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Although it didn’t have the player count of mods like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, The Specialists is still probably one of the most remembered and revered user-made games that graced the original Half-life. Its popularly wasn’t solely due to its nature as a crazy and intense deathmatch shooter, but also because it wholly encapsulated an entire subset of modern popular culture: the action movie. We’re not talking about just any movies with shooting or fighting, but rather the caricatured, stylized, hyperbolized action of The Matrix, Die Hard, The Professional, and roughly the entire film libraries of Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Woo.
While The Specialists undoubtedly pays tribute to an entire genre, The Matrix was clearly the primary influence. The game features three Matrix-themed maps (lobby, dojo and chateau) and two Matrix-themed player models (“laurence” and “agent”). Six of the seven weapons featured in the movie’s famous lobby fight are included, and in addition to dives and somersaults, players can execute Neo’s miraculous standing dodge featured in the movie trailer.
Yet perhaps the biggest homage The Specialists pays to The Matrix was its inclusion of slow motion. This was what set it apart from Action Half-Life and The Opera, the other two action movie-themed Half-Life mods. The Specialists beat these two mods at their own game despite being last on the scene, but ironically, this may have precisely been its advantage. Development of the other two began long before The Matrix hit theaters, so it was not yet part of the canon they sought to embody. The Specialists didn’t come out until 2002 -- by then, The Matrix had already made a lasting impact on popular culture, arguably becoming the action genre’s new standard of excellence.
Speaking more conceptually, The Specialists strove to capture the action movie’s combination of aesthetic realism -- real weapons, real places and real people -- with theatrical and fantastical heroics. Such heroics emphasized the body’s capacity for acrobatic evasion, as well as the hero’s ability to prevail in gun battles even when drastically outnumbered, often because of his or her extensive training as some sort of “specialist.” In mechanical terms, this was articulated through the game’s systems of stunts (somersaults and dives) and slow motion.
Slow motion was undoubtedly the game’s most ambitious feature, even though it wasn’t the first time it existed in a video game. Max Payne had been released a year prior to the first version of The Specialists, and Rare’s Perfect Dark was released two years earlier (but its usage was rather insignificant). The Specialists, however, was the first online multiplayer game to include slow motion as a major feature, defying many people’s perceptions and expectations that it could not work in a multiplayer environment.
Slow motion in action movies is meant to convey a superior situational awareness exclusive to the hero, which allows him or her to aim and evade better under stress than his or her enemies. Having one player in real time and another in slow motion is an impossibility in a multiplayer game, while bestowing the power upon both seems to undermine the intention behind it in the first place. The Specialists tried to solve this problem by putting every player in slow motion, but allowing the player who activated it (acquired as a power-up, much in the way one would pick up Quad Damage in Quake) to aim at real-time speed.
In practice, using slow motion often meant a free kill or two for the person activating it, which was fair enough when it was acquired as a power-up. However, it was also doled out as a reward for each kill (one second per kill, with a maximum stock of three), and this was a feature I never agreed with. It had the unfortunate effect of letting players replenish their slow motion with relative impunity simply by using their currently stocked slow motion. It’s not a game breaker, but it should have been left as a power-up.
The Specialists had a few other noteworthy features. Unlike its predecessors, it sought to better capture the martial arts component of action movies with a more developed melee system that allowed punches, kicks and disarming. The implementation was successful, and consequently, melee was a much bigger part of The Specialists than it normally is in first-person shooters. The overall power it afforded and the ability to knock weapons out of players hands made it a completely viable option, and many players managed to do quite well using it exclusively. The game even included a third-person camera that could be toggled at will (a rarity for a Half-Life mod), which was implemented for many reasons, among them to better accommodate melee.
It also featured an arsenal of thirty different weapons and an attachment customization system that seems like a precursor to Call of Duty’s. Most of the game’s guns could be outfitted with any combination of silencers, flashlights, scopes and lasersights, though the effects are mostly cosmetic. In keeping with the game’s theme, there are no laser guns or rocket launchers here, just ordinary ballistic weapons, including the Desert Eagle, the M16, and the AK47, the three most iconic guns in popular culture. The rest are similar contemporary weapons, many of which have also been featured in action movies but are simply less recognizable. The most eye-catching of these is Castor Troy’s Golden Colt 1911, which can only be used as a dual wield.
The Specialists was first released in 2002, and the last version was released in June of 2007. The official website has been defunct since 2009, but the game is still available for download from Mod DB. Needless to say, the game’s best days are long past, like just about all of the gaming relics in Half-Life’s mod history. There are one or two dozen servers still up, but the ones with any activity are usually zombie or roleplaying custom games, which involve little player-versus-player fragging.
The Specialists achieved mild success in part because of the cultural resonance it had with players. The following killstreak message always made me smile, reaffirming my fondness for the game in spite of any misgivings I have about it:
Player Radical Dreamer eats green berets for breakfast!
Unlike some of those other relics, The Specialists at least has the luxury of being remembered by some. And occasionally, it’s still possible to get a game in.
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