Foundational FPS Half-Life and Platinum Games’ 2013 Metal Gear character action game, Rising: Revengeance go together like… huh, I actually never thought they go together like anything until now.
Komegatze (opens in new tab), an animator on the ambitious Half-Life: Alyx mod, Levitation (opens in new tab), recently flexed his artistic muscles to cross the sober, moody FPS with the bombastic cyborg ninja sim in a 40-second animation (opens in new tab). The video reinterprets the infamous end to MGRR’s tutorial boss (opens in new tab), where cyborg ninja Raiden flings a building-sized mecha into the air, slicing it to pieces before it can hit the ground.
Komegatze replaces classic video game twink Raiden with fiction’s deadliest PhD, Gordon Freeman, here chopping up one of Half-Life 2’s biomechanical Striders with his trusty crowbar. The whole thing is, naturally, accompanied by Jamie Christopherson’s iconic “Rules of Nature (opens in new tab)” from the Rising: Revengeance soundtrack.
All joking aside, it’s amazing to see how much the community of artists, modders, and jokesters surrounding Half-Life continues to breathe new life into the series, be it with serious endeavors like Levitation or top-shelf shitposts like this little number by Komegatze. Perhaps the real Episode Three was inside us all along.