User:Amitakartok

About me

Just another gamer. Played all HL titles extensively except Decay (I have the PC port but haven't played very much since it's too clumsy: go a few meters, switch character, go a few meters, switch back, repeat ad infinitum). Tactical preference:

• HL, BS and OF: sneak close then ambush. Preferably with shotgun. Possibly grenade, but they hear that and run for cover if I'm too close.
• HL2: if possible, snipe with crossbow/Magnum.

As you can see, my preference is inflicting as much pain as possible with as little damage to oneself as possible. In fact, in HL I end up never using any weapon except the shotgun's close-range stopping power. Yet again, I LOVE THE SHOTGUN!!!

Weapon recommendation per enemy in order to suffer the least damage:

HL

• Headcrab: anything goes, preferably ranged. Beretta is enough because of the ammo's plentyness.
• Zombie: run close, shotgun secondary fire, back off before it attacks.
• Vort: if close, shotgun. If far, short bursts from MP5/M16 and ducking behind cover when it attacks.
• Barnacle: don't go underneath, just shoot it. Beretta is good.
• Houndeye: shotgun before it discharges, alternatively run away until it discharges then close in again.
• Controller: Magnum or Tau Cannon primary fire while dodging. 'Nuff said.
• Grunt: treat like Vorts, except that they require sec. fire from shotgun. If applicable, take it out from outside it's range. If not, rifle grenade or tripmine.
• Snark: run away until it expires.
• Soldier: ambush with shotgun or crossbow sniping. Magnum also works, since they run away when they are severely wounded (or if they see/hear a grenade going their way).
• Black Ops (female): crossbow rules. Since they come in groups, killing one silently will not alert the others. If not applicable, try to lure them into a tripmine (you have to place them out of sight or they jump over it).
• Black Ops (male): Desert Eagle is good, just watch out for grenades flying your way.
• Gonome: it will try to get in melee range while throwing stuff your way. Keep backing off and shoot it with shotgun sec. fire. If it stops and touches it's chest, strafe.
• Pit Drone: if they are far off, strafe and Desert Eagle. If close, back off to keep them from hitting you while staying close enough to prevent them from firing spikes. Shotgun.
• Shock Trooper: if you know where it will teleport in, drop a satchel charge, trigger the teleportation then BOOM!!! If you have a spore launcher, use primary fire since they run away from secondary (since it's technically a grenade).
• Shockroach: just run away until it expires.
• Voltigore: keep strafing. Their bolt attack hurts, so don't let them hit you. Don't let them close either since they explode when killed.

I don't play CS. I played a few times in school but my mates got pissed at me. Why? I compensated for my lack of reflexes by resorting to ambush tactics. Evening the scales, huh? Hey, it was supposed to be a tactical shooter, not Quake-in-Goldsource!

Fanfic

Currently I am writing a post-Ep3 crossover with Evangelion, my favorite anime. Basic premise: Black Mesa = Second Impact. For those not in the know, the titular Evas are humanoid lifeforms (technically the clones of an Angel) on about the same scale as the Nihilanth, outfitted with tons of cybernetic modifications to make them controllable. Essentially, they're manmade synths with a human crew. Thing is, most of those cybernetics are actually restraints to keep them from acting under their own accord as they extremely dislike their current state.

Plot additions

To make my story suitable for insertion into the HL universe, I made "some" additions:

• Humanity wasn't the first sentient race that developed on Earth. The Seraphim developed more than 200 million years earlier but were wiped out by the Combine who crashed a planetoid into Earth to exterminate them. This was First Impact, known to human science as the Permian-Triassic extinction event.
• Thanks to the interference of Vortigaunts on his behalf, Shephard is a main cast member. He didn't tell anyone that he took part in the Black Mesa cleanup and in fact spent the first five years of his freedom in a mental institute to readjust; upon leaving, he immediately enlisted to make sure something like Black Mesa never happens again. He married in 2026 and had a daughter next year but lost his wife in 2030 to a terrorist attack. He's currently a Lieutenant Colonel in the Confederate Armed Forces. Thanks to the stasis he was in after Black Mesa, he's physically 45 but he's actually 65; he knows this very well and lets his daughter do her military pursuits as a way of "passing the torch".
  • His little green friend from Black Mesa also survived and grew up. Only Asuka and Shephard knows what exactly Moses is but they don't mind; in fact, Shephard took him in as his aide.
• The G-Man is back and up to no good. I have my own theory about his identity and agenda, both will be revealed later. Turns out he's a good guy who was tricked out by his subordinates, so to speak; he's running a scenario involving humanity as a whole for his own ends.

