Naturally you have to admire the work of game developers, particularly those with a talent like Valve. Between the original Half-Life, new hero shooter Deadlock, and maybe, just maybe, Half-Life 3, the Gabe Enclave has successfully produced some of the most defining PC games of the last two decades. But perhaps even more awe-inspiring is the work of speedrunners, and the ingenious ways they manage to reverse engineer and break Valve’s games. 25 years since it was released, Half-Life Opposing Force, the Adrian Shephard-led expansion focusing on the HECU, has just been dismantled and rebuilt into a staggering speedrun record that almost defies belief.
Half-Life wise, things have been busy lately. First, there was the leak about Project White Sands, which may well hint at Half-Life 3, and then devotees of the FPS game series set a new Steam record for Blue Shift. In terms of sheer visual spectacle, however, this is definitely a crowning achievement. Back in 2014, a team of speedrunners managed to complete a segmented run of the Half-Life base game in just over 20 minutes – 20 minutes to finish the entire thing.
Now, ten years later, two runners have created a perception-shattering run of Opposing Force. You might remember struggling, shooting, and striving to survive the Black Mesa resonance cascade. Turns out you can just spring past everything.
Completed by ‘jorik’ and ‘_Smiley,’ this is Half-Life Opposing Force separated into 503 small segments. Rather than a start-to-finish run, what the two players have created is a theoretical best possible playthrough – over the course of a full, non-segmented run, random elements can easily compromise speed, efficiency, and the perfect time, but by breaking the shooter into chunks, nailing, precisely, each one, and then sticking them back together, the runners show us what a flawless record might look like.
The hypothetical run lasts just 16 minutes and 30 seconds – but creating it took 662 days. You might notice a couple of anomalous (pun intended) moments when it comes to movement. Jorik and _Smiley, for example, are able to leap from great heights and crash onto the floor below without losing any HP.
This is thanks to an exploit in how Half-Life calculates fall damage – between the frame that you first jump and the frame when you land, the game decides how much of a health penalty to apply, but by pressing the duck and jump buttons at the right times while in midair, you can confuse the process.
You’ll also see moments where Adrian Shephard runs into the side of a barrel and is suddenly propelled in the opposite direction like a shell being fired from a cannon. Essentially, if you run into certain objects in Half-Life with sufficient speed, the game interprets those objects as slopes or ramps, and flings you off them as if you’re going downhill.
The persistence, patience, and amount of knowledge required to achieve this kind of run is hard to overstate, so big congratulations to both Jorik and _Smiley.
Take a look at some of the best old games you can still run today, if you miss the days of Opposing Force. You might also want to check out the best upcoming PC games on their way to you in the near future and beyond.
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