Shopped at Gerland ' s in Galveston for years . Friendswood had one , too , eventually , with a Jimmy G ' s deli inside , IIRC . <| sep |> From a gameplay and design standpoint , the leeches are a lot easier to deal with since it ' s just a volume the player enters . With something like the Icky , it has to come from somewhere and it ' s hard to spawn a large sharksized object without the player noticing . That said , in places like the cliffs in Highway 17 where the player has no hope of getting out if they fall , the Icky would have been really cool . This is something that comes up in Black Mesa too . Because HL 1 land BM eeches aren ' t the mass of death that they are in HL 2 , you really can ' t use waterways as level boundaries .