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G-Man (Half-Life)
The G-Man is a mysterious recurring character and one of the main antagonists in the ''Half-Life'' series of first-person shooter video games. Described as a "sinister, interdimensional bureaucrat", he is known to display peculiar behavior and capabilities beyond those of normal humans. Throughout the story of the ''Half-Life'' series, the G-Man plays the role of an overseer and employer: he navigates player-character Gordon Freeman's insertion to, or extraction from, the game-world on several occasions, and his monologues with Freeman reveal his importance to the series' overall narrative. He claims to answer to some unseen higher authority, to which he refers as his "employers". His mysterious nature has made him an icon of the ''Half-Life'' series, with his identity and motives remaining almost completely unexplained. Concept and creation The G-Man's name comes from "G-man", an American colloquialism meaning "government man". However, within the ''Half-Life'' games, he is ide ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Half-Life (series)
''Half-Life'' is a series of first-person shooter (FPS) games developed and published by Valve. The games combine shooting combat, puzzles and storytelling. The original ''Half-Life,'' Valve's first product, was released in 1998 for Windows to critical and commercial success. Players control Gordon Freeman, a scientist who must survive an alien invasion. The innovative scripted sequences were influential on the FPS genre, and the game inspired numerous community-developed mods, including the multiplayer games ''Counter-Strike'' and ''Day of Defeat''. ''Half-Life'' was followed by the expansions ''Opposing Force'' (1999), ''Blue Shift'' (2001) and ''Decay'' (2001), developed by Gearbox Software. In 2004, Valve released ''Half-Life 2'' to further success, with a new setting and characters and physics-based gameplay. It was followed by the extra level ''Lost Coast'' (2005) and the episodic sequels '' Episode One'' (2006) and '' Episode Two'' (2007). The first game in the ''Port ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sibilant Consonant
Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and Fundamental frequency, pitch, made by manner of articulation, directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English language, English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ''genre''. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet used to denote the sibilant sounds in these words are, respectively, . Sibilants have a characteristically intense sound, which accounts for their Paralanguage, paralinguistic use in getting one's attention (e.g. calling someone using "psst!" or quieting someone using "shhhh!"). In the hissing sibilants and , the back of the tongue forms a narrow channel (is ''sulcalization, grooved'') to focus the stream of air more intensely, resulting in a high pitch. With the hushing sibilants (occasionally termed ''shibilants''), such as English , , , and , the tongue is flatter, and the resulting pitch lower. A broader cate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Garry's Mod
''Garry's Mod'' is a 2006 sandbox game developed by Facepunch Studios and published by Valve. The base game mode of ''Garry's Mod'' has no set objectives and provides the player with a world in which to freely manipulate objects. Other game modes, notably ''Trouble in Terrorist Town'' and ''Prop Hunt'', are created by other developers as mods and are installed separately, by means such as the Steam Workshop. ''Garry's Mod'' was created by Garry Newman as a mod for Valve's Source game engine and released in December 2004, before being expanded into a standalone release that was published by Valve in November 2006. Ports of the original Windows version for Mac OS X and Linux followed in September 2010 and June 2013, respectively. As of September 2021, ''Garry's Mod'' has sold more than 20 million copies. Gameplay ''Garry's Mod'' is a physics-based sandbox game that, in its base game mode, has no set objectives. The player is able to spawn non-player characters, ragd ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GameDaily
GameDaily (GD) was a video game journalism website based in the United States. It was launched in 1995 by entrepreneur Mark Friedler under the name Gigex and focused on free game demo downloads. The site changed its business model from a flat fee per download CDN distributed service network to an advertising-based games content portal, content syndication and vertical ad network. The site also operated business news service GameDaily Biz. The network grew to the number one position in ComScore's Games/Gaming Information category in March 2005 and was acquired by AOL on August 16, 2006. The site offered articles on different video game topics, with many game rankings lists. In 2011, the GameDaily brand was retired. Its staff and content were merged with ''Joystiq ''Joystiq'' was a video gaming blog founded in June 2004 as part of the Weblogs, Inc. family of weblogs, now owned by AOL. It was AOL's primary video game blog, with sister blogs dealing with MMORPG gaming in general ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hypnosis
Hypnosis is a human condition involving focused attention (the selective attention/selective inattention hypothesis, SASI), reduced peripheral awareness, and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion.In 2015, the American Psychological Association Division 30 defined hypnosis as a "state of consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness characterized by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion". For critical commentary on this definition, see: There are competing theories explaining hypnosis and related phenomena. ''Altered state'' theories see hypnosis as an altered state of mind or trance, marked by a level of awareness different from the ordinary Consciousness, state of consciousness. In contrast, ''non-state'' theories see hypnosis as, variously, a type of placebo effect,Kirsch, I., "Clinical Hypnosis as a Nondeceptive Placebo", pp. 211–25 in Kirsch, I., Capafons, A., Cardeña-Buelna, E., Amigó, S. (eds.), ''Clinical Hypnosis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teleportation
