There don't appear to be any improvements introduced in the Blue Shift add-on. On the bright side, you can start the game from any chapter, and you'll get a serviceable arsenal when you start in the middle from scratch. I personally like Office Complex and Surface Tension. At the very least, I like being able to skip past the boring part in the beginning where you don't have weapons and have to stand around while snooty scientists screw up an experiment and let vicious aliens teleport into the heart of their top-secret military facility. Oops! My bad, dog!
The AI of the Marines is still impressive after all these years. Very aggressive, great at flushing you out with grenades and come at you from multiple angles. The cyborg ninjas are also great. A truly cool new thing, though, is playing the game in 5.1 surround sound. Half-Life already had some great ambient sound, and this is even more special. Plus, you get that great subwoofer thump for grenades, shotguns, and other loud things.
So how do you get your grubby little gamer hands on it? Well, you can't get it separately yet, but it comes with the Silver and Gold packages available via Steam. You can also get it with the retail boxed Collector's Edition currently priced at $80 USD, which comes with a T-shirt, size XL, a mini Prima strategy guide with "information on character backgrounds, the making of the game, and more than 100 pieces of artwork," and HL2, Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life: Source on a DVD. HL:S will take up about 760MB on your hard drive, compared to a little under 400 for good ole' vanilla Half-Life. Day of Defeat: Source isn't in the CE box, because, well, it's not done yet. It looks as though the quickest way to get DoD: Source is to have gotten the Silver or Gold package on Steam.
One of the other cool things about HL:S is that you can run it on the highest settings your system is capable of, and it will probably run butter smooth. Even with the improved physics and water effects, it's still a pretty basic engine by today's standards. Keep in mind that the original game didn't push the eye candy envelope back in it's day, although it was more than middle-of-the-road. You'll probably find Gordon's movement to be pretty slidey compared to Half-Life 2, and most current first-person shooters, for that matter. And the grenade implementation is just click-and-throw. No cooking, no reticule, and no visible arc like in, say, SOCOM. I also find the pistol to be pretty powerful, as it is in HL2, although this shotgun holds 8 rounds at once instead of six.
I've been using the basic pistol in HL2 more than the assault rifle, and the same is the case here, although bullet impact is more tangible in HL2. In the sequel, you can really tell when you clip somebody. Still, for its time, the weapons of the original are quite well implemented, what with the laser-guided rocket launcher, the bee launcher thingey, and the crossbow with bolts that stayed stuck in the wall instead of disappearing.
As with HL2, HL:S defaults to "Easy" difficulty, so you'll want to bump that up. Reflection also defaults to "Reflect World" instead of "Reflect All." So make sure you make the proper adjustments. Because we of the shooter are not wussies. Crank that ish up! If you want to start the game with some extensions, you'll need to right-click on it in the Play Games menu, select Properties, click "Launch options" and type it in there, remembering to add the dash at the beginning. To access the console, you'll need to go to the Options menu (once you've launched the game), the select the Keyboard tab, and click the Advanced button at the bottom. The console is useful for optimizing performance, although this will be much more useful with Half-Life 2, of course.
Since it's not a Counter-Strike overhaul, it's not worth the price of admission alone, but in combination with CS:S and DoD:S, it's a pretty good deal.
