I’m almost done playing through Half-Life 2 again, and have some things I’d like to say, and some questions that are probably unanswerable.
First of all, let me say that the bugbait and the Super Gravity Gun are probably the best weapons ever. The whole entire game is worth playing through, just to get the Super Gravity.
Some questions relating to Half-Life 1 though (which I just replayed before replaying HL2). What happend to all the cool aliens from it? The sonic puppies, and the acid spitting whatever they are. And the Xen masters with the bumble bee rockets? All we get are the face-crabs, the Vortagaunts, and the dreaded ceiling clingers (I kill every one I see. Even if it’s easily avoidable, I still pump some shells into it. Such irrational hate.).
So now some speculation. What the hell happend between HL and HL2? Where did the combine come from? Xen was refered to as the “border world” in HL. Maybe Xen marked the border between our world and the Combine’s world. Perhaps G-Man, and whatever agency he works for were trying to start a war with the Combine, and took control of Xen to have an offensive advantage. Then, the Combine moved into our world and conquered.
Was this G-Man’s plan all along then? Or did something go wrong? If so, why didn’t he call in Gordon earlier? Will it all be explained in Half-Life 3? Or will that just raise more questions?
Personally, I think they should do a prequel, perhaps with Alyx as the protagonist this. Or have several people as the protagonist, and spanning over the years between HL1 and 2. That would be interesting to see.
Completely agree with you about the super grav gun. The pacing in this game is great, but by the time you get to the very end there in the Citadel and all your guns get taken away (I was like NOOOOOOO not this old gimmick again), but then it’s like “Beeerp, item not recognized”, and you’re like WTF?, then then you realize that this thing just tosses people aside like ragdolls, swinging by their legs, it gives you the power of a god. By this point, who would want a shotgun anyway. Perfect.
Whew.
Not sure about the storyline speculations. Actually I prefer reading other peoples ideas/interpretations rather than coming up with my own.
I do know, though, that the next installment is called Aftermath and deals with what happens after the final events in HL2. Presumably with Alyx as the protagonist.
Oh, another thing I wanted to bring up: The headcrabs. What, exactly is their purpose? They latch on to peoples heads, and presumeably gain control of their nervous system, but to what end?
As we saw in HL on Xen, they breed through a giant ‘queen’ (though we don’t see a ‘king’, so we don’t know if it’s sexual or asexual reproduction), so their latching onto other things is kind of confusing. Do they just eat the brains until the host dies, then go to find another host? Or is there something else we’re not seeing? Why hasn’t the combine used the headcrabs to their advantage, by genetically and technologically modifying them for mind-control purposes? If I was an evil Combine Overlord, that’s what I’d be doing.
There was a “king” of sorts developed, but it was never included in the final game. I was supposed to have a “psionic scream” attack. There’s some HL1 mod (Poke444?) that uses the model in a lab (as well as the famous chumtoads!).
In Opposing force, we see that the headcrab zombies can evolve further, sort of, to become more aggressive (a little too much like the Flood in Halo IMHO, though OP4 may have come out first) so we can assume that they do have some sort of reproductive cycle where they might become a new king or queen after feeding on their victims.
It’s made pretty clear in HL2 that headcrabs are used as population supression techniques. They turn the populace into mindless zombies unable to coordinate and oppose them. They launch headcrabs in giant shells into resistance bases. The headcrabs then get to work. The combine can easily clean up later with projectile weapons, which the headcrabs, at least in HL2, don’t or can’t use.
They were originally going to have the bullsquids(acid spitting guys) in HL2, but for whatever reason they were taken out early in development.
As for the xen masters and xen grunts; if you remember the Xen factory levels in HL1 they were changing the vortigaunts into the big hivehand guys using Combine tech the same way they were doing it to humans in HL2. I’d also assume the xen masters and Nihilanth were vortigaunt hybrids as well, since they had a lot of the same features as the grunts/gaunts.
Presumably the death of Nihilanth helped free enough of the vortigaunts that the Combine decided to stop using them.
There’s some mods in the works that are going to be taking place during the 7 Hour War. Should be interesting.
There’s some HL1 mod (Poke444?) that uses the model in a lab (as well as the famous chumtoads!).