![]() ![]() Male Citizen 07 is talking directly to me. I am a physical presence where Gordon should be. I am no longer just looking through Gordon’s eyes. Breen as he snivels away on a giant screen in the game’s opening, I am struck with a sensation I can only describe as experiencing something that had previously only happened in a dream. From the fresh perspective of virtual reality, City 17 and its surrounding areas feel eerily familiar yet largely unrecognisable. City 17 feels less dystopian when you run away from civil protection officers giggling like a teenager with a crush. I know the layout of Half-Life 2 better than some areas of the city I live in currently. For a few years in the mid-2000s, Half-Life 2 was my everything game, offering a foundation upon which hundreds of mods were built. I have made a gurning Gman flip the bird towards a disgusted Eli Vance in the burning ruins of Ravenholme. I have lobbed sawblades at other players in the bathrooms of Nova Prospekt. I have liberated City 17 from Combine forces. I’ve played Half-Life 2 countless times over the last two(ish) decades. I spend the majority of my time leaning in really close to walls and muttering, “That’s interesting,” before a leaping headcrab shocks me so severely that I damage some more furniture and scare the cat. Under my direct control, Gordon Freeman is less a time-displaced MIT graduate with a penchant for murder and instead a gawking tourist who’s more interested in staring at canal architecture than liberating humanity. This has been my experience of playing the first few hours of Half-Life 2’s excellent fan-made VR mod, a completely free add-on that transforms Valve’s 2004 masterpiece into a full virtual reality experience. The resulting crack gives me such a fright that I fling my arms out and smack my hand against the corner of a bookcase. As I defiantly refuse to pick up litter in Half-Life 2’s opening sequence, I find the approaching officer and his raised electric baton to be weirdly adorable. Don’t get me wrong, I'm very much a Short King myself, but I assumed the gas mask-wearing enforcers of City 17 would be more vertically intimidating. Civil Protection officers are shorter than I thought they’d be. ![]()
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