Like I said, I have a lot of game to go through, and a lot of stuff to say about it.

But I only have a few more things to say about the "Anomalous Materials" chapter before moving on, so without further ado,

Ah, here he is, the Narrator of The Stanley Parable! Not sure why Kevan Brighting voices a single scientist in the game and no one else, or why he's there at all, but hey, he's a great voice. I ain't complaining.

If you look closely at the control panel of the anti-mass spectrometer before it's destroyed, you can see,

Who in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to start this thing without repairing the emergency shutdown??

Hey, wait, guys, I'm having second thoughts, I don't know if this is a good idea, maybe we shouldn't have swapped out the original crystal sample for a new one-

Yeah, definitely not a good idea.

Also, remember how I said the orange/green color contrast would show up a lot? I feel like the rest of this statement I don't need to explain.

Also, here's our first glimpse at the lovely Xen landscape, and the Vortigaunts!

"Oh my gosh, this is crazy in a box with a side order of fries." -Ross Scott, Freeman's Mind

And with that, we proceed to...

Unforeseen Consequences

I just want to note that I think it's funny that in one of my fics, I have a three part chapter titled "Unforeseen Consequences," and I wrote that probably only seven or eight months before I first played Half-Life.

But a bit about the chapter- the Black Mesa chapter, not The Time Before chapter. This is the true "beginning" chapter of the game, the true start of The One Free Man. And I feel that, in the beginning, Gordon does what he does purely because he's simply too shocked to really comprehend the horror of the situation. I mean, he can't get out the way he normally would, so what does Gordon do? Crawl through an air duct back towards the way you came. Stuck in a room with nothing between him and zombies but a glass wall? Just pull out the crowbar that's holding the door closed and use it to bludgeon the zombies 'til they stop moving! Doors are all locked or jammed? That's fine, Gordon will just leap across storage containers suspended on a railway hundreds of feet above the ground. I mean, sure, it's possible that Gordon is just too crazy/badass/levelheaded/emotionless to begin with to be bothered by a zombifying alien invasion, but I like to think of it more like he's just too shocked to really even realize what he's doing. While sure, he's scared, it hasn't quite sunk in that this is real, that all this is really happening, so he still manages to proceed with considerable haste.

(I feel it's worth noting, though, that the air duct thing isn't unnatural for Gordon. Alyx mentions in HL2.Ep1 that she's heard stories about how, before the Black Mesa incident, whenever Dr. Kleiner accidentally locked himself in his lab, Gordon and Barney would race to see who could break him out first via the air ducts. So Gordon has experience crawling through them. The unnatural part would be that, being familiar with the air ducts, Gordon would know that crawling through that particular vent wouldn't get him out of the labs- in fact, it would lead him to a room that the only regular exit from would be a door that he would already know by then was blocked, and the only way out in the game is a hole that was exploded in the wall, which Gordon couldn't have known would be there, not having been able to see into the room. Yet still, his first reaction is to crawl through the air duct to that room.)

Also, if you dislike violent games, this might be a good place for you to stop, because, I mean. It's a zombie apocalypse game. And there are a lot of dead people. I mean, the first people you meet on waking up are these two

and one of them is probably dead, or very close.

But anyway, moving on,

MY STATUS IS THAT EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE AND THERE ARE DEAD PEOPLE PLEASE SEND HELP

Isaac Kleiner is the best, and by Schrodinger's cat, this is my new favorite exclamation of surprise.

More reasons to love Kleiner:

Despite the fact that everything's gone to rack and ruin rather quickly, he remains optimistic and finds beauty where no one else could-

-in the form of a parasitic, zombifying alien creature that would just as soon latch onto his head and kill him for its own gain as it would become his pet named Hedy Lamarr who may or may not end up causing Gordon to accidentally lead a bunch of evil aliens to a secret resistance base. At any rate, Kleiner would seem to be remaining happy and optimistic in spite of his current position trapped in the middle of an alien invasion!

Unfortunately, after Eli's insistence that Gordon head to the surface to fetch help, this is the last we see of Isaac Kleiner, until HL2...

Take caution is right! This is dangerous!

... Sure is a cool laser, though.

Gee, it sure is unfortunate that I don't have any weapons to defend myself with! Good thing I can rely on the help of my pals, the Black Mesa Security Force, to protect me from my former coworkers who have been hijacked by alien parasites and turned into zombies!

For real, though, I love the security guards. Despite the fact that they're entirely in the same boat as Gordon, and after he gets his hands on a few guns, he's much stronger than them, they're always ready to leap in to defend Gordon from any attacking force- even if they're on the verge of death themselves! (Though, I will admit, I almost always reload if one of them dies while following me.) I also love the guards' idle dialogue- from fearful "Did you see that thing with the... the missing leg?" to a somber "Any idea how many of our crew have died?" to- almost immediately after, I might add- a comedic "Does this vest make me look fat?" or "hey, does it look cooler if I hold my gun like this?"

It's also great when you have a squad of a few followers with you, because in addition to having random idle dialogue, they all have random response dialogue. My personal favorite conversation I've heard between two guards went something like

"Hey, uh, are you sure this is the right way outta here?"

Which was closely followed up with something to the effects of "don't worry about that right now; we have more important things to think about!"

Yes, we definitely have something more important to think about than trying to find our way out of a alien infested office complex. Definitely not priority one, right there.

Well this isn't terrifying at all! I'm sure it's fine my security guard friend decided to stay behind to try to get the radios working, leaving me to proceed without a weapon!

But hey, I gotta keep moving forward, so I guess I'll just

pull that crowbar out of the door latch and use it to beat the zombies to death

And thus began Freeman's legacy as an unstoppable crowbar-wielding harbinger of death.

Aw, man, you were so close...

I think the most unnerving sound in the whole game is the screams they make when on fire. It's sort of muffled. Garbled. But you can still hear the raw agony in it, and it sounds just human enough to make you feel sympathy for the flaming zombie trying to kill you.

While vaccines are definitely effective in helping you fend off alien viruses in your body, I don't think they'll do much good when it comes to fending off alien parasites that latch onto your head and eat your face off. The concern, however, is appreciated!

Yeah, let's definitely climb into the blood coated, broken down elevator! That seems like an excellent idea!

(Hint: it wasn't.)

But this, too, gives me the feeling that Gordon is still in shock and disbelief and can't quite comprehend that everything he's doing is real.

I'll end off this section with this kinda cool wavy, distorted shot I got while trying to get a screenshot of a charged houndeye. Shortly after, I got fed up with it and just decided to kill the thing.

A fun fact for you, though: houndeyes were originally going to be passive, or even friendly creatures in Half-Life! Unfortunately, the developers decided to make them hostile, because the playtesters kept shooting them because they assumed everything alien was inherently hostile.

But once again, I've reached the picture limit. So I'll probably be back relatively soon, to finish up the "Unforeseen Consequences" chapter and move on to the "Office Complex" chapter.