I was hoping for another full expansion like “Opposing Force” was. But Blue Shift is more or less just an offically released set of extra levels for Half-Life. No new weapons, no new enemies. In fact, you don’t even get all the weapons or enemies from the original. And the emphasis seems to be much more on problem solving then on battle. After being completely stumped at how to proceed at one point, I resorted to finding a walkthrough which explained that you had to manipulate your environment in a way that I didn’t even suspect was possible:
You have to move a metal barrel over the gap in a detonating wire so that you can set off an explosive charge. AFAIK, nothing like that even existed in the previous games.
Still, the enhanced graphics package gave me chance to confirm that my system is ready for HL2.
Anyways, about Blue Shift, it was never intended to be a stand-alone product. It was originally designed as a side mission for the Dreamcast version of Half-Life; however that version got canned, thus releasing the Blue Shift on the PC was merely a way to cut their losses.
That, and it originally came packaged with Opposing Force. Since OP by itself was the same price and I didn’t have it, I didn’t think I was getting the short end of the stick when I got Blue Shift. I imagine why you would be disappointed if you had paid full price for Blue when you already had OP.
I liked TWO things about Blue Shift: The new weapon models, and the introduction to the plot that SOMEONE got out of Black Mesa without being abducted by “the Man.”
Other than that, it’s just a dissapointingly short bit of extra single player campaign. I love the game so much that I was glad to have it, though…
I was introduced to Half-Life in their Game of the Year edition (HL, OP, TF, & CS). I recently got a stand-alone Blue Shift off the web for nine bucks plus shipping, so the price was right.
No, not even close. The updated texture pack merely provided slightly higher resolution textures to make the ancient Half Life engine (which is about Quake 2 generation) look tolerable. Even when Blue Shift first came out, the update pack was still generations behind its contemporaries (the now obsolete Quake 3 and Unreal engines).
The supposedly revolutionary HL 2 engine will be at least three whole generations beyond the original. Which probably means having a Radeon 9800 to play at decent resolution.
I heard that it may only need a 700mhz pc to be able to run HL2, so the video card probably doesnt need to be super amazing to run it smoothly. But, then obviously the graphics will suffer.
Blue Shift was ok, but not the stunning advance that O.F. was to the Half-Life story and gameplay. The high-res pack was a nice bonus. It was worth the money though, IMHO.
And count on needing a GF 5600 or higher Nvidea wise, or a 9600 or higher Radeon wise to run HL2 at a decent resolution and frame rate. I picked up a 9800 Pro 128 Meg card when the started to be discounted with the annoucement of the 9800XT cards. My first ATI card- runs nicely and I should be set for a while card wise.
Like all modern FPS game engines, you can scale back features to get whatever sort of “resolution/feature” mix you want. Obviously to play at the highest settings possible, you’ll need the best card possible: but that’s simply true by definition. For every game.
