Some people have the worst luck Not enough credit is given to scientists. Especially ones like Gordon Freeman. When aliens come and invade his lab and everyone else backs away, Gordon grabs his trusty crowbar and gets down to business. Yes folks, he slices, he dices, and makes aliens go SPLAT against the walls. How did he sharpen his alien killing skills so greatly? There is a little story behind that question. Pull up a chair and I'll tell you all about it. Gordon works for the government. All his projects are worked on a 'need to know' basis. If he doesn't 'need to know' about something for his experiments, they don't tell him. He knew almost nothing of this particular project; still, he moved on and started to perform his experiments. Then something went wrong. The lab literally exploded. Dazed, Gordon got up and looked around. Then they start to come out. Creatures of all kinds are ripping the scientists apart all around the facility. So that's when, as I said before, Gordon Freeman gets down to business. He grabs a crowbar and tries to get out. Too bad he doesn't know the layout of the facility. What's worse, is that the government has sent in a group of soldiers to silence him. Can Gordon escape the government and the hordes of aliens overrunning the facility? That depends only on your skills. The sad truth is that Valve software is making poor Gordon endure all of this for our enjoyment. He doesn't know that he is in a game. I'm sure there is some activist organization somewhere for Non-Living Game Character Rights that would put an end to this. Well, in any event, we can look forward to hours and hours of fun with Gordon and his alien friends. Technology above the rest Half-Life makes a few technological breakthroughs. At the heart of everything, is an almost completely redone Quake 2 engine. Valve has added a lot of stuff though, and not much of it (the Quake 2 engine) remains. The main achievement of the engine upgrades is the 16-bit color palette. Previously, first person shooters have mostly used 8-bit color pallets. That just doesn't cut it these days. Now with Half-Life's 16-bit pallet, things will look twice as good as before. In previous games, the levels could be 'painted' with 256 colors; Half-Life's levels can be 'painted' with 65,535 colors. All these new colors allow for colored lighting in software mode. That is not all though, colored lights can blend together, surfaces can shine, smoke can be thick or thin, you name it, and it can happen in software mode. As a matter of fact, the only benefits that will come from having hardware acceleration are increased framerate and the fact that things will look a little cooler :) Another interesting thing is the dynamic surfaces. For example when the player moves through the water, it will ripple realistically.