Half-Life: Opposing Force

Opposing Force is the first expansion pack for the popular first-person shooter Half-Life, released by Valve Software on October 31, 1999. The expansion's single-player mode features the same setting as the original except that this time the player is cast as Corporal Adrian Shepherd, a United States Marine. Shepherd is sent into the huge underground Black Mesa Research Facility on an undisclosed mission, but things go badly wrong and he finds himself fighting for survival against sinister government agents and monstrous aliens. The action of Opposing Force cleverly interweaves with the original events of Half-Life, so that the player occasionally catches glimpses of Gordon Freeman, the player character from the original game, and visits some recognizable locations. In the original Half-life after the "containment failure" of the resonance-cascade, an extra-dimensional alien army began to invade Black Mesa. Unlike other first-person shooters like DOOM, a substantial number of personnel besides the main character surived the initial attack, and the scientists and security guards of Black Mesa struggled to fight the aliens. A matter of hours later, the United States military launched a massive assault on Black Mesa to eradicate the alien presence there, resulting in a furious battle between Marines, Special Forces, and the alien army, along with aerial bombardment by the air force. However, the U.S. military's counterattack force was instructed to shoot on sight anything that moved in Black Mesa for fear of contamination, so they too started killing the remaining scientists and security guards. After a fierce battle, the U.S. army forces were ordered to pull out of Black Mesa. In Opposing Force, the battle at Black Mesa is revealed from a new perspective - that of one of the Marines sent in to kill Gordon Freeman, hero of the first game. However, Shepherd is initially cut off from the rest of his unit, which suffers heavy casualties during the chaos unfolding in the base. Shepherd soon finds handfulls of other marines separated from his unit, and they begin to fight their way through the base. This time, it is revealed that the Black Ops soldiers seen in the first game are acting separately from the marines ("grunts" as they call them) and shoot on sight any marine they find. Opposing Force also added several weapons and maps available in multiplayer games.

External link

\n* Sierra's official Opposing Force site Category:Half-Life