos.
Awesome video as always!
Duuuude DUDE! You struck a cord in me with this. Thank you for putting in words the feelings I have with this game.
Honestly? This has given me a real new appreciation for ya boi Barney
0:12 - Unknown origin? It's called a _Xen_ crystal, specifically sample "GG-3883".
About that beer I owe ya.
I've always wished that the game had the balls to only give you the pistol
it's a strange thing i like too, where just the simplicity of a day-to-day thing is something i want to see. how they work their job. i've always replayed the beginning of black mesa over and over wishing it was kind of the entire game bc of just how, well, mundane and "home"-y it felt to me. like i was apart of their world. another example would be SCP containment breach, simply i'd love to work as a black mesa researcher or an scp scientist. really, its strange but i love the concept of it.
Augh yea, an Half-Life video. Never expecting you to talk abt it
i wouldn't have mind Blue Shift being a slice of life game honestly
Barney and Half-Life: Blue Shift is what I think is the golden standard for a '2nd person narrative.' You literally play as a nobody staring on on a situation being dealt with by important people. Gordon Freeman, Adrian Shephard, Gina Cross and Colette Green all have a mission: to save the world from the impending alien attack. That's why they all fight off the aliens, whether Xen or Race X. Sure all their attempts fail in the end, but through their efforts they all prove themselves worth something to G-Man, which is why he takes all of them and puts them in his weird stasis dimension. Barney on the other hand, his goal is just to save himself, and since he's with some helpful scientists, to save them too. Between Barney, Ken, Walter and Simmons, you can tell their goal is really just to save their own ass. They want to live, they aren't heroes, their just trying to escape. That's where it comes into play, their (metaphorically) watching from the sidelines while main characters like Gordon and Adrian and Colette actually try to be the hero.
-"just following instructions on my own" most german sentence ever
Poor Half-Life Decay has been forgotten again.
Even in Half-Life Decay, I'd say you play as "main character material." Colette and Gina are literally trying to save the world, without any idea about Gordon or Adrian's attempts at the exact same goal. With Barney, his only goal is to save himself, he's not "main character material", he doesn't act for the greater good, he's self-centred like a real everyday worker would be in this situation. Same goes for the scientists you meet in Blue Shift, Ken Rosenburg, Walter, Harry and Simmons all just want to live, they don't care about trying to save the world from aliens, their happy with escaping the facility alive.
@@koolaid33 I was talking about the fact that at the beginning, he mentioned Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and the original Half-Life; completely skipping Decay. You are correct however.
I just found you today Peter and you make good half life as a half life fan content keep it up! Hope you get to 1 millon subs!🎉
I enjoyed all the little nods to Wayneradiotv's "Half-Life, but the AI is self-aware" series :)
Honestly, I absolutely loved the introduction to the old 70's side of black mesa, made me consider thier past a lot more
12:42 fun fact: even if yore was corrected, it'd be the wrong your/you're.
THANK YOU! Finally someone else likes Blue Shift as much as I do. Maybe it's because Barney is my favorite character in the series, but I truly love the expansion.
first Half Life game I played along with HL2.
but small theory, people don't like Blue Shift because it brought the HD pack to the PC.
I like the HD pack a lot actually (as evidenced by the video), especially the weapon models and the new sounds. The SMG sounds actually good for once!
Blue shift and, to a greater extent, Black Mesa and Black Mesa: Blue shift, do an excellent job at making the facility feel lived in. It makes you kind of wish you worked there, and the catastrophe of the resonance cascade and how it affected the people who worked at Black Mesa makes you feel the pain that someone like Gordon or Barney must have felt when they saw the aftermath of the Resonance Cascade.
Enjoying the half-life content, because at some point I would eventually like to learn German. Seeing how media gets altered for Germany is very interesting, and in the case of video games, important to video game history. I’m curious to see more.
Someone’s gotta have a Half Life mod that’s just simulating life before the resonance cascade in as realistically boring detail as possible.
Call it “Half Life: Control Group” or something. The entire time, it keeps hinting at the resonance cascade happening at the end, but then at the end there’s just an announcement that the experiment got postponed lol.
Love the oxymoron in the title
When I first played Blue Shift and Opposing Force, I definitely liked Blue Shift much more than the other game. The way it felt was more interesting to me (Maybe because I played Half-Life 2 before playing Blue Shift and just was interested in Barneys story). I didn't like Opposing Force so much, though I can't tell that it's a bad game, it just doesn't feel like a Half-Life game, it was too long, and I was kinda bored while playing it.
