Hopefully this might be one of my last Half Life themed posts. If you are bored or annoyed by these, I apologize, but in the last few weeks I played Portal, Episode One and Episode Two straight through, back to back and now I’m impatiently waiting for Episode Three. So bear with me for a bit while I get this stuff out of my system.
Anyways, every single Half Life game involves a fair amount crawling through air ducts, or some other tight places. In fact, Valve even decided to make fun of their love for air-duct sequences, by having Alyx make references to Gordon’s formidable crawling skills in Episode One. At one point, when I was doing all the crawling it hit me. How the hell do you fit in these tight ducts with the HEV suit and all your weapons? I mean, let’s think about it – on your average day, Gordon can be seen carrying:
- standard crowbar
- USP Match Pistol, with around 8 spare magazines
- .357 Magnum revolver with 12 spare rounds
- MP7 Submachine gun with 5 spare ammo clips, and 3 grenades for the built in launcher
- SPAS-12 pump action shotgun with around 30 spare cartridges
- Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifle with 60 spare rounds
- mechanical crossbow with 10 bolts
- AT4 Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher (RPG) with 3 rockets
- three fragmentation grenades
- Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator (aka the Gravity Gun)
That’s two machine guns, a crossbow, a rocket launcher tube, a unwieldy crowbar and a very bulky and heavy gravity gun. Seriously, check out the scenes when it used by Alyx or Dr. Breen. It’s so heavy that they can hardly lift it into the upright firing position without the HEV suit. Actually, Alyx seems to be barely able to lift the damn thing at all.
Note that I’m not even mentioning the HEV suit itself here. Ok, so I just mentioned it. Look at it though. From the way it looks on concept art sketches, and that brief moment you see it in the game, it looks big and bulky. I think that it actually has rigid plate components that protect you from “blunt trauma”, a hardened collar and chest plate and etc. It’s not really a good outfit for ventilation duct crawling to begin with.
So next time you are crawling through an air duct in Half Life think about this: you are actually have a dozen bulky weapons strapped to your suit. How is it possible? Gordon Freeman is just that awesome. This is why Vortigaunts are always so nice to him! Cause, dude – if you can fit into a tiny duct in a big suit, with weapons strapped all over your body, you must be fucking unconsciously using vortesence to bend reality or something. 
RSS Feed
/dev/random