Rating: 
Summary: not internet capable
Review: When I bought this several years ago I got a refund because the network engine did not work.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Game From a Great Series
Review: Half-Life: Blue Shift is a great game. The graphics aren't bad and the gameplay is incredible. You play as Barney Calhoun, a Black Mesa security guard. It's a normal day, you're just fixing an elevator for some grumpy scientists when all of a sudden swarms of hideous aliens are everywhere in the Black Mesa underground lab. Things get worse when the military comes on a mission to kill anything and everything, including you. You must escape Black Mesa or you will surely die. Like the other Half-Life games, Blue Shift definitely desrves an M rating. There is blood, gore, and lots of dead things. However, unlike the other Half-Life games, if you kill an ally you are court-martialed, so at least you get in trouble for killing humans. Also there is content control (meaning you can turn of anything inappropriate). There is no language or sexual content. Get Blue Shift, you'll love it. The only problem is it's too short.
Rating:
Summary: HalfLife Online Ruined My G.P.A. (lol)
Review: This game is unspeakably awesome, right up there with RUNE insofar as providing online gaming that will make your world a better place. Now if they'd only port it to Macintosh (the new UNIX-based Mac OS), I'd be able to run it on a real computer, that's good for something besides video games!
Rating: 
Summary: Hey i'm in blue-shift! Wait, huh? Where did blue-shift go?
Review: Half-Life(gave it 5 stars) and Opposing Force(gave it 4 stars) were the half-life games that were actually WORTHY. Blue-shift fails, and even more, fails because it's failure is presented so embarrasingly it has to include half-life's high definition pack and opposing force free to isolate it's embarrasement. Blue-shift for one thing is waaay too short, infact, it's soo short, that you can't even tell when it's done. You'll be like: "What, Wait, come back! It's over already?". Second of all, there is uninsipiring game-play and action, absolutely too easy too beat. There are none of those immerse puzzles and realistic situations found in the last game. I never knew barney's experience was soo boring. I feel sorry for him. And single player only? I don't even want to talk about that. 7 short levels that makes you do boring stuff. Although the storyline connects to the original two game's storylines, at least. Go to work. Get prepared. Watch the experiment's distraterous effects. fight boring basic enemies and use boring basic weapons and solve boring basic puzzles. go to xen, for a few minutes. complain about how boring and easy it is. return to the black mesa facility and finnally save these annoying scienstist and escape in a jeep. Not much more. The high defintion pack improves the character models and weapons and are much more realistic, and takes effect for half-life, opposing force, and blue-shift, at least. and at least it patches up your half-life version and freely includes opposing force. That's about it, there's not too much else too it, other than it was a fatal error and a major disapointement. {system boot up] [Incoming message display start] half-life blue-shift core status: failure. [Incoming message display shut-down] [system shut down]
Rating:
Summary: WHAT ITS OVER ALREADY
Review: that was my expression as I beat teh game...no end boss, no new weapons, this game just doesn't feel like opposing force or teh original half life, at 10 bucks I'd suggest buying it if only for the high res pack and a quick run through the levels, but the game itself isn't that good, its not much combat mostly puzzles until the last 2 levels.My advice stands as: Buy it if only for the high res pack packaged in but dont expect much from teh game.
Rating:
Summary: Half-wits' are reviewing this...
Review: Yes, it is short. No, it is not shovelware. It is a solid, fun, and creative game that simply expnads the horizon of the half-life universe. It does not offer new MONSTERS and stuff. Like that's important. The gameplay is #1 in my book. AND, it should be in others as well. I mean, under ten bucks and we're pitching a fit?!?! The graphics update patch is sweet, and the ending is nice as well. The puzzles are similar to the first half-life, but usually simpler to solve. the load times inside of levels are dramatically improved in speed. The processor required is still the same as the first half-life. And, there are a lot of little secrets sprinkled around that will make you want to play this thing through a few times over to figure them all out. A nice slice of the 'half-life ' universe, if you ask me.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Expansion Now at the Right Price
Review: Alot of the negative reviews of this game are justified in that Blue-Shift is a pretty short expansion pack that doesn't offer any new monters or "bosses". However I don't think a lot of the people reviewing the game know Blue-Shift's history. Originaly Blue-Shift was meant as a little bonus adventure for the Dreamcast version of Half-Life that was being produced by Gear Box. When production of the Sega Dreamcast console was canceled right near the end of production of the Half-Life port Gearbox was left with a nearly completed product which no longer had a home. On top of all of this the Dreamcast version of Half-Life was going to sport higher detailed versions of the weapons and characters, so that as well was ported over to the PC in the form of the included High Definition pack (there's actualy some extra work put in here as it updates the non-Dreamcast content of Opposing Force). Again Blue Shift was never meant to be a stand alone expansion pack, this is why there's no new monsters in the game, there probably just wasn't budget for development of new content. The only real problem with Blue-Shift is that Sierra (the publisher not the developer) knew the value of the Half-Life name and knew they could sell it at the same price as the full blown expansion Opposing Force. So what did they do? They included Opposing Force and slapped the high price tag onto it. Now a days Blue-Shift is at the price it should of been all along. At just $ it's WELL worth it. It is every bit as well written and executed as both Half-Life and Opposing force. Heck anyone who pays close attention to the plot will realise that the shortness of the campaign is actualy appropriate. Now you know Blue Shift's history, it's actualy great that Gearbox went ahead and got Blue Shift into the hands of the right audiance (the P.C. players). Now if we can only get Half-Life: Decay ported....
