Half-Life: Critical Mass mod

Half-Life: Critical Mass is a singleplayer mod for regular half-life which includes many enemies and weapons featured in Half-Life: Opposing Force. Critical Mass reveals the fate of Corporal Adrian Shepard - and also Gordon Freeman - in a manner consistent with all episodes of the Half-Life saga, including Blue-Shift and Decay, the co-operative game on the playstation 2 version of Half-Life. It is also designed to be as consistant with Half-Life 2 as possible, although that's rather difficult seeing how we don't know the story of HL2 yet. ;)

After the annihilation of Black Mesa, the “g-man” told survivor Corporal Adrian Shepard that he was being conveyed to somewhere he would be unable to reveal what had occurred but where he would come to no harm.

You star as Corporal Shepard, last seen at the end of Opposing Force being sent off to be detained, awaiting further evaluation. Critical Mass features a main game and a mini-mission that replaces the hazard course. In the mini-mission, you are released from your "detainment" and you get the G-Man's "further evaluation": being squad leader in a special mission to investigate what's happened to the military's new base in the Xen borderworld, which has now been trashed by the pesky Race-X aliens, the ones which turned up in Opposing Force and were never properly dealt with. After proving that you can lead a team, obey the chain of command and kick alien behind, the G-Man decides that you can be trusted enough to work for the organisation in some capacity and doesn't sign that termination order.

In the main game, you are the head of a sub-division of Half-Life’s Hazardous Environment Combat Unit, guarding the most important laboratories at the Northwest Advanced Operations Facility. Unfortunately, the small bunch of people that escaped from Black Mesa have formed a resistance group against the Special Projects Executive (the g-man's government employers) and they decide to teleport into your workplace and steal the displacement engine from a new prototype interdimensional teleporting fighter craft. Your commanding officer orders you to boost the displacement dampening fields to full strength, to stop them from teleporting out again. Of course, acting against scientists' recommendations makes everything go kablooi and all the stored teleportation energy goes whizzing throughout the labs and turns Complex B into the dimensional equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting. The mysterious Race-X aliens detect the dimensional breach and being aliens from another dimension they decide to invade the Earth again for no good reason. Or so you think... dum dum DUM.

So, you escape Complex B but get put in quarantine, cause you’ve been having a tête-à-tête with a bunch of unstudied aliens, but then THOSE labs get attacked by Race-X too, and you have to escape again... but when you break out of quarantine you and your security force buddies and the scientists are seen as a threat (you might have alien flu or be under mental control) and now the U.S. marines that guard the facility's topside are after YOU. Of course, a Black Operations Force turns up to grab all of the alien specimens and research data before they torch the whole place, and Gordon Freeman, infamous alien hunter, and still wearing that fetching orange suit, has been sent in by the G-Man too, and he isn't particularly partial to you either. AND there are still those Black Mesa resistance members, Gina Cross and Colette Green (the latter is from the PS2 version of Half-Life, she fights alongside Gina). The game features two exciting endings.

If you are interested in mapping, modelling or coding for this mod, please contact me at wingerden@lineone.net or visit our forums at Fircone.d2g.com .