Also wrote Singularity Sky, where a continent-sized cruise ship starts dropping magical gifts onto a medieval planet.

And the short story A Colder War.

Grog wakes up one night to find them trying to steal his weapon, and the twerp can't even lift the handle off the ground. He picks up the hammer by the head and spins around to dislodge the kid - which works, insofar as the child flies off toward the mountains, holding some kind of sword. Grog wonders where he got that, and goes back to bed.

So it's a generic emulator that cannibalizes a goofy-but-rare controller?

Meh.

Shattering the glass ceiling for who's allowed to be a total piece of shit.

Yeah what's the big deal about making kids go through the wrong puberty? That's never life-altering, or life-ending.

Especially when these miserable fucks also shit on trans adults.

And there's no way they're just wrong.

Yeesh on both counts.

Half-Life as a live-action film, in continuous first-person.

The game is deliberately cinematic to begin with. You'd cut down a brisk run-through to maybe an hour of set-pieces and combat, then build out the "dialog." In quotations because I would make Gordon canonically mute. It'd become thematic.

Gordon took the hazard course qualifications that secretly exist to staff the extraterrestial excursion team, but they're not quite desperate enough to risk having an astronaut who can't use the radio, so he's stuck on Earth pushing rocks. Without a helmet, because the excursion team keeps losing equipment, what with getting attacked by aliens. The aliens think the guys in orange suits are a distinct subspecies... which keeps kidnapping their kind.

Vortigaunts in particular would be seen maybe trying communicate with scientists in labcoats (a subspecies marked by their ridiculous ties) only to spot Gordon and freak out. They all hate the POV character on-sight. If they're on-camera, they're gonna start waving their hands to cast deadly lightning. They'd even try to communicate with the bug-eyed subspecies in splotchy green outfits, only to get shredded by submachinegun fire. The military wears those dehumanizing masks (and speaks over radio comms you can hear) because all they were told is "secret experiments, actual zombies, existential threat." They saw one distended human with a jaw for his ribcage and the strength to slap a dude in half, and they didn't ask any further questions.

This all comes together in Interloper. Gordon sees the biological factory where these creatures are enslaved to manufacture more of themselves. The ones inside know nothing about Earth. They prance up, curious and burbling incoherently, pawing all over Gordon's bright orange carapace. He sticks a gun in their faces and they consider the object fascinating. But when he puts it away and tries communicating in sign language, they scatter, and a few start waving their hands to zap him. Gordon Freeman was chosen for this event because he is physically incapable of any outcome but one.

At that point, use AI as a filter. It'd be the perfect setting for some mild gloop.

If you forget the second step, well, that's what sweet potatoes are.

And for those who aren't aware, it sounds killer when played at the wrong speed.