Enjoyable but very short` (Half-Life - Blue Shift (PC))

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Product:	Half-Life - Blue Shift (PC)
Date:	05/09/01 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Short and sweet, Good NPC interaction, Usual Half Life quality

Disadvantages: short yet £15!, Ends just as it gets going

Plenty of people have slagged off Half-Life:Blue Shift,calling it a commercial rip-off and cash-in. These people might be right, the RRP£ is a bit high when you find out how short this add-on really is, but I find it enjoyable and interesting. I also bought it second hand for £8 so I didn't feel "ripped-off".

Blue Shift was originally an extra level for the PC->Dreamcast conversion. I bought a Dreamcast to play Half-Life, as I couldn't see myself spending £1000 on a PC. As time passed, the Dreamcast version slipped further into development hell. Eventually, it was canned which is a real shame as gold discs about floating about the development community.

It seems really stupid that the game is finished but the publishers took the decision to not publish the game as the marketing and distribution costs were deemed unrecoverable following poor sales of many Dreamcast titles. But surely a game of Half-Life's calibre would sell very well on the DC. The DC community isn't THAT small, there are 10 million or so owners across the World. That's a decent market even if you sell to 1/10 DC owners.

But luckily for me, I managed to build my own PC and ended up with a lovely high-end machine to play games and write Word articles. I was happy to hear about Blue Shift being released for the PC, cash-in or not!

I really liked the original game very much, although it could have been a level or two shorter (it started rambling towards the end). Opposing Force suffered the same fate, it was a bit long and rambling. This is where I like Blue Shift, it only took me 4 hours to complete, but those were 4 enjoyable hours. The debate about long games has surfaced many times in the past year. Should a game be longer for the sake of being longer? Or should it be shorted and packed with higher quality moments? I prefer the short and sweet game, as opposed to the Final Fantasy "50 hours of boredom" type game.
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br>Playing as Barney the security guard gives a different perspective, and interaction between yourself and the scientists is interesting. It is short, before you know it you are outside the compound and the credits are rolling. You may feel "cheated" as it's short, but I enjoyed it and thought it was a worthwhile addition to the Half-Life universe.

I enjoyed it more than Opposing Force. Just remember that Blue Shift was an add-on for the Dreamcast version, not really a game in it's own right.

Something else that makes it a good purchase is the addition of a "high definition" graphics package, derived from the Dreamcast version. This updated the graphics, animation, AI (as if it needed updating!) and weapons of ALL version of Half-Life. This is very cool, and makes a welcome change to Half Life and Half Life:opposing force.

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