So... Black Mesa

[SajuukKhar]

Do you have to own half life 1 to play this?

No, you only have to have the source SDK 2007, basically own any orange box game.

 

[CleverNickname]

Another type of change I really liked was how the guards and scientists now have scripts and lines when you have to leave them behind. The 4 guards and 3 scientists (or however many) you can collect in Office Complex and leave behind at the elevator shaft... they now talk about staying put there, holding out, etc. And that happens several times.

Black Mesa makes you feel like you're actually helping or even saving people along your way. HL sure never did. Makes it feel more natural and ... human.

Do you have to own half life 1 to play this?

No, you only have to have the source SDK 2007, basically own any orange box game.

So... TF2? Which is free? So... the whole world can now play Half-Life 1 for free? And Valve not only doesn't care, they're gonna distribute it on their platform! It's a good time to be a gamer!

Never thought about it before, cuz I've just had the Half-Lifes and Portals and TF2 forever...

 

[SajuukKhar]

So... TF2? Which is free? So... the whole world can now play Half-Life 1 for free? And Valve not only doesn't care, they're gonna distribute it on their platform! It's a good time to be a gamer!

Never thought about it before, cuz I've just had the Half-Lifes and Portals and TF2 forever...

Valve has been anxiously awaiting Black Mesa themselves. I don't see why they would care that it's free, I mean HL1 doesn't exactly sell anymore.

As to getting it to run, all you have to do is
-Go to your games library
-Click on the part that says all games, should be located right next to the search bar right above your games list, to open up a menu
-Go down to tools, and that opens you a whole list of things such as SDKs and dedicated servers, -look for Source SDK 2007
-Install it.
-then install Black Mesa and it should run

 

[Blachman201_v1legacy]

Overall, I feel this mod is an impressive piece of work, especially for something you can get for free. I have gotten to the cliff-side portion of "Surface Tension", and so far the love that was poured into this project have shined brightly through all the way.

The atmosphere fits to a T. It hits that perfect blend of survival-horror and action-pulp that Half-Life represented, there is a multitude of wonderful small details, and the humor feels right up Valve's alley. The soundside is fantastic for the most part; the soundtrack is one of the best and most fitting things I have ever heard, and it comes to the voice-acting the security guards and scientists are just perfect, with the female scientists and the HECU marines being kind of average mod voice acting, and Eli being kind of terrible.

The Gameplay is fun, but is bugged a bit down by a couple of things. The jump height seems to be gimped a bit too much in order to enforce crouch-jumping, and it doesn't feel very promising when you consider yourself more acrobatic than the character you play. The marines are a bit too good; they drain your health like crazy, and can now run and gun at full auto at the same time. I must admit that I like the way they behaved in the original game (occasionally stopping to shoot in small bursts) better. I hope they will tweak these things in a later update.

Overall; I really, really dig this game, and I can barely contain my excitement for the Xen chapters!

 

[bigfatcarp93]

The first 10 minutes of the game took be nearly an hour, because I spent so much time, looking for more people to have conversations.

It is amazingly well made , I spent 90 minutes talking / harassing people before reaching unforeseen consequences.

The Black Mesa Research Facility is so much more detailed now that even through the rest of the game I wasted tons of time just taking in the new environments and exploring every little change in layout they made.

BTW, did you guys notice the return of the "lunchroom sabotage opportunity"? The poor guard whose dinner you ruin has a bunch of new, very punny, dialogue:

It isn't his dinner, it's Dr. Magnusson's from Ep2. Also, did you notice that the microwave has a setting for "Head Crab?"

Captcha: Which one is math?
Options:
Blue Berry
Kitten
China
Pickled Herring
Chewing Gum
Sqare Root of 3

 

[SajuukKhar]

Black Mesa also has a bunch of women scientists which weren't "canonically" there either. I don't know if you remember, but there are exactly 4 different scientist models in HL1. Valve makes fun of this by later saying that the black one was Eli, the bald-ish white one was Kleiner and the hairy one was Magnusson. There was also a single security guard model for the entire game; was Barney simultaneously every security guard in the Black Mesa Research Facility?

Actually, Valve has said there WERE female scientists at Black Mesa.

them not being in the game was due to resource limitations.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2503050

Well, we didn't always have the resources; early on we wanted a wider range of characters - we wanted women scientists and stuff there - but we just didn't have the texture read memory. The train says they're an equal-opportunities employer on the way in, but the fact is that there are no women there that day. They all stayed at home; they knew there was something going on.

