"All hell break loose,when Tabitha let her hair loose"

Daniel Mok

The basic plot of Half-Life 2 is pretty simple in concept, much as the first game was. The player is once again Gordon Freeman, but rather than being involved in the action by happenstance, he's placed there by the G-Man. Players of the first game will recall being given a "choice" at the end - work for him, or die horribly. Needless to say, the former was used as the springboard for a sequel.

Gordon was placed in some kind of stasis following the events in Half-Life, and is reactivated by the G-man to deal with a growing problem on Earth - aliens are running the show 1984-style, using Black Mesa's administrator, Dr. Wallace Breen, as a puppet/mouthpiece to control huamnity and maintain order. Gordon is teleported to City 17, an urban center (apparently in Russia, judging by the Cyrillic characters on some of the buildings and the names of some of the local people and places) where Dr. Breen has his main administrative center.
Fortunately, Gordon is not alone against the forces of the alien Combine - characters from Half-Life are working with a resistance movement and will be more than happy to help Gordon, who has become something of a mythical figure amongst the resistance members. Doctors Kleiner and Vance, scientists from Black Mesa, have been working on some high-tech aid for humanity. Barney Calhoun ("the" security guard from Black Mesa) has been working inside "Civil Protection," the oppressive police force of City 17, to keep the reisistance as safe as possible. New characters include Dr. Judith Mossman, an assistant of Eli Vance's, and Eli's daughter Alyx.
Half-Life 2 is comprised of 14 chapters. Since there's a lot to do and see in the game, as well as plenty of stopover areas in some otherwise fast-paced levels, the amount of time it takes to complete each chapter will vary based on the player's proclivity for exploration, perfection, sight-seeing, tomfoolery, hijinx, shenanigans and other sorts of goings-on. A relatively exploratory and skilled player can probably expect to spend 1 to 2 hours in each chapter on average, making for a pretty lengthy game.

Apart from City 17 and its various sub-environs (a canal, a zombie-infested urban wasteland and the streets themselves), game locations include a coastal highway beset by burrowing insect-aliens, labratories, a Combine prison and, of course, the massive Citadel at the center of the city.

In Half-Life, you play Gordon Freeman. A native of Seattle, Washington, Gordon Freeman showed high interest and aptitude in the areas of quantum physics and relativity at an extremely young age. His earliest heroes were Einstein, Hawking and Feynman.While a visiting student at the University of Innsbruck in the late 1990's, Gordon Freeman observed a series of seminal teleportation experiments conducted by the Institute for Experimental Physics (see Bowemeester, Pan, Mattle, Eibl, Weinfurter, Zeilinger, "Experimental Quantum Teleportation," Nature, 11 December 1997) (see also http://www.sciam.com/explorations/122297teleport). Practical applications for teleportation became his obsession. In 1999, Freeman received his doctorate from M.I.T. with a thesis paper entitled: "Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures By Induction through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array."Disappointed with the slow pace and poor funding of academic research, and with tenure a distant dream, Gordon cast about for a job in private industry. As fortune would have it, his mentor at M.I.T., Professor Alex Kleiner, had taken charge of a research project being conducted at a decommissioned missile base in Black Mesa, New Mexico. Kleiner was looking for a few bright associates, and Gordon was his first choice. Considering the source and amount of funds available to the Black Mesa Labs, Gordon suspected that he would be involved in some sort of weapons research; but in the hopes that practical civilian applications would arise (in areas of quantum computing and astrophysics), he accepted Kleiner's offer. Apart from a butane-powered tennis ball cannon he constructed at age 6, Gordon had never handled a weapon of any sort-or needed to... until now.

hey mok here is a treat for you... if you can consider it a treat....

The Half-Life Story

The majority of Half-Life's storyline was written by Marc Laidlaw, Valve Software's resident wordsmith and author of novels such as Dad's Nuke, Kalifornia, and The 37th Mandala.
Deep in the bowels of the Black Mesa Research Labs, a decommisioned missile base, a top secret project is underway. Information about the project is strictly on a "need-to-know" basis, and as a low level research associate you (Gordon Freeman) "need to know" very little. Each morning you ride the train to work from the employee dorms, you put on your environmental protection suit, you enter the test chamber, and you run stress tests on whatever odd devices have been delivered from some other nameless part of the Black Mesa compound.

But this morning is different. This morning, your test lab is suddenly the most important place on Earth-because something is going seriously wrong. Maybe it's sabotage-maybe it's an accident. Whatever the reason, reality is getting all bent out of shape. One minute you're doing your job, pressing buttons. The next thing you know, you're staring into an alien world. Something huge with too many arms is taking a bite out of your partner's face. An explosion of unearthly light....then darkness.

Disaster. Sirens wailing. People screaming. And everywhere you turn, people are dying--being eaten. Monsters are everywhere. Monsters--there's no better word for them. You head for the surface, to get the hell away from ground zero, but the usual routes are unpassable--damaged by the disaster, infested with headcrabs and houndeyes and increasingly larger and hungrier creatures. Madness is the order of the day. You enlist the help of traumatized scientists and trigger-happy guards to get through high security zones, sneaking and fighting your way through riuned missle silos and Cold War cafeterias, through darkened air ducts and subterranean railways where you must ride a missle transport sled straight into the jaws of slavering nightmare. When you finally come in sight of the surface, you realize the aliens aren't your only enemies--for now the government forces have arrived with heavy-weapons goons, squadrons of ruthless containment troops, and stealthy assassin gals. Their orders seem to be that when it comes to Black Mesa labs, nothing must get out alive....and especially not you, the guy who made it all go bad. So much for the cavalry.

When your own species turns against you, where do you turn? You've uprooted a bunch of nasty government secrets. You've found a portal to another world, and an alien light comes shining through. Can it get any worse over there? Some things you just have to see for yourself.

nobody is perfect, i am nobody