• HEVs were manufactured using experimental nanotechnology, making them vastly superior to low-level transhumans; this technology has been lost in the Black Mesa Incident, making the three still-existing suits irreplacable. However, they were able to reverse-engineer it enough to create crude powered exoskeletons and later mechas. Power issues resulted in that the suits got progressively larger at first; the Mk-I Mjolnir was the standard combat vehicle of the confeds until it got completely phased out by the Mk-II Gugnir. The newest Mk-III Durandal went in the opposite direction, revolutionizing the concept of heavy infantry and bringing it into modern use in a highly mobile five-meter tall form. (I found Code Geass highly informative in this regard.)
• A large amount of Combine tech was reverse-engineered, hence how humanity got back to it's feet so fast: in 23 years, they went from ragtag bunch of refugees to capable of faster-than-light interstellar travel via a combination of pre-Impact portal research and Combine dimensional tunneling to create the Xenspace Waygate Network, essentially a bunch of huge spacegates capable of wormholing to each other across any distance. It's pretty slow however: even the system nearest to Sol is a week away via Waygate.
• Transhuman cybernetic augmentations were extensively studied and reverse-engineered. There are plans to create a human exocortex but such a thing would take years and human cybernetics is somewhat... frowned upon. One of the protagonists have a somewhat buggy brain augmentation prototype; it's fully functional but causes frequent migraines and has an unsightly external socket on the back of the head. It's essentially a flash memory and CPU linked to his cognitive cortex, gifting him with capabilities such as perfect recall of anything, enhanced senses and math skills, etc.
• Similarly, studying genetic augmentations have spurred a resurgence in genetic engineering. Two of the protagonists (NGE fans will know which two) are the result of one such hybridisation experiment even though such things are illegal by law. The purpose of it was to create a humanoid predator that can combat Advisors one-on-one and have a real chance of winning; the result was a lifeform that looks exactly like a human but can punch out a Hunter bare-handed, to speak nothing of their other abilities: telepathy, telekinesis, short-range self-teleportation, self-propelled telekinetic flight, limited shapeshifting capability to produce natural weaponry and chitinous carapace, high radiation tolerance, high resistance to biological weaponry, a potentially unlimited lifespan as well as capability to interbreed and reproduce with humans. The drawback is that said specimens have a higher than average chance of being psychologically unstable.
• The Evas themselves are basically human-made bastardizations of the Combine concept of synths, made from the Nihilanth they retrieved from Xen and put into Terminal Dogma for safekeeping. Unlike the forced servitude of synths, the AEL aimed to make the Evas assume a symbiotic relationship with the pilot to make them more controllable and effective. Also, they managed to rig the Evas with an experimental dark fusion reactor (illegal tech, not that it bothers them...) that can operate for 16 hours before needing to be refueled with dark energy plasma.
  • Speaking of which, Gordon's efforts didn't actually kill the Nihilanth. All he did was severing the Nihilanth's soul from it's body; it looks like it's dead but the body doesn't decay. Now, the Nihilanth is a proto-Angel and knows where the rest of the Seraphim is; if a real Angel gets in contact with it, Earth is FUBAR since there'll be nothing preventing the Angels from completely exterminating humanity.
• S2 organs [AKA Super Solenoid Engine, a biological power source that can provide literally unlimited amounts of energy] are made of xenite (exotic isotope of xenium a.k.a. the Xen crystals) and cannot be produced artificially. The Nihilanth spent so much time in Xen that the background radiation caused mutations, rendering it unable to replace it's S2 organ, therefore it used raw xenium instead which is much less efficient. Evas can consume xenium and metabolize it into xenite but they can't actually grow an S2 unless a tissue sample is provided first.
• The Aperture Science tech Eli and Kleiner were referring to in Episode Two is the Lance of Longinus [Another thing from the Evaverse, it's an about 100 meter-long object of alien origin and is capable of incapacitating holy beings] that was ferried by the Borealis before the Lance opened up a Dirac Sea during the unloading. Since Ep3 won't be out for quite a while, I decided that Gordon attempted to honor Eli's last will by destroying the Lance; it turned out however that the weapon is completely indestructible: from acid to diamond saws to nuclear warheads, nothing can even scratch it. The goverment told the public that it was destroyed but in truth, they ran some tests on it to determine it's composition, etc. before giving it to the AEL for safekeeping. Why would they give a potential weapon of mass destruction to a civilian biotech research company? Exactly that's why: no one would ever suspect them.
• Tau particle weapon research is performed mainly by CERN who have built a massive cannon prototype that operates far above anything ever seen from terrestrial or Combine technology. During the course of the fic, this cannon is borrowed by the AEL to do some field tests and eventually researched by Gehirn Industries into the XPR-1 Tau Beam Rifle. This carbine has an underslung pump-action dark plasma blast cannon [Pulse Rifle sec. fire oversized and modified for combo attacks by converting the plasma ball into antimatter upon being bombarded by the high-energy particles of a Tau beam, causing an explosion rivalling tactical nuclear warheads] and a mounted bayonet as well.
• Controlled xenium reaction is the key to dimensional and FTL-travel. It can be used as an energy source but it's highly dangerous to do so and they are very motivated at averting another resonance cascade. Xenium is considered Class 1.7 Quantum Explosive and Class 7.2 Non-radioactive Nuclear Material; unlawful possession is strictly forbidden, punishable by death. This stuff is even more illegal than pure plutonium.
  • There IS one stuff that is similarly dangerous: at one point, the military starts fielding a mixture of chlorine-trifluoride and dioxygen difluoride. Both are real-life chemicals that can ignite just about everything, even sand; they're also EXTREMELY corrosive. This it the verse's equivalent of the N2 mine [nuclear-scale thermobaric bomb in the Eva verse].

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