Action Half-Life

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Action Half-Life is a mod for the award-winning first-person shooter computer game Half-Life. It strives to simulate action movies, especially those directed by John Woo. It was developed by The A-Team, led by Dwayne 'Oddjob' Douglass. Action Half -Life had several beta versions before being released as version 1.0. It has had several lead programmers, but Stuart 'Payback' Crouch is the one that made the last few betas leading to V1.0 (which was meant to be the final one). AHL:Directors Cut, however, is a project started by the Ministry of Action. While this project isn't supported by the A-Team themselves, Ministry of Action has been given the A-Team's blessing. The Ministry is a group of people who still enjoy AHL and think that it has a life ahead of it despite the age of the HL engine. In their opinion, AHL is a wonderful formula for online play, but a few bad design decisions spoiled the brew; thus they have been busy making improvements to AHL v1. They have tried to take the best features of all betas + V1.0 and create a final "Director's cut". They improved overall accessibility, weapon behaviour, and content, and according to most they did a nice job. Nowadays the latest AHL-version is AHL: DC - Release Candidate 2 (RC2). RC3 is currently in development (June 2006) and might be the last and final version of AHL:DC.

Action HL has several rare features. First, it has a stunt system similar to the one found in Max Payne, introduced in Action beta 3.0 long before Max Payne was released. It was also the first Half-Life mod to feature akimbo pistols. Furthermore, it pioneered several graphic enhancements to the Half-Life engine, including the visible laser sight and wall debris. In addition to the usual Deathmatch and Team vs Team, it also has a round based game-mode called "Last Man Standing" which can be described as either Deathmatch without respawning or Teamplay with everyone on their own team. Note, Unreal Tournament also has a game-mode called "Last Man Standing", but normally the players are able to respawn a few times. UT LMS with only one life would be equivalent to AHL LMS.

In addition, unlike other mods, it has support for single player mode. In it, the player can execute an Adrenaline Rush mode, which is basically Bullet Time.

Another noted aspect of AHL is the inclusion of several extremely off-the-beaten-path but long and intricate secret areas that are housed in many of its maps, especially those created by famed map designer Hondo. One in particular (in the map "5 AM") takes multiple players to access and complete, and is in fact much bigger than the main portion of the map.

Action Half-Life is considered to be the second official mod in the "Action" series. The first was Action Quake 2 and the third was Action Unreal Tournament 2004. There's also a similar mod, called DistrAction HalfLife (DHL) and meant for the Halflife2/source-engine. The team of this project consists mainly of fans of AQ2 and AHL. DistrAction might be a nicely chosen name, but the reason for it is the team was not allowed to use the name AHL2, because of the original AHL developers who want to keep the rights to the AHL-franchise. The fact the ministry of action was allowed to alter AHL's code and create Director's Cut was simply because the failure of AUT2k4 and therewith the decision to freeze the franchise was made AFTER moa obtained AHL's sourcecode from its former developers.