(IDG) -- Valve Software's classic PC game is getting a serious dressing up. After selling millions of copies worldwide and garnering massive critical acclaim, the time has come for the game that turned the first person shooter genre on its ear to come home to console systems. Randy Pitchford, one of the owners of Gearbox Software sat down with GamePro's Dan Elektro to dish on the upcoming port of Half-Life for Playstation2 and the two separate Half Life Dreamcast games that are being put together. There have been significant changes made in the game for both platforms, but from the way things seem to be shaping up, both PS2 and Dreamcast gamers have a lot to look forward to when Half-Life makes the move from the PC. Better graphics with more detailed character models, new storylines, and a host of other surprises are in the mix, so strap yourselves in!

Dan Elektro: The upcoming Dreamcast version of Half-Life has the original game plus the new Blue Shift story. What will be in the PS2 version? Multiplayer with bots? TF? Split screen? Opposing Force? Mods? It's too early in the lifecycle to support online components on PS2, right?

Randy Pitchford: Just as Half-Life redefined the first person action game, Half-Life for Dreamcast redefines what an extension of a great PC game to console should be. Half-Life for Dreamcast offers enhanced game characters with more detail than ever before and includes an entirely new episode in the Half-Life saga - Half-Life: Blue Shift.

We hope that in enough time before we're due to launch, the PS2's planned on-line capabilities succeed because we'd love to take advantage of that as well.

Dan Elektro: Will the PS2 version ship on DVD? If so, is it a storage choice or a performance choice?

Randy Pitchford: This still hasn't been determined, but we could probably use the extra space the DVD offers.

Dan Elektro: Will you support USB mouse and keyboard on the PS2?

Randy Pitchford: This already is in the game and works great. Of course, we try to force ourselves to use the controller more than a mouse and keyboard combo because we're already so familiar with the PC interface and want to make sure the controller is very fun to play with.

Dan Elektro: What makes the PS2 an attractive platform for Half-Life?

Otherwise, the PS2 itself is a remarkable computer and has the horsepower to allow us to do some incredible things like increase the detail of the scientist character to the point where he has facial expressions and can move his eyes to look around. Those kinds of things permeate Half-Life for PS2 and the ability to do those things was a factor in the decision to bring the game to the platform.

Dan Elektro: Why PS2 over PS one? N64? Why not focus on the DC, for that matter, and be done with it?

Randy Pitchford: Half-Life needs next generation hardware to thrive. The philosophy at Valve and Gearbox is that if things can't be done better, they shouldn't be done at all. The Dreamcast version of Half-Life is great - it looks better than the original PC version and it's the only way console owners can enjoy Half-Life: Blue Shift. But the PS2 version is incredible. The Playstation2 technically outperforms the Sega Dreamcast and we take advantage of the fact in the PS2 version at every turn.

Dan Elektro: What about Half-Life makes it appealing to a console audience? Will they care, since the PC game has been out for so long?

Randy Pitchford: Good entertainment is always welcome. Half-Life has been enjoyed by more than 2 million people worldwide on the PC - and those are great numbers on that platform. But, there are a very large number of console-only game players that have been looking forward to Half-Life coming to a platform that's affordable to them. We're very proud to bring the game to as many players as possible and want to reward them with an unprecedented experience.


{From Dreamcast Magazine}

Don't like PC conversions? well it's time to stop complaining. the finest PC game ever made is coming to dreamcast, and STEVE OWEN couldn't be more excited!

9 Aug 01: Christmas 1998 will be forever etched on my brain. I couldn't tell you whether my sister got her pony or not. Perhaps there was a James Bond film on ITV. Maybe The Two Ronnies were still celebrating 20 years of themselves some 30 years after they first appeared. I couldn't tell you, because I'd been sitting in front of my PC for the previous fortnight making my way through what is still the finest game ever produced - Half-Life.

Some might say that honour belongs to Zelda, others would opt for Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil. But nothing has ever come close to the unparalleled joy and wondrousness that is Half-Life. Until 18 months ago I was never able to categorically give the name of a favourite game - perhaps I'd go for Quake, maybe GoldenEye or possibly Super Mario Kart. I can't name a favourite film, book, TV show or band, and yet I am assured enough to name Half-Life as the finest, most astonishing, fantastic, brilliant game in the world. It's liberating.

