Half-Life: Blue Shift

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The advertising on the back of the box is rife with inaccuracies. * Two new episodes for "the best PC game ever" -- The Half-Life: Opposing Force add-on is not new. In fact, there are some versions of the box with a sticker on the front giving existing owners of Opposing Force a $10 rebate. This rebate, by the way, involves not only cutting up the Blue Shift box but also requires sending in the Opposing Force CD.

• Return to Black Mesa as the security guard who allied with Gordon Freeman in the original, award-winning thriller. -- There were multiple security guards who interacted with Freeman.

• 32-Person Multiplayer. Battle opponents from around the world in Capture the Flag and more Half-Life online games. -- This is misleading. While it is possible to play online Half-Life games with this package because it includes the original engine (not storyline, just the engine), there are no Blue Shift-specific games or features except for some additional levels.

• Includes the Half-Life HD Pack. Automatically upgrade all of your weapons and characters with new high definition content. -- There is nothing technically wrong with this statement, but it leads people to believe that the weapons themselves are upgraded, not just their appearance.

Barney

The name of the main character, Barney Calhoun, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to what most fans of Half-Life started calling the various security guards around the Black Mesa complex in both Half-Life and Opposing Force. The reason the fans started to call the guards "Barneys", is because they were usually slow, dim-witted, and not very helpful, which is very much like the deputy sheriff Barney on the old show The Andy Griffith Show.

Development

Blue Shift was going to be the killer app added to the Half Life Dreamcast port, specially since Sierra promised to take full advantage of the Dreamcast's capabilities to handle the new high definition models. The Dreamcast port of Half Life had been in development limbo since 1999 and was eagerly awaited by every Dreamcast owner and his sister until Sierra flushed the port following SEGA's decision to flush the console.

Freeware release

On August 24th, 2005, the full expansion was released for free through Valve's electronic distribution platform Steam for anyone that owns the Half-Life Premier Pack, the Half-Life 2 Silver package, or the Half-Life 2 Gold package.

German version

There are a number of changes in some German releases of the game: * All human enemies were replaced with robots (not when the HD Pack is installed) * All blood (except blood which is part of the level design) and gore effects were removed * Killed scientists don't die but sit on the ground and shake their head * Some cries of fear were toned down

References

In the beginning of the game, there is an arcade cabinet with the game Prax Wars. This is a little joke by Randy Pitchford. He had been working on the game Prax War at Rebel Boat Rocker for Electronic Arts, but it was never released. The extra "s" was added because people often mistakenly referred to the company as Rebel Boat Rockers or to the Gearbox game as Half-Life: Opposing Force**s. Also, they couldn't use the real name as EA still held the rights.

Information also contributed by NGC 5194, Sciere and Zovni.