In conclusion: Blue Shift - Short, cool, Barney is awesome as always. Opposing Force - Long, difficult, but Shephard is a great character.
Bei gott ich hab als kind blue shift noch mehr als half life gesuchtet
I got stuck at the stupid puzzle where you have to climb a ladder after moving boxes. Then moving cranes and then it just kept falling me off the ladder. No matter what I do I couldn't f****** finish the puzzle and I just quit. And then I played opposing forces.
Thanks, this puts my question about the game "just ending" to rest. To be fair, I probably shouldn't play Blue Shift right after Opposing Force, it kinda mashes everything together, especially on the hardest difficulty (the game flow certainly didn't have difficulty settings in mind). By the way, Barney does get an alien (weapon) right before the end, it's just super easy to skip if you figure out the puzzles instead of scouring every notch and crany for hidden path :D.
Keep in mind this was originally made for the Sega Dreamcast.
The Black Mesa remake really makes this story shine
In the end of hl2 ep1 during the end, we don't know where barney went or unknown safe place location.
and he stills owes gordon a beer
Banrey has to be the Hal-life character with the most hard character development, from the average and boring security guard that G-man even ignored, to the military commander of the rebellion against the combine.
And then Barney leads the resistance
I mean, to be honest, four people is probably still more than Gordon or Adrian ended up saving!
Gordon didn't save anyone 'cause the aliens ended up overrunning the whole planet anyway, and Adrian was just lucky to miss the part where he was actually sent there to kill everyone.
Adrian did shockingly little in his adventure, honestly. I mean, did he even make any impact, other than killing people? He didn't even stop the nuke from going off. If he hadn't appeared, nothing would have been different.
@@GermanPeter In my own headcanon even Otis's mom did more :)
Could say that's the nature of having a follow-up story take place during the events of the original -- you can't change the outcome.
Except Opposing Force did, and they made it even worse XD
Without blue shift how would we know properly about Barney in the Half Life 2 series and forward
“Without the past there would be no present and future.”
Barney just go through pain and stuff
German gamer loves security guard simulator...what a surprise
agree, Valve should make another Half Life VR game where you play as Barney
Me, myself, thought that blue shift was boring too, but after playing it, i changed my mind. It felt like my regular life
7:19 you mean Half-Life decay?
Now i want a pre resonance mod... Well i am making one but its too short as it is my first map, i want one from a more qualified person
Someone needs to buy Barney a beer.
You're like me when it comes to Opposing Force - I used to have this huge elaborate theory about the themes of the game extrapolating from the meaning of the title and running all throughout Adrian's adventures, wish I could remember it because it was really fun to think up but I never wrote it down other than in scattered TH-cam comments which I hope are lost to time and space by now.
Anyway, I kinda realize now that the disparate threads that seem to connect to an overall tone or a set of themes probably came last in the development of these first few HL titles.
Like, they had a premise, they did a bunch of game dev stuff, THEN found ways to incorporate larger themes that meshed with the already extant gameplay sections in a way that could be used to diffuse potential criticisms and build towards a more cohesive product in keeping with that initial premise.
The game devs were working backwards from how you and I interpret their work, basically. There almost certainly was no grand design in which breadcrumbs were seeded in order to lead the observant to a better understanding of whatever Valve's thesis happened to be for that game.
It's a little more like someone was eating a sandwich and sloppily dropped crumbs everywhere, then said it was a trail of breadcrumbs - which is technically correct, the important distinction is time-order. It is fun to dream though.
This disscusion reminded me of Papers Please
Have you tried the Blue Shift mod for Black Mesa yet? I think you'll like it.
I like In the english version of blue shift barney sounds more tired
If I can say anything positive about the really uncanny HD models that came with Blue Shift, it's the weapons that got changed. Though some of them are cursed looking, namely the MP5 getting changed to an M4, some of them are legitimate improvements. The glock didn't look that great in the original game, but the M9 Beretta looks surprisingly good. The Colt Python may be the best weapon in the game, but that barrel just looks wrong. I know it didn't look right with an accurate model in testing, but the Colt Anaconda it was changed to actually looks accurate. And then there's the shotgun. The new model is pretty take it or leave it for me, but that sound effect when you shoot it makes it feel amazing. Otherwise, Blue Shift isn't that great to me. I get the appeal, but it's not what I'm looking for in a game.
great video bro
I call him jerry, simply because it's the better name