I'm not the only person who has chosen it, either. More than 50 different publications or organisations throughout the world last year named Half-Life as The Game Of The Year, or in some cases The Best Game Of All Time.

And here's the really good bit: the Dreamcast version is nearly finished. Now, this isn't some half-baked port of a PC game, a process we're seeing perhaps a tad too often. No, Half-Life for Dreamcast is promising to be bigger, better and even more astounding, and we just can't wait to get our hands on it.

At a casual glance, Half-Life appears to just be another first-person shooter along the lines of Quake, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. Sure enough, the PC version was created using the same graphics engine (somewhat enhanced) as Quake II. But this is to ignore the reasons why Half-Life is so popular. While it does all take place in the first person (ie through the eyes of the main character), and you do shoot baddies with a range of fantastical weaponry, the pulse of Half-Life is the story - an engaging tale that leads you from one set piece to the next. If you try to just shoot your way through to the end then you're going to miss half of the game, most of the point and all the subtlety.

Half-Life is best described using a phrase that generally makes games critics like us shudder. It is an 'interactive movie'. Thankfully, in this case that isn't a marketing term used to indicate shoddy real-life videos directed by a programmer and starring the postman, but instead to suggest that the game has a strong narrative, a beginning, middle and end, a range of believable and original characters, pacing, surprises, set pieces, and that you genuinely do influence the outcome, rather than simply selecting one of two choices before being dragged back to the bit of story you were meant to go to in the first place.

Music plays its part too, and Half-Life's is amazing. There's nothing better than a creepy blast of strings hinting that something really bad is about to happen. And a lot of really bad things happen in Half-Life. No one wants to read a script before seeing a film, but if you simply must know something about what's going on we'd recommend a quick glance at the 'What's This? A Game With A Plot?' panel on the right.

MUCH IMPROVED
If you think that you might as well get the PC version rather than wait the final three or four months for the Dreamcast version, then you're missing a very important point. Half-Life on Dreamcast isn't just a straight conversion, but an entirely new game, greatly enhanced to make the most of Dreamcast's power.

'We didn't want to do a cheap port, where we just made sure that it works and everything else is the same,' explains Randy Pitchford, Director of Gearbox Software and producer of Half-Life for Dreamcast. 'Half-Life was one of the first games where every single moment was part of the story. It's not like old-school level-based games, where levels have nothing to do with each other - where you hit a switch, finish the level, get some stats and move on to the next one. In those ports you can throw any difficult levels away and build some new ones in their place and it doesn't change the plot at all. We couldn't do that, so we had to decide where to change the game without affecting the plot or disrupting the universe. We're leaving the game the same as it was. It's just going to look better than it's ever looked before.'

Gearbox Software, a fairly new company, are just one of four companies involved in the creation of Half-Life on the Dreamcast. Previously they created the highly regarded Opposing Forces add-on for the original Half-Life, and many of the team worked for 3D Realms and created Duke Nukem 3D on PC and its many console spin-offs.

Gearbox are a team of designers, so they've passed much of the technical work to Captivation. 'Captivation were the original team that worked with Sega to generate the demos to show to developers when Dreamcast was first revealed,' Pitchford explains. 'They know the hardware inside out. When we were first deciding who to get to work on the technology, we asked around and Captivation was the name that came up again and again. There are three or four engineers who are just spending all their time optimising the code for Dreamcast.


Get a life? Get Half-Life! STEVE OWEN checks the progress of the highly anticipated PC conversion

9 Aug 01: Half-Life. Two years on, and it's probably still the PC's best game. Two years on, and it's about to make its console debut. And it will be good. It won't just be God that is pleased. If you've never played, seen or even heard of the game then you are in for the fright and the surprise of your life, because Half-Life really is the Holy Grail of Gaming. It deserves the following moniker more than anything that has gone before it, even if the phrase has some ugly connotations: Half-Life is the first, the only, true Interactive Movie.

You will be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that it resembles a Quake clone - a first-person shooter where you run around imaginative alien landscapes shooting creatures with a variety of enticing weapons. Then you realise that this corresponds to about five per cent of the overall effect. That's like calling Die Hard an action film, and conveniently forgetting that it's Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, and the humour that made it great.

