Half Life 2 Final Boss

1. Half Life 2 Episode 2 Walkthrough
2. Half Life Nihilanth

The Final Boss of the first game, the Nihilanth, is a spectacular example. Not only does its death cause the collapse of the chamber in which the player fights it, again escape only possible due to the GMan. The game is estimated to have cost 40 million dollars to produce. As revealed by the coffee table book Half Life 2: Raising the Bar, Half-Life 2 was originally intended to be a much darker, grittier experience where the Combine are more evidently draining the Earth's resources and eliminating the surviving citizen population. I just beat half life 1 and chose not to enter g-man's portal, instead I chose to take the fight. When I chose to take the fight it teleported me to another planet then teleported me again just to a black screen. After this it showed the end credits and all of the people who worked on the game without letting me fight the final boss.

The Nihilanth is the leader of the Xen military forces that invade Black Mesa during the Black Mesa Incident. It acts as the primary antagonist and the final boss in Half-Life.

• 3Appearances
• 6List of appearances

Overview[edit]

The Nihilanth is a massive, floating being that resembles an abnormally proportioned humanoid fetus, with a large head atop a smaller body. It shares many physical traits with other intelligent Xen life forms, especially with the Alien Controllers, and is related to the Vortigaunts, as indicated by their vestigial chest-arms, which is why it had a particular ability to control them.^[2] It also wears shackles similar to those worn by enslaved Vortigaunts. The Nihilanth's body features what appears to be the remains of some sort of surgical procedure, and its minuscule legs appear to be either vestigial or the remains of amputation.

Some of its backstory was revealed in a series of conversations with the developers. According to Doug Lombardi (restating something that was told to him by Marc Laidlaw), the Nihilanth's homeworld was invaded by the Combine long before the events of Half-Life, prompting the migration and takeover of Xen by the Nihilanth.^[3] It was also said the Nihilanth, the Vortigaunts, and the Alien Grunts were all from the same world.^[2]

Behavior and skills[edit]

The Nihilanth appears to be floating in a meditation pose. It has two attack moves. The first attack is a stream of purple-colored energy projectiles, similar to the Alien Controller's fireballs, but stronger. The second attack is a large green sphere that teleports the player to other areas populated with aliens. These spheres can be destroyed by the player. The Nihilanth can also summon Vortigaunts and Alien Controllers for help in the battle.

A series of orange-colored 'energy spheres' orbit around the Nihilanth's head, and provide it with energy. It uses this energy to protect itself from harm and to attack the player. When this energy runs low (after being attacked by the player), the Nihilanth replenishes the spheres by absorbing energy from one of the crystals in the chamber.

When the crystals are destroyed, the Nihilanth becomes vulnerable, and its head opens up like a flower after some time, revealing a large energy sphere atop a fleshy prong inside his head, which is its only weak spot. Eventually, the Nihilanth floats up with beams and green spheres coming out of its body and dies in a massive green explosion.

Appearances[edit]

Half-Life[edit]

The scientists suspect there is an immense portal at the borderworld, created by the intense concentration of a single powerful being. Gordon Freeman is sent to kill the Nihilanth to stop the invasion, and close the dimensional rift between the worlds. The Nihilanth regularly contacts Gordon telepathically and speaks to him in English in Xen.

Decay[edit]

Dr. Richard Keller thinks that something is interfering from the other side of the rift, when Dr. Gina Cross and Dr. Colette Green attempt to reset the dampening fields to prevent another cascade. Keller says whatever held the rift open did so with intent, and aliens may not all be here by accident. Furthermore, in the bonus chapter Xen Attacks, the Nihilanth sends two Vortigaunts, drone subjects X-8973 and R-4913, to retrieve several stolen Xen crystals.

Half-Life 2[edit]

The Nihilanth is mentioned by Vortigaunts throughout the game in random conversations. It is revealed through these messages that the Vortigaunts see Gordon as a messianic figure after he liberates them by killing the Nihilanth. This is also the only in-game instance in the series where the Nihilanth's name is mentioned by the characters.

Behind the scenes[edit]

The Nihilanth's design was influenced by the horror aspects of pregnancy and childbirth, to which Valve turned after being inspired by the birth of Gray Newell, Gabe Newell's son.^[4]Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar states that the first part of the Nihilanth's name references nihilism (from the Latin nihil, meaning nothing), while -anth is a common suffix that is related to flowers and is a reference to how his scalp peels open like a blossom.^[1] Marc Laidlaw admitted that he came up with this name at the last minute.^[5]Michael Shapiro is uncredited to the Nihilanth's voice. However, it can be verified by listening to the Nihilanth's speech sounds and by changing the speed of its grunting sounds.

