HALF LIFE BLACK SCREEN UPGRADE

Progressing through the quarantine zone is slow work, both due to the nature of movement in VR, the need to search through each room for spare ammo and resin (a resource you can use to upgrade your guns) and the unsettling, spooky, occasionally pitch-black environment. While the grossness feels overdone at times, it's also pretty neat that headcrabs and barnacles and other creatures I've been shooting at since 1998 are now freshly creepy and repulsive in VR. Not to mention the lengthy stealth sequence where I'm stalked by a creature who insta-kills me by vomiting gallons of black slime directly onto my face. Corpses sit upright at desks, dangle from holes in ceilings, and lean through windows, silently daring me to nudge them out of the way or collect ammo clips and health syringes from their blood-blackened bodies.Д®ven the act of healing is gross, as I insert a glass cylinder containing a living alien grub into a wall-mounted health station and watch as it's crushed into a bilious liquid just inches from my face, followed by skittering needles jabbing into the backs of my fingers as the machine knits health back into my veins. Shiny gas sacks cling to the walls, swelling and inflating when I approach until they rupture and spew noxious particles into the air. Apartment walls are covered with pulsating tendrils and toothy alien blossoms that gibber and snap at my fingertips if I hover too close. Barnacles with their sticky, dangling tongues belch and barf human remains directly onto me when they expire, giving me another good reason to avoid standing under them. Here in VR the graphic grossness increases by at least a factor of 10. Disgusting.Д«arnacles with their sticky, dangling tongues belch and barf human remains directly onto me when they expire. Plump, fleshy headcrabs leaping at your face from darkened air ducts, shambling zombies with bloody, elongated claws and gaping midsections suddenly lurching to life, the gonarch's massive and pendulous testacles swinging as it gallops after you, the giant fetus-like body and swollen cranium of the Nihilanth. The Half-Life series, especially the original, has always been as much about horror as about action, and that horror was often gross. Your father, Eli, has been captured by the Combine and you're trying to intercept the train he's on by making your way through a Xen infestation that has filled metro tunnels, dark sewers, and basements of crumbling buildings. How many objects did I Force-pull to my hand over the course of Half-Life: Alyx? Hundreds? A thousand? I don't know, but it never once got old.ДЄfter the intro you descend into City 17's quarantine zone, a murky labyrinth closed off by walls within the walls of City 17, where most of the game takes place. The opening minutes, and at plenty of times during the entire game, I just had to stop, stand still, and take it all in. I've seen Striders before but I've never had one step over me in VR as I stared up at it, utterly dumbfounded, watching it sink its massive feet into the side of a building, using the crumbling masonry as a step to walk itself up to a rooftop. Combine Metro Cops seem larger than life because they're now actually life-size.

When a city scanner takes my picture I instinctively hold my hands up against its blinding camera flash. It's immediately engaging to be back in City 17 again, so familiar yet so much more impressive in VR, an environment I don't need to just look at to admire but one I can actually run my virtual fingertips across and crane my neck back to take in fully. Here's the the best GPU and VR headset for Half-Life: Alyx.ДЇive years before the events of Half-Life 2, Alyx Vance is performing surveillance and recon in the Combine-controlled City 17. Looking for a VR headset for Half-Life: Alyx? Wondering if your GPU is up to the challenge? We've got you covered.

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