Scientists Go Online

Here’s an older story for our latest featured item.  Scientists Go Online is one of Friendly Garg’s earlier tales using Half-Life and the traditional image story format.

In this story, Luther and Walter begin bickering over on-line gaming skills one day and decide to play a round of Half-Life’s Deathmatch.

To access the game, they use a piece of Black Mesa technology that transports them into the game.

Originally, a part two of this story was planned.  However, due to a personal lack of interest and a feeling that the story had run its course, FG decided to drop that second project.

Check out this and other Image Fiction from the Image Fiction page.

I had many plans for the future and began work on a Comic Strips page as one of the additions.

Since this was such a new idea for this site, I was rather surprised when a new comic strip was submitted.  I did a little digging and tracked the author back to TWHL.

The Mesa Times by Daubster

The Mesa Times is the creation of one of TWHL’s staff, Daubster.  It is a Half-Life comic strip that takes place before the Black Mesa incident.  Daubster made it and posted it on TWHL initially with plans for a future website that never materialized.  One of the forum members at TWHL posted our link and suggested that he submit it here.

And so, The Mesa Times by Daubster is today’s featured comic.  Learn how the G-Man developed his speech impediment, learn what happened to the donuts, learn how Gordon got his assignment in the test labs, and learn what the scis do in their spare time.

Most visitors that remember the site from those early years think of certain key image stories.  Specifically, the Barney Time Series or, on occasion, one of the other team-made plots.  But some of the best, most creative stories were fan-made.

In this case, I’m thinking of a story by R. Tarrman.  “INVASION”

Invasion by R. Tarrman

The story follows an unnamed scientist from an undisclosed facility that looks a lot like Black Mesa.  When he awakes in the locker room to find blood and death have filled the halls, he becomes concerned.  Then he encounters aliens and knows that his only recourse is to travel into the Black Mesa Research facility and find a way to stop the Xen invasion.

Of course, as with most of our stories, this one is based more around humor and is no where near as dramatic as it sounds.

This story is a 31 page image story on the Half-Life Stories page.  The majority of the jokes appear toward the end of the story when the scientist joins with Barney the security guard to stop the aliens.

When all else fails… turn to the Holy Book of Final Fantasy!

Invasion

Well,  with this new site I would like to include a feature from time to time as well.  But I don’t really want to use the old widget.  Instead, I’d like to make a new monthly or even bi-weekly feature.

That said, here is our first edition.

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Tonight’s feature is our first text-fiction, an entry from almost five years ago.  Barney Calhoun’s Birthday Party by Ghost Calhoun.

Originally posted on the PHL forums, this story is a script style short fiction.  It still stands as a fairly humorous story about Barney Calhoun’s 30th birthday and the Black Mesa/Xen surprise party.

When this story first appeared, Friendly Garg had started to seek potential fan-fiction authors to add to his website.  At that time, Friendly Garg’s Stories was a PHL hosted site and home to image stories.  He had started to expand his interests and over time, the site would move and become known as the Garg-o-holics, but the fan-fiction aspect would be dropped.

This was one of his first findings during that first expansion.  FG quickly posted an offer for Ghost Calhoun to join the story team as a text fiction author and other stories were written and scouted.

Unfortunately, any and all of the other text fictions of that era, there were only a few, have been lost.  But thankfully, this little gem still exists and was restored to the site.  BWL Development presents… Barney Calhoun’s Birthday Party.