Fans Bring Back Half Life Game Series: Black Mesa Mod Launches 9/14 133
MojoKid writes "In a little less than two weeks, Half Life fans will have an opportunity to relive Valve's original 1998 title Half Life, albeit reborn and modified using the company's Source engine. The ambitious third-party project is called Black Mesa (previously known as Black Mesa: Source) and it's been in development for eight years. Black Mesa will deliver Half Life as you've never seen it before. It will have all new graphics, maps, a new soundtrack, updated voice acting, support for multi-core processors, hardware accelerated facial animation, and other goodies."
Re:Details... (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't they just skip the lame Xen stuff & make it an improvement on the original?
Re:Colour me a cynic for saying this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Colour me a cynic for saying this... (Score:4, Insightful)
A timeless classic (Score:5, Insightful)
I played HL for the first time a few years ago; years after I'd played HL2. The game had tons of content, ingenious puzzles to solve, and maybe the best final boss I've ever fought in a FPS. Even with the low-end graphics, I still found this one to be a blast to play. Don't let the age of the game detract you from revisiting it.
Re:Colour me a cynic for saying this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? A mod is not done until it is done, and when it is being created by fans for free, it tends to take a while and proceed entirely at the pace of the people creating it, which (since they aren't being paid to do it under a certain time) is "whenever they feel like working on it." All properly done video games are "nearly done" for a very long time (years, sometimes) because going from nearly done to actually done is usually the longest part. Sometimes, they never actually do get finished even if they are released.
And Duke Nukem Forever is rather a bad example, given that, you know, it actually came out. More importantly, to my knowledge the developers of Black Mesa have never announced a release date or given a completion quantity ever, so the fact that they are now means there is no prior justification for such cynicism, since your hopes have never been actually let down. They have only been let down in your mind, which expected it to be finished before now. You really shouldn't be cynical if they've never actually failed yet.
Xen is the former trope namer for... (Score:4, Insightful)
except that is NOT where HL 1 ends, there's four more levels after that, Xen, Gonarch's Lair, Interloper, and Nihalinth.
There's a reason why the "disappointing last level" page on TV Tropes used to be called "Xen syndrome". Perhaps they intentionally set out the parts not widely thought to suck.
Re:A timeless classic (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't listen to this guy - Opposing Forces was almost better than the original game. Do not skip it. Blue Shift, on the other hand, sucked.
Re:Colour me a cynic for saying this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even back when it came out, it wasn't a very good game.
I realize taste is entirely subjective, however, it won 50 awards [wikipedia.org]. There is no way you can say it wasn't a very good game (did you mean fun?) when many games released over the last decade haven't come close to that.