Teleportation is the hypothetical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. It is a common subject in science fiction literature and in other popular culture. Teleportation is often paired with time travel, being that the travelling between the two points takes an unknown period of time, sometimes being immediate. An apport is a similar phenomenon featured in parapsychology and spiritualism. There is no known physical mechanism that would allow for teleportation. Frequently appearing scientific papers and media articles with the term ''teleportation'' typically report on so-called " quantum teleportation", a scheme for information transfer which, due to the no-communication theorem, still would not allow for faster-than-light communication. Etymology The use of the term ''teleport'' to describe the hypothetical movement of material objects between one place and another without physically traversing the distance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nuclear Warhead
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. The first test of a fission ("atomic") bomb released an amount of energy approximately equal to . The first thermonuclear ("hydrogen") bomb test released energy approximately equal to . Nuclear bombs have had yields between 10 tons TNT (the W54) and 50 megatons for the Tsar Bomba (see TNT equivalent). A thermonuclear weapon weighing as little as can release energy equal to more than . A nuclear device no larger than a conventional bomb can devastate an entire city by blast, fire, and radiation. Since they are weapons of mass destruction, the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a focus of international relations policy. Nuclear weapons have been deployed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cellular Phones
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture and, therefore, mobile telephones are called ''cellular telephones'' or ''cell phones'' in North America. In addition to telephony, digital mobile phones ( 2G) support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, multimedia messagIng, email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications (infrared, Bluetooth), business applications, video games and digital photography. Mobile phones offering only those capabilities are known as featur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Black Mesa Research Facility
The Black Mesa Research Facility (also simply called Black Mesa) is a fictional underground laboratory complex that serves as the primary setting for the video game ''Half-Life'' and its expansions, as well as its remake, '' Black Mesa''. It also features in the wider ''Half-Life'' universe, including the ''Portal'' series. Located in the New Mexico desert in a decommissioned Cold War missile site, it is the former employer of ''Half-Life'''s protagonist, Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist, and a competitor of Aperture Science. While the facility ostensibly conducts military-industrial research, its secret experiments into teleportation have caused it to make contact with the alien world of Xen, and its scientists covertly study its life-forms and materials. An "anti-mass spectrometer" experiment conducted on Xen matter causes a Resonance Cascade disaster that allows aliens to invade Earth, and is the catalyst for the events of the series. ''Half-Life'' was critically ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parallel Universe (fiction)
A parallel universe, also known as a parallel dimension, alternate universe, or alternate reality, is a hypothetical self-contained plane of existence, co-existing with one's own. The sum of all potential parallel universes that constitute reality is often called a "multiverse". While the four terms are generally synonymous and can be used interchangeably in most cases, there is sometimes an additional connotation implied with the term "alternate universe/reality" that implies that the reality is a variant of our own, with some overlap with the similarly named alternate history. Fiction has long borrowed an idea of "another world" from mythology, myth, legend and religion. Heaven, Hell, Twelve Olympians, Olympus, and Valhalla are all "alternative universes" different from the familiar material realm. Plato reflected deeply on the parallel realities, resulting in Platonism, in which the upper reality is perfect while the lower earthly reality is an imperfect shadow of the heavenly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alyx Vance
Alyx Vance is a fictional character from Valve Corporation, Valve's ''Half-Life (series), Half-Life'' video game series. She is introduced as a non-playable, supporting character in ''Half-Life 2'' (2004), accompanying the player's character, Gordon Freeman, throughout much of the game. She subsequently appears in a similar capacity in ''Half-Life 2: Episode One'' (2006) and ''Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Episode Two'' (2007), and as the titular protagonist of the Virtual reality game, VR game ''Half-Life: Alyx'' (2020). Alyx is portrayed as a young woman in her mid-twenties of Afro-Asian descent, and is a prominent figure in the human resistance against the rule of the alien empire called the Combine (Half-Life), Combine and their human representative, Characters of Half-Life#Wallace Breen, Dr. Wallace Breen. She is the daughter of resistance leader Dr. Eli Vance, and becomes a close friend and ally of Gordon. She received highly positive reviews from critics. Character design A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
