Difficulty Settings Bug?

[kupocake]

I've just completed Half-Life 2 for the second time, and am going through it a third. First time I played on Normal, second time on hard or at least that's how I started out. I have reason to believe that loading a saved game for a different difficulty setting, after you've started a new game will change the difficulty of your current playthrough. For me, I noticed that I was getting a good 75 points of Energy from the "HEV" machines even though i was supposedly playing on hard (On my third playthrough, I only got 25 units from Kleiner's Charger). Specifically, I reloaded a Saved Game in Dark Energy to see the end of the game again (So perhaps the bug only manifests itself when you re-complete the game?), and once I resumed playing my 2nd playthorugh, it seemed like I was playing on "Normal".

Anyone else experienced this, or am I just seeing things?