Half-Life: Blue Shift storyline

This article describes the Half-Life: Blue Shift storyline, chapter by chapter.

At several points during Blue Shift, Calhoun almost meets the protagonist of Half-Life, Gordon Freeman: Calhoun is locked outside the door to Area 3 Security Facilities and sees Freeman go past on the tram heading towards Sector C (In the opening sequence of Half-Life Gordon Freeman sees a guard locked out of a door on the inside of the tunnel); using remote cameras, Calhoun also sees Freeman heading towards the HEV Storage Area from the surveillance room; during the ending sequence of Blue Shift, Calhoun sees Freeman being dragged by HECU soldiers towards a trash compactor.

Hazard Course (optional)


The training chapter of Half-Life: Blue Shift. The "Black Mesa Hazard Course for Security Guard Training" trains the player to use their suit, how to move around within the environment and interact with it and how to use weapons. Scientists (such as Rosenberg) watch as the player trains.

Living Quarters Outbound


In it, Barney Calhoun rides the tram from the Area 8 Topside Dormitories on the surface into work inside the Black Mesa Research Facility. Along the way many new details about Black Mesa are revealed; Calhoun passes a laundromat and several fast food outlets, suggesting that the facility is very self-sufficient and probably houses many of its workers. He is also passed by Gordon Freeman riding in another tram in a scene that mirrors one in the original game.

Barney Calhoun, a mid-ranking security guard in Black Mesa, is responsible for the preservation of equipment and materials and the welfare of research personnel in a cavernous underground sector of the facility.

Trivia

 * Easter egg: a soccer ball that fell from the basketball terrain above can be seen under the tracks at the very start of the ride.
 * Easter egg: in the laundromat, a scientist and a security guard are playing a fighting arcade video game, named Prax Wars 2: Dante's Revenge; the security guard eventually loses the game. A second scientist is reading The Mesa Times while waiting for his laundry to be done. Prax Wars is a nod to Prax War, an actual canceled game by developer Rebel Boat Rocker, on which Gearbox's Randy Pitchford worked. It was announced at E3 1998 as a very promising game.

Insecurity


In it, Barney Calhoun visits security headquarters, including a shooting range and a surveillance room where it is possible to see Gordon Freeman again. He is then sent to help some scientists with an elevator; along the way, he witnesses many incidents foreshadowing the resonance cascade, such as a pair of scientists vainly trying to fix a supercomputer. He also sees the G-Man passing by in a tram. After repairing the elevator, the resonance cascade occurs; the elevator cable snaps and sends Calhoun and two scientists plummeting down the shaft as chaos breaks out around them.

At the time of the resonance cascade, Calhoun is trapped in an elevator with two scientists. He wakes up at the bottom of the lift shaft, and soon finds himself fighting through the facility's underground areas to reach the surface and escape.

Duty Calls


In it, Barney Calhoun regains consciousness at the bottom of the elevator shaft to the sight of a Houndeye eating the body of a fellow security guard. The two scientists in the elevator are dead, and so Calhoun sets off through the industrial waste areas of Black Mesa to try to find help. Along the way he gains an insight into the scope of the disaster, and sees a pair of marines dumping corpses into a sewer opening, thus discovering that the military is trying to cover up the disaster rather than evacuate surviving personnel. This scene also contains a reference to previous Half-Life expansion, Opposing Force, as one of the marines grumbles "just because Shephard's team didn't make it, we have to do the crap jobs?"

Captive Freight


In it, Barney Calhoun reaches the surface and encounters the HECU. He manages to fight through them and reach Dr. Rosenberg. He and a team of fellow scientists were trying to escape until the marines caught them.

Calhoun rescues some scientists who have been locked in railway cars in Black Mesa's classification yards. One of the scientists, Dr. Rosenberg (who is also a character in Decay), advises Calhoun that the entire facility is surrounded by Hazardous Environment Combat Unit Marines intent upon killing all base personnel to cover-up Black Mesa's research into extradimensional exploration. The only way to escape, Rosenberg explains, is to use an old prototype of the Lambda Complex teleporter; if it works, they can reach an obscure entrance to Black Mesa which (hopefully) has been overlooked by the Marines.

Focal Point


In it, Barney Calhoun and Rosenberg reach an older part of the Black Mesa Research Facility where a disused teleporter system is being reassembled by scientists. To make the teleporter completely operational, Calhoun is forced to travel to Xen and activate a device to allow teleportation to happen. Notable in the older part of the facility are older-looking models of health and HEV chargers and the use of hand scanners instead of retina scanners for identification.

The remainder of the game takes place in an abandoned, walled-up sector of the base originally built for research of the first teleporter device. Calhoun, Rosenberg, and two other scientists (Walter Bennet and Simmons) try to restart the prototype teleporter. Calhoun is briefly teleported to a ruined human research camp on Xen to operate a triangulation device.

Note: In optics a focal point is the point at which initially collimated rays of light meet after passing through a convex lens, or reflecting from a concave mirror.

Power Struggle


In it, the teleporter has used its entire supply of batteries to transport Barney Calhoun through to Xen. Calhoun is again forced to go down to a power facility level and find the batteries and recharge them. Calhoun fights through a team of HECU marines and aliens before he reaches the power generators.

A Leap of Faith


In it, Barney Calhoun helps operate the simpler parts of the teleporter to get all the scientists through. He barely escapes the marines before teleporting.

Upon his return, Calhoun fights off Marines and aliens while the three scientists teleport out of the facility.

Deliverance


In it, the other scientists have teleported to a safe location outside Black Mesa with some cars laying about. Barney Calhoun also arrives and sees Simmons and Rosenberg trying to fix an SUV and Bennet breaking open a gate with a crowbar, but some kind of discharge has affected him. Calhoun is glowing green and is teleported to several locations, such as a Xen platform and a storage room in Black Mesa where he witnesses Gordon Freeman being carried off to the trash compactor before transporting back to the scientists (a reference to the chapter Apprehension of Half-Life). Calhoun finally ends up back at the yard with the scientists, no longer glowing. They have fixed the SUV, and Rosenberg expresses his relief, explaining to Calhoun he is lucky not to have been caught in an infinite loop. Walter pulls the gate open, and the game ends.

Calhoun experiences a brief malfunction while teleporting: he is quickly "zapped" through different locations across Black Mesa and is imbued with a green glow. Finally, he returns safely to the remote facility entrance where he and the three scientists escape in a Black Mesa SUV.

Behind the scenes
Blue Shift is the shortest game in the Half-Life series (with the exception of Half Life 2: Episode One) with all the events taking place immediately after the Resonance Cascade. It is interesting to note that aside from the PlayStation 2-only Decay, Blue Shift is arguably the only HL1-based game with a "happy ending". At the end of Half-Life, Gordon Freeman is conscripted by the mysterious G-Man, and Opposing Force's Adrian Shephard is detained by the same individual to ensure his silence. However, in Blue Shift, Barney and his three scientist companions escape Black Mesa and the scrutiny of the G-Man, whose brief report suggests either that he deems them too insignificant to bother further monitoring or eliminating or that they managed to escape while he was busy with Freeman and Shephard (the exact wording says "out of range").