Games that should have been more popular - Science & Industry

I was thinking about how a lot of games and mods never truly got the love and support they really should have. Over the next few weeks I am going to write up about a few I feel should have been more popular. First game I am going to bring up is an old Half-Life 1 mod under the name of Science and Industry. Compared to the likes of Counter Strike and Team Fortress this mod was severely under rated. It is in essence an advanced capture the flag type game.

You play as a security guard for one of two research companies, Amalgamated Fluorodynamics (AFD) and Midland Carbide Labs (MCL), I have no idea the reasons behind the names but they aren't really important. Each team starts off with 3 scis (from now on will be mentioned as scis), your job as a security guardis to protect your companies research lab from the opposing team while trying to kidnap rival scientists (from now on will be mentioned as scis as I am lazy) and bring them to the G-man at human resources to make them work for your team. This is the main objective in the game, there are some secondary objectives depending on the map which I will get to in a bit.

The reason for you needing to kidnap and hire enemy scis is to help with your teams research. This research can get you better weapons, better armour, devices such as trip mines, satchel charges and mind rays (which make you scis work more efficiently making them research quicker) and implants for your player which can speed your movement, regenerate ammo, health and armour among other things.

Along with hiring scis you can also help you teams progress with secondary objectives. If you happen to kill an enemy who happens to be using a weapon you have yet to research, you can pick it up and return it to human resources. Doing this speeds up research of that specific weapon. There are other secondary objectives that are only available on certain maps. These objectives include:
Stealing files from your opposing team which can help speed up research.
Sabotage of enemy lab equipment which costs them money to replace, this is important as the team with the most money at the end of the round is the winner.

I would really like to see some one bring this back and update it to say source graphics. It would be awesome if Valve picked it up, I believe they could do wonders with it and put Half-Life and Portal fans against each other changing the team names to Black Mesa and Aperture. They could then make the playable characters for each team a well known person from each franchise. Black Mesa having Gordon, Alyx and Barney while Aperture has Chell, P-body and Atlas, then maybe include the gravity gun and the portal gun as exclusive weapons for each team retrospectively.

If you are interested in the game and want to give it a shot to see how you like it, you should give it a download and while very few people play these days, there is always the weekly gather Sunday night at 9pm GMT which is still going without fail after all these years.