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Released in November 1998, Half-Life used a heavily modified Quake engine to create a very immersive 3D FPS experience. Gordon Freeman heads to work at the Black Mesa research facility for what should be a normal day, but an experiment goes horribly wrong and a portal to another world opens.

 

Timing note: A penalty of half a second is added to the time for each demo recorded beyond the first. This is because the engine cuts out around 0.2 seconds on the start of every new demo, and to discourage using a large number of demos.

Runs on default versions:

Runs using the HLSP Bunny mod:

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Hard mode with scripts 0:31:00 by Blake Piepho, done in 180 segments appended to one file. Original demo files also available. External audio commentary is available in a .mp3 file.

Author's comments:

First off, let me tell you this is a temporary brief set of comments, I will have much better ones with lots of detail up here probably by august, 2007.

This is my first and only segmented Half-Life speedrun. I had the idea for this in year 2000, started working on it in 2003, and completed it in October 2006.

This run was done through many small segments in aim of achieving a high level of perfection. The final time from start to the death blow on Nihilanth is 29:41.

I have to give a big thanks to people that made a segmented Half-Life run before me, these people are Radon (-think.circle-), Dopefish, and RandomEngy. I'd also like to thank RandomEngy for capturing the video and his video editing support.

I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to link and tell your friends about it.

Single-segment with HLSP Bunny 1:00:33 by Blake Piepho. Demo was captured to avi and compressed to a 320x240 and 640x480 version. The original demo file is available as well, but will only play in Half-Life v1.1.2.0.

Author's comments:

First off I'd like to give big thank you to RandomEngy for making the avi from my demo; he also gave me advice and support throughout the making of this run.

This run was quite an endeavor which turned out to be much harder than I had first anticipated. When it was all said and done I had spent roughly 4-5 hours a day for 3 weeks working on this. I am very satisfied with the completed result.

I think this run went a bit faster than my average run attempt. There were some delays which I rarely did but also some extra shortcuts which I rarely did in my many failed attempts.

I had really rough start health wise in this run, but recovered mostly by the part where you get mugged. At the start of "We've Got Hostiles" I had only had 13 armor which was very low for this point, typically I would have around 40 armor which was very consistent, and thus the run was flukishly low on armor at this point. After armoring up, shortly after blasting 3-arms I only had 82 armor; which was very rare, I had 100 armor at this point on virtually every other run attempt, but this was still ok, it was in the events to come that I would almost doom myself. In the electric water part I had the map load right when I landed in the water, this makes you lose an extra 22 armor. At about 18:50 my computer started chunking massively causing me run onto the electric rail and get hit my alien slave, the demo is also chunky at this point. Fortunately it only lasted for about 10 seconds. At 19:20 I only had 35 armor after using the armor dispenser, normally I would have 90-100 armor at this point. At 19:44 I hit a trip mine, only the second time I ever hit a trip mine in my many attempts. This took me down to 40|0 which is extremely low health for this point and I was considering restarting the run for I had little hope to make it through the next parts, but I decided to continue.

At 22:55 I decided to take a small detour to get an extra 10 armor (which turned out to only be an extra 5 because of the water worms) because I never been at this low on armor before and wanted to play it safe. This is something I regret doing now. I would go on to finish the rest of the level strong, only taking 1 alien slave hit and no hits from the spies, salvaging my yearly misfortunes, and finishing up apprehension with 79 armor.

At 28:20 I had an unusual mistake in falling off the conveyor belt but it was only about a 12 second delay. At 29:47 I snuck up on a guard and grabbed him before he could see me, otherwise you have wait for him to finish a long speech for you have grab him. At 30:35 I lost 40 armor to my own grenade launcher shot, which is somewhat BS and sucks a lot. I made this up by doing the rest of questionable ethics quite nicely; this was one of my best jobs on this level. In the 34:00-34:50 part I hid from the helicopter a lot because if you're out in the open when it's out it will do insane damage to you.

I am very happy with the way everything went up to 41:00; I barely missed an air boost jump here that ended up costing me 15 seconds. At 42:15, since I had so much armor and still 1 more trip mine, both of which I didn't normally have, I was able to do a small shortcut which I very rarely got to do. At 43:50 since I had so much armor still, I decided to let some of the head crabs damage it while I had some free health you use. At 44:45 I went to the room with head crabs to get rid of my armor for a grenade jump coming up. The amount of boost you get from an explosive it proportional to the health you lose, so armor will make you lose much less health and thus much less boost. I accidentally took a little too much damage from the head crabs so I had to take a small detour to get more health.

Everything went pretty nicely up until 52:40, at which point Gonarch went insane and demanding that I do an insane amount of damage to him before he would continue. But I managed to salvage the situation losing little armor and only cells. At 55:40 I had a very high amount of armor so I didn't have to take a 30 second detour to get more. Everything went very well up to 57:50, which is important because the part starting at 57:50 is by far and away the hardest part in the game to go fast through. Here I go all out using the egon weapon wildly; doing anything I can to prevent damage. At 58:12, since I still had 74 armor, I decided to mulch through the rest of level, which is what I ideally had planned to do, but 74 armor is a luxury you can't count on. I made it to Nihilanth with 26 armor, which would mean only a large blast from Nihilanth himself would kill me. I am very pleased with the way Nihilanth went, the only thing that really could have been much faster would have been dropping down and going for the kill sooner, before his head opened up, but I didn't want to take this risk.

Overall I'm quite satisfied with the final result, and don't plan on doing anymore HL marathon runs. However, I still have plans to do a segmented run, teaming up with some other HL runners. Stay tuned for when this run hits the shelves, I'm expecting a time between 38 and 39 minutes!

Hazard Course in 0:03:10 by Blake Piepho. Demo was captured to avi and compressed to a 320x240 and 1024x768 version. The original demo file is available as well, but will only play in Half-Life v1.1.2.0.

Author's comments:

I'm pretty satisfied with this run, largest mistake being at the longjump over the large box, perhaps 3 seconds lost there.

Hazard Course with HLSP Bunny in 0:03:05 by Blake Piepho. Demo was captured to avi and compressed to a 320x240 and 1024x768 version. The original demo file is available as well, but will only play in Half-Life v1.1.2.0.

Author's comments:

There were some mistakes, namely at the jump around the elevator part, 3 seconds lost. I went up too high on the last ladder, didn't trigger new level to load in the water as fast as you can do it, and messed up the jump over the large crate you're supposed to break. So there were about 7 seconds lost in all. However, I think a lot of things I did pretty fast so this run would be hard for me to improve much.

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