Although in an e-mail conversation with a fan, Marc Laidlaw said that the Nihilanth was last of its kind, and some of its predecessors might have been captured by the Combine,^[6] he later commented that 'there was only one Nihilanth.'^[7] He eventually gave no definite answer, stating that he 'could be wrong' about revising his words as 'apparently in the games there are references to more than one.'^[8]

Gallery[edit]

• Concept art.

• The Nihilanth.

• The revealed energy sphere inside its head.

• The Nihilanth is defeated.

List of appearances[edit]

Main games[edit]

• Half-Life(First appearance)
• Half-Life: Decay(Mentioned only)(Heard only)
• Half-Life 2(Mentioned only)

Other[edit]

References[edit]

1. ↑ ^1.01.1Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, page 28
2. ↑ ^2.02.1Marc Laidlaw on the Vortiaunt slaves (unverified)
3. ↑PC Zone magazine, September 2005
4. ↑Meet Gabe Newell's Son on YouTube
5. ↑'The Nihilanth will never be a meme to me. (It'll always be a name I made up at the last minute for an unfinished boss.)' @marc_laidlaw on Twitter (August 19, 2017)
6. ↑Marc Laidlaw on the Nihilanth (unverified)
7. ↑'There was only one Nihilanth.' @marc_laidlaw on Twitter (August 15, 2017)
8. ↑'Apparently in the games there are references to more than one, so I could be wrong.' @marc_laidlaw on Twitter (August 20, 2017)

The Orange Box 10th Anniversary

Our other anniversary pieces:
- Valve interview
- The Orange Box review from 2007
- How TF2 changed FPSes
- Portal and the cake meme

Half Life 2 Episode 2 Walkthrough

Ten years. It almost doesn’t seem that long since we left Gordon Freeman in the ashes of a dead world, frozen in time with increasingly little chance of the enigmatic G-Man showing up to conclude business. The promise of Half-Life: Episode Three never really died, kept alive by jokes and hopes and increasingly desperate attempts to see a ‘3’ even hinted in anything Valve did.

Going back to Episode Two though, it’s not too surprising. The industry’s brief fascination with episodic content was a bad idea for basically everyone not called Telltale, which approached it by carefully working out pipelines for content and limited and games where one team could be working on one episode while another team did the prep-work for the next, allowing games within a couple of months. Valve, like Ritual with SiN: Episodes, was effectively looking at a new game every time, each time having to be bigger and better for a likely diminishing playerbase.

Even by 2007, and upgraded over the years with effects like HDR lighting and improved models, the Source engine was starting to creak. Tech aside, the Half-Life 2 world that had looked so real back in 2004 now felt distinctly blocky retrograde in the wake of games like BioShock and Crysis and Call of Duty 4, which, yes, was a very different style, but took shooter set-pieces to crazy levels of polish and inspiration. For Half-Life to continue as a blockbuster, it had to take that generational leap again, and at this point Valve was already turning its attention elsewhere. Soon it was too late. It could risk leaving a gaming generation blueballed over a sequel (and of course the lady equivalent!). It couldn’t so easily risk a Half-Life that didn’t set the world on fire, and it wasn’t long before it was hard to imagine what Episode Three versus a full sequel could realistically do.

That’s not to dismiss Episode 2, though. Like the best DLC/add-ons, Valve treated the Episodes not just as more Half-Life 2, but a way of exploring the potential of the game and expand what that actually meant. Episode 1 for instance reversed the order that you got the weapons, cranked up the feel of City 17 being under siege and playing your part in a warzone, and focused on the team-up of Gordon and Alyx Vance, after the largely solitary travels of Half-Life 2 proper.

