Reliving Gordon Freeman's Worst Day
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Having never played the original, I very much liked Black Mesa. I grant that the difficulty was excessive at times and the occasional glitch or instance of confusion as to what to do next left me frustrated, but I stuck with it and overall I had fun. The pacing was well done, like most valve games, the weapons were balanced, and the enemies and environments varied and interesting. The story was incoherent(I love how the existence of the main villain is revealed through an offhand comment by a nameless character at the very end of the mod) but I was impressed at how well the game did atmosphere and put you in Gordon's shoes through simple gameplay; on that count I think it did better then the actual Valve games, in part due to the custom soundtrack.
It was a small thing, but personally I also liked the bloodstains on the weapons. It added to the immersion and allowed you to imagine Gordon being splattered with goo after shooting a houndeye point-blank in the face with a shotgun. Personally I sort of hope that feature gets into official half-life games.
It was a small thing, but personally I also liked the bloodstains on the weapons. It added to the immersion and allowed you to imagine Gordon being splattered with goo after shooting a houndeye point-blank in the face with a shotgun. Personally I sort of hope that feature gets into official half-life games.
If I try that, I get instantly filled with more lead than my suit is made off before I can pull the damn trigger. No, soldiers are OP in every single way. And together with pretty much everything else in regards to gameplay make Black Mesa the biggest disappointment of 2012 for me.Mcoffey said:
This is hardly a mere remake, I thought the motivation for Black Mesa was because of what a piss-poor offering Half-Life: Source was.
I plan on hanging on to both for posterity.
I plan on hanging on to both for posterity.
Finally....that bloody ridculously hard chopper boss battle gets mentioned as being....well bloody ridculously hard. It was a horrible edition that even on the easiest difficulty (which I had to change it to) was still painfully annoying as f**k. Overall though, Black Mesa was a great, mostly faithful experience that I'll definitely be playing from now on instead of the original.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who found Black Mesa more difficult. I beat Half Life 1 on all difficulties. Hard mode gave me some teeth-grinding moments, but was still beatable. I'm on meduim right now with Black Mesa and I'm having tons of problems getting through it. Do all the enemies have better aim this time around, or just hit harder? Once I got to the point where the military guys showed up, I was killed faster than I could think.
Still. It's a really good remake.
Still. It's a really good remake.
Quote button has moved to the top now!tehpiemaker said:
Not sure why they moved it, everyone's making this mistake now.
Especially the gunship, bloody hell does that thing kill you fast on hard mode. It also takes ~10 rockets and 2 fully powered laser blasts to take it down. I cant remember exactly how many hits the original took, but I'm sure it was a fraction of that.tehweave said:
I did like the redesign of the facility making sense as to what all the rooms are supposed to be and whatnot, but I'm on par with the other major complaints being made. The jumping puzzles never bothered me in the original Half-Life (I'm just good at them, I suppose), but the change in the physics and especially the reduction of your jump height and changing how the duck-jump works makes a lot of the jumping puzzles frustratingly difficult. Getting through that damn section where the soldiers set up a bunch of trip mines around a missile (seriously, who the fuck does something like that anyway? I mean, I know soldiers don't have a reputation for being geniuses, but that seems like stupidity above and beyond the call of duty) gave me so much pain just getting over the first mine. The jump height really does need to be increased.
Also, the reduced amount of ammunition you can carry and load in each clip for the weapons makes what ought to be reasonable sections much harder than they should be. You end up reloading so much more often while there are big groups of enemies shaving off your health. They're only little changes, but they make such a bloody huge difference in how you would need to play that the redesign does not account for.
Also, the reduced amount of ammunition you can carry and load in each clip for the weapons makes what ought to be reasonable sections much harder than they should be. You end up reloading so much more often while there are big groups of enemies shaving off your health. They're only little changes, but they make such a bloody huge difference in how you would need to play that the redesign does not account for.
I waited years for this game (when I first found it I thought it would be something nice to tide me over until Half Life 2 Episode 3 came out - and I expected that to be out a couple of years after The Orange Box - what a naive fool I was!) and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. The jumping does annoy me and I do find the difficulty level to be a bit excessive. I'm not really surprised at this because I assumed that they wouldn't be doing any play testing with casual, fairly unskilled players such as myself. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that all the play testing was done by the developers themselves because they were justifiably afraid of leaks if they sent it out to a larger group for evaluation. I don't expect a game to be too easy nor do I consider myself particularly skilled but I was able to get through all the Half Life games, Fallout 3 and New Vegas as well as Borderlands without dying so frequently that it broke the sense of immersion in the game. This wasn't the case with Black Mesa. That said, I really did enjoy it. A lot of love went into making it and it shows.