You see, Half-Life is a combination of the most astounding of factors, many of which have indeed been borrowed from Quake and science fiction and horror movies. But Hollywood is rightfully jealous that it's the relatively small group of developers called Valve that has created the amorphous, exquisitely directed whole that is Half-Life. It is a story game, interspersed with some wonderful action set-pieces, a few puzzles and truly evil characters, but more importantly making it perfectly obvious what is about to happen. Believe us when we say that scary moments are made that much more scary when you know they are just around the corner. The trick is that you just don't know what it is that's about to be really scary. Oh, you've got to play it.

AND WE HAVE
We can say this with some authority now, because we've been given a version of the game to play through this month. Right up until a week before deadline we were hoping that it would be a finished version, ready for review. But as the days slipped by we became increasingly aware that it just wasn't all in shape.

BUT WHAT THE HELL, WE SPENT HOURS PLAYING IT ANYWAY
When you start the game, you're given three options of where to head. PC owners will be familiar with two of them: the main game and the training ground. These two are linked, in that you play the game's main protagonist, the unlikely hero Gordon Freeman. The training ground is used to gain familiarity in using your HEV suit, protective clothing that also helps you jump further, sneak around silently, provide armour against the perils of any laboratory about to be ransacked by aliens, and to understand your heads-up display and how to use your weapons.

The main game starts deceptively slowly, a real film-opening technique of immersing you within the world, setting the scene, indirectly introducing your character and your job, and pointing out quite how far underground you are when the you-know-what hits the fan. You're just a modest scientist, sent to find and put on your suit, before finding your way to the science lab. Both the main game and the training level seem identical to their PC counterparts.

BLUE SHIFT
But the third option from the main screen is unique to the Dreamcast version. Dubbed Blue Shift, it's the same story but from the viewpoint of one of the many guards that patrol the Black Mesa Research Facility. Many of the timelines in this chapter cross over with the main game. Indeed, even as you pull up to your guard post in an automatic shuttle service, you see a separate shuttle bus trundle past carrying someone who looks much like Gordon Freeman from the game's cover image. Sure enough, were you to return to the opening sequence of the main story, you can see, through the eyes of Freeman, the very same guard knocking on a door.

This crossover has been retained throughout the chapter. While you don't actually interact with Freeman in Blue Shift, you often see him in the distance, going about his escaping and alien-annihilating business.

Blue Shift seems every bit as carefully constructed as the main game. The opening sequence is just as detailed and atmospheric. The first few challenges are familiar as you recover your uniform and sidearm (um, don't shoot the bloke in the armoury, although you're likely to be rather tempted). Scientists and colleagues can be overheard discussing the problems with some of the machinery that morning, adding to the feeling that something's bound to go horribly wrong.

And this is where Half-Life really works as a game, as a piece of unique entertainment. Anticipation is a great emotion and, combined with fear and surprise, the two stories really know how to play with your emotions. Playing Half-Life can be just as exhausting as ESPN International Track & Field (ODM #13, 8/10), for example.

YOU MUST LEARN CONTROL
Of course, the PC's mouse and keyboard combination lends itself very well to control of these games, and fortunately the Dreamcast's own combination of controllers will be available by the time the game is released. But one thing that we have learnt with this playtest is that Half-Life is better suited to the standard controller than, say, Quake III Arena is. Half-Life is less dependent on split-second reactions, certainly at the beginning, which means you should be perfectly adapted to the standard control mechanism before the game gets too difficult. If you've ever played GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, you'll be familiar with using the analogue controller to look around, the four main buttons to move, and the triggers and digital pad for shooting, jumping, ducking, opening doors and selecting weapons. It all starts to feel quite natural after about 30 minutes.


{From Computer and Videogames.com}

DC HALF-LIFE IN NON-MULTIPLAYER SHOCKER

Say it isn't so. Half-Life for Dreamcast will ship without full online play, and gamers will have to wait till next year for deathmatch. We wonder why…

Half-Life for Dreamcast will not be playable online when it first ships on November 22. Quel surprise. The multiplayer portion of the game "will be released at a later date" according to a PR rep this afternoon.

This situation has been in place for months, but Sierra hoped to have the multiplayer side of the game finished in time for launch. That's not the only thing holding up online play: strong rumour is suggesting Sega itself is having extreme difficulty getting the heavy service n to support shooters such as Half-Life and Quake 3 Arena as opposed to the relative simplicity of Chu-Chu Rocket! - up and running before the end of the year in Europe.Sega is expected to make an official comment on the situation extremely soon. In case you hadn't noticed, it's nearly October now guys...