The keyword of Episode Two was ‘freedom’. Kinda. To a point. It certainly wasn’t a game like, say, STALKER, where you could head off in whatever direction you wanted and fight the evil Combine. The path through the game was linear. However, it was also considerably wider, giving you a car and moving out of caves and streets and other very controlled areas to the relatively open roads of the White Forest and its abandoned houses and waypoints. One of its best set-pieces involves defending an empty inn from attack by both regular troops and the game’s new Hunter enemies, and running around from window to window to take on the attackers as they break down the doors and try to swarm you. It’s an open combat environment that feels like a carefully laid trap by the enemies rather than simply holding out against waves, as with a remarkably tedious antlion fight earlier, where you’re running upstairs to shoot out of windows and then back down as guys burst in, and otherwise trying to watch your flanks like an actual guerrilla warfare situation.

The thing is that replaying the game, despite having fond memories of wandering around the countryside and so on, the road trip is only about an hour of its running time. The first part is all underground, in a tedious trek through a maze of antlion tunnels, and just as you’re starting to enjoy the driving around, it’s over, give or take some conversations with NPCs that definitely didn’t drag on this much in 2004-2007 and can’t be sped up no matter how much junk you throw in their faces with the gravity gun (still, incidentally, one of the greatest weapons ever invented).

Only then do you get another taste of freedom with the final boss—another non-linear base defence bit, this time involving a car, attacking Striders, and the expansions’ one new weapon—a bomb created by new character (but old Black Mesa scientist) Magnusson. It’s a fun, tense standoff that certainly beats the heck out of fighting Nihilanth in the first game, or the dark matter Skeeball that ended Half-Life 2, but it’s also over pretty quickly. Like so much of the episode, the openness feels transitionary—the acceptance that Half-Life needed to grow into something new and the realisation that the tricks that were so cool in 2004 were wearing thin. Even then it gets some fun use out of physics, like smashing open a door with a carefully positioned cart, but still.

It remains a fun enough shooter, but the reality versus the memory is definitely unsatisfying. It doesn’t help that it’s the middle part of a trilogy, and in Empire Strikes Back fashion, one that exists primarily to set up the finale. Emotionally, it ends on a low, with a big win for our heroes, but the brutal murder of a major character right in front of both Gordon and Alyx. The job isn’t just unfinished, it’s unfinished leaving at least one big maggot-shaped alien needing a kicking.

Luckily, we now have at least some idea of how things would have gone, courtesy of writer Marc Laidlaw’s 'Epistle 3'. This not-exactly-coded ‘fanfic’ took the form of a letter from one 'Gertie Fremont' to find a ship called the 'Hyperborea' in the Antarctic and defeat the evil 'Disparate', and tells of a last-ditch suicide mission to the heart of the alien menace, before loyal partner 'Alex Vaunt' gets whisked away by a mysterious suited presence and 'Gertie' is likewise pulled from the action by the not-Vortigaunts. In short, a more explosive cliffhanger, not a big series finale.

The challenge facing Episode 3

It’s important to note that even outside the tongue-in-cheek premise, Laidlaw wasn’t the only writer of the Episodes, no longer works for Valve, there were no doubt many revisions of the story (Laidlaw himself has said that ‘Like most things in the HL series, answers are developed strictly as needed’ —there is no official big secret to be revealed about, say, the identity of the G-Man) and it’s anyone’s guess how Episode Three would actually have played out. Still, it’s both more than we usually get when series fizzle out, and better than leaving Gordon staring at a corpse for all eternity.

Now, if some of this sounds harsh towards Episode Two, it’s largely in retrospect. At the time, even with its issues, it was an exciting step forward for the series and a fresh take on things. Half-Life 2 in all its forms is still stunningly playable for its age compared to most of its peers, helped by its commitment to staying within Gordon’s POV and its set-pieces typically flowing naturally and designed around the game rather than being a flashy background to climb over or simply witness. Episode Two was a great couple of hours of action, even if it was somewhat upstaged by the other parts of The Orange Box—Portal’s sheer novelty, and the beyond-wonderful early TF2.

There’s a reason that everyone wanted Episode Three so much, and it wasn’t just to see what happened next. While Episode Two wasn’t Valve’s best moment, it was Valve at its most exciting time creatively. The company that would do something like The Orange Box. The company that had overcome everyone’s early dislike of Steam to create a platform people actually wanted to use. The company that could do absolutely anything, make whatever game it wanted, and be guaranteed to deliver. The promise of Episode Three, much like Half-Life 2 before it, was that it could be anything but was sure to be great. And maybe the result could have lived up to that.

Half Life Nihilanth

Maybe. Or maybe not. We’ll never know for sure.

But at least we can savour what we actually got.

We’ll always have City 17.