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dkirschner's Black Mesa (PC)
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| [October 28, 2023 03:18:19 PM]
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Finished this recently and whaaaat a game. This Valve-sanctioned fan remaster of Half-Life is blissful. I never actually beat the original Half-Life. Those were my teenage days when I was mostly obsessed with Diablo II, StarCraft, and Final Fantasy games. I didn't seek out PC games back then, but played what I knew I liked. I remember starting Half-Life several times, riding on the tram and doing some opening chapters, but I never got into it. So THANK YOU Black Mesa team for revitalizing Half-Life! It's tight, looks great, sounds great. It really draws a contrast between shooters before it. I just played DUSK recently too, and that game is reminiscent of pre-Half-Life FPSes. Half-Life is leaps and bounds ahead of what came before it and presumably the boomer shooters that are reviving the pre-Half-Life FPS style.
One of the coolest things about playing Black Mesa is seeing so many pre-cursor ideas to portal: teleportation, the basic physics of picking up and manipulating objects, very environmental puzzles, and so on. Every now and then, I'd be like, "Oh! I bet that's where that idea for xyz thing in Portal came from!" Something as simple as picking up a box would trigger that response. I mean, there weren't many games back then with physics like Half-Life's, and then the physics engine was significantly enhanced and manipulating objects became a core part of the gameplay in Half-Life 2, as with the iconic "Pick up the can" tutorial. Picking up a box fast-forwarded me to picking up a testing cube in Portal. Teleporting in Xen fast-forwarded me to creating portals in Portal.
Speaking of Xen, I had always heard people poo-poo the final area as too long, and I thought that the remake fixed it. Xen starts off super cool, but drags by the time you are fighting the Gonarch, running through tunnel after tunnel unsure of when you'll actually get to kill the thing. I thought Xen was the end of the game! But then, no, there's another chapter called Interloper, and it was SO LONG! Interloper is like...just climbing the biggest most pointlessly tall and complicated tower ever. How would any of the aliens even use this tower? Why are there 500 conveyor belts criss-crossing in every direction, transporting enemies, bouncing upward to the next level of conveyor belts, repeated literally like 20 times, with laser puzzles and other time-wasting shit added in? The final boss was an epic battle, and I won with 2hp left! But seriously, when I finished and started jotting notes about the game, I had to bracket aside my distaste for the last several hours of it. So ignore that. Black Mesa (or the original Half-Life, I suppose) is totally worth playing, necessary even.
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dkirschner's Black Mesa (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Monday 4 September, 2023
GameLog closed on: Monday 23 October, 2023 |
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