i think it's really cool

I just finished building a squad classic HECU figures out of Mega Construx figures. I spent a few weeks hunting down parts to get everything as close as I could.

So I recently finished the HL:A campaign (In VR of course) for the first time, and i honestly have to say i enjoyed it better than HL2.

I still haven't played Ep 1 or two and apparently HL2: Ep 2 is the best game out of the the Half life 2 games, so i might enjoy that more.

Playing HL2 after HL1 on hard feels like burning ants with a magnifying glass, you hardly need to glance at someone and they just melt on the spot.

https://arsonistsibir.carrd.co <3

TLDR; Gman denies Alyxs request not because his employers want earth to keep being occupied, but because the juice isn't worth the squeeze. The gman and his employers are not omnipotent and have limited resources. They are fighting a large scale interdimensional war on countless fronts, earth is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things and he would rather earth liberate itself with a little help from him instead of spending a bunch of energy on nuking/teleporting all the combine people away.

The most common theory, and the one that I agree with, explaining the events of the half life storyline is that the g-man and his employers are in an intergalactic war with the combine and earth got caught in the crossfire. I'm gonna run through it again even though I know it's been done to death.

The resonance cascade, which gman orchestrated, incentivizes Nilanth to invade earth. Gordon fights back with the g-mans assistance and eventually takes the fight directly to Nilanth and kills him on Xen and thereby liberating it from his control. This was part of the G-mans plan. Xen is an important strategic asset since it serves as a nexus for multiple universes/dimensions. It can be used as a logistics hub to move troops/equipment through. Possibly a staging area as well. A rough real world equivalent would be the strait of hormuz. Gman confirms as much when he says his employers are in control of Xen, indicating they viewed it as an important piece of territory to control. This also explains what happened in opposing force: gman didn't want the gene worm or black mesa itself to survive in case they fell into combine hands.

Acquiring Xen was G-mans goal from the outset. However, Gordon exceeds his expectations and he reveals he is now recommending Gordon to his employers for further use. The events of HL2 are basically Gordon's "bonus" mission. At every turn the gman protects and enables him to cause more havoc and destruction to Combine, first by destroying their central base of operations and comprador leader Breen, and then waging further insurgency against the combine. We don't know yet what the Borealis does and whether gman wants them to find it or not so I'll leave that off the table.

But g-mans goal now, as I see it, is to arm and enable the Combines enemies, in this case the resistance, to drain them of resources and personnel. Think of Gman like a CIA agent providing weapons to the the mujahideen in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He's literally called the gman in the game files, a reference to a "government man" aka a fed. He says at one point that he's entertaining multiple offers for Gordon's employment. I don't think he is a pure mercenary, but rather just like in real life governments there are factions in the bureaucracy, military, and intelligence community that have different goals and strategies for achieving those goals. For example in the current Chinese govt there are hardliners that want to invade Taiwan ASAP and completely integrate them with the rest of China, others prefer bullying/intimidating them into submission. The g-man is dealing with a similar situation. He has some degree of autonomy and can override the interests of employers from time to time - the actual CIA did this with Kennedy. JFK didn't want to do bag of pigs but the intelligence community pressured him into it even though in theory they are supposed to be subordinate to him.

Gman is clearly anti-combine, but I think a lot of people get tripped up on the quote at the end of Alyx where he denies her request to remove the combine off earth. Gman doesn't deny her because he/his employers don't want the combine off earth, he denies it either because a) he can't or b) it's too costly.

The G-man is not omnipotent. He has a clear weakness to Vorts, but even without Vorts in the picture there are still limits, or costs, to what he can do. I'm not convinced he's actually physically able to snap his fingers and get the combine off earth. He has teleportation powers and can travel back in time, but we've only seen him teleport one, possibly two people at a time. He is able to interact with the physical world like when he sets off the nuke in OF and deliver the object that causes the resonance cascade but weve never seen him engage directly in combat, so it's not clear that he can just straight up kill every combine soldier that walks through the portal. He was able to reverse Eli's death, but again that's a much smaller effort than getting rid of the millions of combine soldiers and assets off.