Rating: 
Summary: Will BS gonna keep this series half alive? Yes.
Review: Blue Shift, or BS as it is sometimes called (affectionately, I might add,) has remained a pretty controversial move by Valve. Did it pay for itself? Did Valve simply want to keep the fandom salivating? I think the real reason Blue Shift was released was to update the weapon models and keep the game looking halfway decent (spotted a pun? I didn't!) The game actually does very well for what its objective was. You get your professional quality extra missions, and the idea of revisiting those infamous areas from another angle and time is simply fascinating if you take a moment to look around. The tradition put in place by Gearbox Software (where you see Gordon jump into the portal to the Xen homeworld) is one of the selling points behind this game series. Of course, Blue Shift lets you play as THE Barney, as some people call him. He's not that Barney, or that other one. He's the one in the tram! What tram, you say? Well, it doesn't really matter except to say that he is the one who escapes the disaster of Black Mesa. If OpFor was the depressing chapter, the Empire Strikes Back where we find out that the G-Man is...well, the low point of Half-Life, Blue Shift is the relatively uplifting finale, and the chronicle of one of Half-Life's individual victories. What you see is mostly new, and the level geometry is vastly improved, though the enemy AI is still that "just post-Metal Gear Solid" scripted stuff, as Valve took pains not to break compatability with old mapping styles, and old maps and mods are still quite playable. If there is anything that I can say which you won't read anywhere else, it's this: The music isn't anything new. The Opposing Force (OpFor in the jargon of our embedded game reporters) music, though I spent many hours playing it on a regular stereo under headphones, is only suitable . With noise, inappropriate, painfully solid and metallic reverb effects (it's not the base but rather the higher frequencies that are a killer), bizzare and sometimes randomly constructed passages, and generally too predictable advancement from the beginning to the end, it seems at times as if a simple heart beat or Gordon's breathing would have been an appropriate replacement which wouldn't have occupied the larger portion of the disk. That's not to say some of these sections frankly work: the section where you are trapped inside behind a blast door as an Osprey takes off works pretty well in conjunction with a rapid fire series of staccato drum beat, and the very last section's music sets the melancholy, introspective nature of the soldier's predestined fate in Opposing Force. That said, Blue Shift appropriates this music of questionable aesthetic qualities and does not attempt to improve on it at all. I don't feel it was an appropriate way to constrain the cost of developing this "standalone expansion," and a selection of some of Half-Life's excellent original tracks would have been quite welcome here. After all, one remembers tracks 2,3,10, and many of the others from Half-Life long after the pain and oppresion of the whole post-HL game audio have faded from your mind. Track 15 from the original Half-Life? One of the best game tracks in existance, on any format. Track 15 from Blue Shift? I have no clue what it is anymore, and it may have been one of the better ones (though I think 17 was more promising..)! That said, you don't have to suffer through that music playing the original Half-Life or any multiplayer mode with the improved weapons models. At this price, you have little to complain about, and another classic Half-Life box design sitting on your shelf, with THE Barney on it, is certainly not embarrasing for a gamer. Give it a try!
Rating:
Summary: Take my advice
Review: When I was looking at the reviews on this page I thought to myself, "Oh come on they can't be all that bad". Curious I bought it off the bargin rack and then the adventure began. Unfortunatly this adventure is probably the lamest in the Half-Life universe. Its not that the game is all that made its just that there are A. No new weapons
B. No new bosses But then agian maybe I was just expecting too much when I bought this game. Trust me this game is bad enough don't waste your time.
Rating:
Summary: Sierra is dead
Review: That is my oppinion of Sierra. They should fold. They are the only game manufacturer that consistantly produces interesting products that are so error prone, or infested with bugs(Blue Shift) that its just not worth purchasing from them anymore. They're incompetent. What happened to you Sierra? What happened to QA? What happened to attention to detail? How the mighty have fallen! Sierra has the only web page with a searchable FAQ devoted to errors and bugs. For example, you type BLUE SHIFT, press enter, and your querry will return an FAQ the size of Texas. An FAQ that TRYS to address all the problems with Blue shift(thats funny). It appears that the only bug free program Sierra makes nowdays is SIERRA UTILITIES, but like all recent Sierra products, it too is worthless!! REST IN PEACE SIERRA!!
|
