History VideoGame / BlackMesaBlueShift

* EasterEgg: The Chumtoad from the original makes a return. Although it's now a plushie instead of a living creature, the method of obtaining it is pretty much the same. [[spoiler:In the Captive Freight release, bringing the plushie all the way to the prototype teleporter causes an additional "Xen When?" message to pop up after the "To Be Continued" screen.]]

* ThePurge: One of the scientists in ''Duty Calls'' encourages Barney to escape the disaster but not reveal his presence in the facility, as he fears the government would pull this on him and everyone else in Black Mesa owing to all the [[ForScience questionable research]] Black Mesa have been conducting with their funding - the sort of research which would [[NiceJobBreakingItHero ultimately cause the Resonance Cascade]] and [[UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom cause the Black Mesa Incident]]. As those familiar with ''Half Life'' and ''Black Mesa'' would know, [[LeaveNoWitnesses given the HECU's actions]], that his fears were entirely justified.

* SchmuckBait: Shortly after ''Captive Freight'' begins, Barney physically encounters his first HECU marines, who try to trick him into an ambush by saying that the evac site is just around the corner. Either he blindly walks into the ambush (despite witnessing their work beforehand), or he can just straight up shoot the marines first.

** In the original "Captive Freight", there's two random unnamed scientists that Calhoun comes across before finally locating Dr. Rosenberg who don't serve any purpose after being freed from the train cars they're locked in. Here however, one of the scientists is now a maintenance worker named Ronny while the other is a female scientist named Dr. Henderson, and after Calhoun rescues them, they actually follow along with him, Rosenberg, and the two other security guards to the old prototype teleporter lab.

** In the original "Captive Freight", the marines simply decide to lock Barney inside the container where Rosenberg is without disarming him, which is [[DidntThinkThisThrough a severe oversight on their part]]. The remake rectifies this problem; as the marines ambush Barney and knock him out, some aliens suddenly teleport to their location and, faced with a "kill or be killed" situation, they immediately shove Barney inside the container to fight the Xenian attackers, which gave them an ample reason as to why they didn't immediately take his weapons away.

* CassandraTruth: The female scientist trapped behind a security door in "Duty Calls" claims that the Xenians are teleporting into the facility, but this is initially dismissed by Murdoch as too insane to be true. Moments later an [[SlaveMooks enslaved Vortigaunt]] teleports into the chamber, killing her shortly after.

-->'''Female Scientist''': I'm not hallucinating, i'm panicking! Get us out of here!
-->'''Murdoch''': Okay, okay. I- I got a couple more I can try.
-->(cue teleporting enslaved Vortigaunt teleporting in the chamber with her)

-->'''Female Scientist''': Oh lord...! No, no no no...! '''AAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!''' (she [[NotEnoughToBury instantly gets disintegrated]])

** If Barney opts to either disable a HECU Sentry Guns (either by picking them up and throwing them) or destroy them, a marine wonders if an intruder is nearby only for the other to dismiss such notion and decide to move the train engine to a makeshift outpost.
** Discussed. While Barney is trapped inside a container, a HECU officer asks a marine if they confiscated his weapons only to react with YouHaveGotToBeKiddingMe when he realizes that they didn't. The other marine decides to back away, leaving the other to explain the situation to his superior and gets reprimanded. The officer then "volunteers" the marine to ascertain a critical information and leaves, but not before giving him a stern reminder.
---> '''HECU Officer''': And be sure to take his weapons.

* ForScience: ''Blue Shift'' reveals a possible reason for the HECU's actions to be due to this: a scientist mentioned to Barney that Black Mesa was conducting a lot of unapproved research with the budget they received from the government, things apparently so dangerous or questionable that the government would outright ''[[ThePurge kill them all]]'' if they ever found out - which is possibly understandable considering what Black Mesa's forays into Xen and the fateful Anti-Mass Spectrometer experiment that day ultimately [[AlienInvasion led]] [[VideoGame/HalfLife2 to]]...

** Getting Rosenberg to the prototype labs after freeing him from his container involves more soldiers and other obstacles this time around, making the sequence less straightforward than the original.

*** The train yard itself is also revamped in order to implement new puzzles that revolve around having to take control of train engines and move them around the tracks in order to shove around certain cars. Either to move a car with a stationary rocket launcher into place in order to use it to blow open train yard gates, or to move the freight cars with captives inside them to the drop off locations that they can be opened up.
** Calhoun's first encounter with Rosenberg is slightly changed. Instead of moving into the container he's locked in and the door getting locked from behind, Calhoun suffers what Freeman did at the end of Apprehension and get ambushed by the HECU just as he's opening the container door. With aliens warping in abruptly soon after, the soldiers have no choice but to shove Calhoun into the locker with Rosenberg. Rosenberg then brings Calhoun back to consciousness before explaining the situation as he did in the original game.

* SchmuckBait: Shortly after ''Captive Freight'' begins, Barney physically encounters his first HECU marines, who try to trick him into an ambush by saying that the evac site is just around the corner. Either he blindly walks into the ambush (despite witnessing their work beforehand), or he can just straight up shoot the soldiers first.

** The third one is when Otis asks him if he knows the code to the security door, he says "kinda" then opts to kick it open like last time. This unintentionally saved his life as there is a HECU marine standing behind the door when he got squashed by it, much to the guard's surprise, then makes a quip on said soldier afterwards when he saw what happened. Had Murdoch opened it conventionally, the marine might get the drop on him first before he can respond.

** Like the original expansion, shooting anybody during "Insecurity" results in Barney getting fired for improper firearm usage, though it's now only possible while in the shooting range.

** Barney's friendship with Gordon is referenced by a sticky note in his locker that reads "Buy a beer for Gordon". Several NPCs' quips imply that Calhoun's beer-debt is a topic of office chitchat, and that it arose from a bet he'd recently lost to Freeman.

** Barney's friendship with Gordon is referenced by a sticky note in his locker that reads "Buy a beer for Gordon".

-->'''Female Scientist''': Oh lord...! No, no no no...! '''AAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!''' (she [[NotEnoughLeftToBury instantly gets disintegrated]])

* CassandraTruth: The female scientist trapped behind a security door in "Duty Calls" claims that the Xenians are teleporting into the facility, but this is initially dismissed by Murdoch as too insane to be true.

* ArtisticLicenseMilitary: Like the Apaches in the main game, the Chinook helicopters first seen in "Captive Freight" are not employed by the real-world US Marine Corps (they would be employing [=CH-53E=] Super Stallions instead), which the HECU are a division of. Also, while the most capable Chinooks boast a 14-ton payload limit that would plausibly allow them to carry an LAV-25, they definitely couldn't do the same with the 60-ton M1 Abrams.