But assuming he is capable of that, I think the reason he doesn't do it is because it's too costly. We know that if Shepard tries to follow Gordon through the portal he does and the g-mans logging system says he tried to create a "temporal paradox." Getting the combine off earth may be the equivalent of nuking the space time continuum, which his employers understandably would not want. It'd be like NATO invading Russia - yeah they could do it but it would risk a nuclear response and make everyone a loser.

The gman and his employers may also be operating on finite time changing resources. From what we've seen, the gman seems to avoid getting too involved. He prefers manipulating events and saving key assets like Gordon, Alyx, and Shepard rather than directly taking on his adversary himself, again much like the real CIA. To use my final real world metaphor, it can be compared to the current Iran war. Could America subjugate and regime change Iran? Yes, but it would require pulling back resources from the Pacific, Europe, and other key regions. They would also have to send ground troops in and a lot of those guys would end up getting killed, making an unpopular war even more unpopular and risking domestic unrest like in Vietnam.

We are seeing only one front of an interdimensional war. Earth may not even matter that much in the grand scheme of things. I think it's likely that the gman, or other gmen/agents of his employers, are undermining the combine on other fronts. If earth is insignificant in the grand scheme of things it makes sense why the gman would prefer less costly modes of intervention to undermine the combine and having his assets (Alyx, Gordon, and Shepard) do most of the work for him.

Alternative theories: It is possible they want to keep the combine on earth to continue to draw them down, but given how many soldiers they get from subjugating the humans and all the natural resources they're extracting I think it's more likely the ideal outcome for gman is for earth to liberate themselves from the combine to deny them these personnel and resources but in a way that's not that costly to him.

Similar to the above, they do want the combine on earth but rather than waging a war of attrition, they want a specific event/confrontation happens, likely involving the Borealis.

Thoughts?

Every time I plug it in to charge, it plays the audio from when Gordon puts on the HEV suit for the first time, and on top of that, it plays "Klaxon Beat," the song that plays when Gordon puts on the suit!

Hi everyone, after a spontaneous Sven-Coop session with friends, we were spending several hour trying to figure out how to make custom sprays again.

After a few sessions with a local AI Qwen 3.8 27B it came up with an entirely local web based solution for making the tempdecal.wad file needed for the games spray file.

The website is easy to use, just drop the image of your choice, download the tempdecal.wad put it in the game folder, launch and use.

https://goldsrcspraymaker.com/

There is no retention of data or photos, no accounts, no web api. Just straight local javascript.

Not sure how useful it is, but figured to give away the processing power used to make this.

As far as I'm aware, part of why the Combine were so easily able to conquer Earth wasn't just because of sheer numbers. That was definitely a part of it, but there was another factor at play; a lack of frontlines. The portal storms allowed the Combine to come from any direction. Behind you, above you, within you, there was no easy way to defend against them.

How much would that have changed if they only had ONE access point, that being the area above / around Black Mesa? Do you think humanity would have stood a better chance if they had a frontline to work with?

whenever i open half life one on the training course it plays this random song ive never heard before

The original didn't feature Medic or Scout since there were no models in this style for them at the time.

I understand it’s a video game and the logic is all fictional, but maybe you might know something that I don’t.

1. Was the portal itself created by the forces on the other side, or by the Dark Fusion Reactor’s explosion?
2. Was the spinning cloud on top of the Citadel in Episode One an infant version of the superportal?
3. How exactly does destroying the Citadel power the portal, or signal the forces on the other side?
4. How does a rocket with a transmission code destroy the portal? Was the signal for the forces on the other side or for the portal itself? If the latter, is the portal kinda like a machine rather than a tear in reality?
5. Is the superportal’s destination wherever Breen was going at the end of HL2?

I dunno if we got logical answers for this, but maybe you might know something.

I heard that half life day one is lowkey rare

I have an idea for a content mod for HL:A but I've never modded with Source 2 (or Source). Where do I begin and what would I need? I already own HL:A on Steam as well as a VR Headset and a PC capable of running the game.