In true Half-Life fashion, getting from point A to point B is often more complicated than it sounds. Disarming tripwire mines by tracing a path through rings as a burning fuse chases you – while being careful not to accidentally trip the mine with your hand – can get fairly intense.Īnd then there's the environmental puzzles. None of them are terribly complex – for instance, there’s a memory-matching game where you connect points on a holographic sphere and a very cool-looking one where you trace the path of electricity through a wall and rotate connectors in a power-flow puzzle – but all of them make heavy use of VR’s ability to work in three dimensions, and some of them actually get tricky when they scale up in the later levels. Some hacking puzzles pop up when you go to unlock various Combine technology. Combat is a major part of the journey, but so is puzzle-solving. Each chapter of the 15-hour campaign feels substantially different from the last, including one that relies heavily on an unkillable antagonist you have to work your way around, and some that are all but pitch black except for your wrist-mounted flashlight.
#What is half life series#
It’s set up as a linear series of areas, starting with a normal City 17 neighborhood and then moving underground, through industrial areas like a distillery, high-tech Combine facilities, slimy alien nests, and more.
#What is half life full#
The same otherworldly sound design that made the landscape of the gulag-like City 17 so memorable back in 2004 is in full effect here as well, and full-3D surround sound intensifies all of these recognizable pieces.Īside from the new perspective, Alyx feels very much like a traditional Half-Life game. That established, with great force, the immense scale of the mosquito-like alien tanks we first fought in Half-Life 2 – if you didn’t take them seriously as a threat before, it’s now impossible not to. Subtle as it is, it sets the stage for the best VR shooter I’ve ever played by a mile – and one of the best in any perspective.The next thing that stood out, jarring me out of gazing at my hands like a first-time stoner, was probably the gigantic, 30-foot Strider leg that smashed down directly in front of me as it moved past, going about its business. This grit also tells us something about this character, a scrappy survivor raised in the aftermath of the Seven-Hour War in which the alien Combine conquered Earth, and it quickly establishes that she isn’t as buttoned-down as that MIT-educated nerd Dr. Usually, virtual hands are either low-detail ghostly apparitions or gloved. It’s a simple thing, but it’s not often that you see that level of fine detail in a VR game. This relationship enables the determination of all values, as long as at least one is known.One of the first things that struck me when I started playing Half-Life: Alyx was the dirt under Alyx Vance’s fingernails. Using the above equations, it is also possible for a relationship to be derived between t 1/2, τ, and λ. Derivation of the Relationship Between Half-Life Constants This means that the fossil is 11,460 years old. If an archaeologist found a fossil sample that contained 25% carbon-14 in comparison to a living sample, the time of the fossil sample's death could be determined by rearranging equation 1, since N t, N 0, and t 1/2 are known.
N t is the remaining quantity after time, t The carbon-14 undergoes radioactive decay once the plant or animal dies, and measuring the amount of carbon-14 in a sample conveys information about when the plant or animal died.īelow are shown three equivalent formulas describing exponential decay:
It is incorporated into plants through photosynthesis, and then into animals when they consume plants. The process of carbon-14 dating was developed by William Libby, and is based on the fact that carbon-14 is constantly being made in the atmosphere. The half-life of carbon-14 is approximately 5,730 years, and it can be reliably used to measure dates up to around 50,000 years ago. One of the most well-known applications of half-life is carbon-14 dating. The term is most commonly used in relation to atoms undergoing radioactive decay, but can be used to describe other types of decay, whether exponential or not. Half-life is defined as the amount of time it takes a given quantity to decrease to half of its initial value.