The whole relationship with Dr Mossman in HL2 was a scene that we tried to do in Half-Life. We'd done a whole bunch of stuff for this scene where there was a betrayal by a woman scientist; at that point in the story Freeman was being hunted and you think that the scientists are all your friends, so this scientist says she's going to get you help and tells you to stay in the room you're in - and then she calls the guards. We couldn't do that in Half-Life - we didn't really have characters on that level - so it was cool in HL2 when we had characters who were far enough along...

 

[Ickorus]

Anyone gotten their hands on a Snark yet and sat there watching the idle animations? Freakin' hilarious

All in all, this mod is everything i hoped for, amazing set pieces and stunning re-imaginings of the most iconic Half life levels. The section where you move about the cliff side is especially awesome with the Harrier jets passing by (and that one freaking awesome part where they make a bombing run on a pump station off in the distance).

This is my personal favourite animation:


Poor Hivehand.

Actually, thinking about it; those Grunts have gigantic hands so that little guy got pretty lucky.

 

[Starbolt-81]

This is my personal favourite animation:


Poor Hivehand.

Actually, thinking about it; those Grunts have gigantic hands so that little guy got pretty lucky.

Ahaha yes i forgot about that one

 

[bafrali]

Am I the only one with no desire to play a 14 year old first person shooter with updated graphics?

People even complain about free stuff these days.

It is more than just Half Life with pretty colors. Just play it and see for yourself.

OT: Mod is awesome. I can see myself playing it through many times over.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Am I the only one with no desire to play a 14 year old first person shooter with updated graphics?

People even complain about free stuff these days.

It is more than just Half Life with pretty colors. Just play it and see for yourself.

OT: Mod is awesome. I can see myself playing it through many times over.

Im not complaining, just trying to find a kindred soul out there. I just can't muster any enthusiasm for it like i could have back in the good old days when I wasn't a jaded world weary man.

Ehh your loss.

I would recommend a Pixar movie to help with that jaded feeling.

 

[bafrali]

Am I the only one with no desire to play a 14 year old first person shooter with updated graphics?

People even complain about free stuff these days.

It is more than just Half Life with pretty colors. Just play it and see for yourself.

OT: Mod is awesome. I can see myself playing it through many times over.

Im not complaining, just trying to find a kindred soul out there. I just can't muster any enthusiasm for it like i could have back in the good old days when I wasn't a jaded world weary man.

So you are looking for others to not care together? Not a worthy cause to look for companions i would say. Rather than looking for people to look down on other people's labor of love, i would recommend letting your inner child to go batshit crazy with nostalgia.

(Note: If you haven't played the first Half Life, please ignore the advice because you are irredeemable by this point)

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Just watched toy story 3. Gonna go kill myself now

Are you serious?

 

[bafrali]

Am I the only one with no desire to play a 14 year old first person shooter with updated graphics?

People even complain about free stuff these days.

It is more than just Half Life with pretty colors. Just play it and see for yourself.

OT: Mod is awesome. I can see myself playing it through many times over.

Im not complaining, just trying to find a kindred soul out there. I just can't muster any enthusiasm for it like i could have back in the good old days when I wasn't a jaded world weary man.

So you are looking for others to not care together? Not a worthy cause to look for companions i would say. Rather than looking for people to look down on other people's labor love, i would recommend letting your inner child to go batshit crazy with nostalgia.

(Note: If you haven't played the first Half Life, please ignore the advice because you are irredeemable by this point)

Yea sure, im a depressed person looking for other depressed people to hang and chat about how taking the red pill was a bad idea.

Sure i played the first half life - 14 years ago. But it seems to me that valve is trying to distract people from the fact that they dont want to get off their lazy asses and make HL3, and why should they? They are swimming in more cash than any video game they make could ever produce for them.

Why did you bring up Valve to this topic when they are irrevelant? This is a fan made mod.

 

[VladG]

Didn't like it. Not sure why they though it a good idea to change as much as they did, but the pacing and level design is nowhere near as good as the original game, and that's not surprising considering the modders aren't exactly professional game designers. It looks nice, I suppose, but I honestly prefer the better design of the original over the updated graphics of Black Mesa.

There are several other issues as well that I find strange... Such as the awful crowbar animation (I don't know why they didn't simply use the HL2 animation, since they would have had access to it... why waste time on an inferior job?), the changes to some of the weapons (Iron Sights on the Magnum... really? And why did they remove the secondary fire from the pistol?) and the fairly broken jump system (you don't jump as high as in the original game and crouch-jumping only seems to work when it feels like it)

I understand they were aiming for more than a simple graphical overhaul, but frankly I find most of the changes detract greatly from the game instead of improve it. Overall, I dislike it.

 

[vun]

It's like a fantastic new game and a nostalgia trip injected directly into the bloodstream.
Other than that I feel this post says exactly what I wanted to say:

Overall, I feel this mod is an impressive piece of work, especially for something you can get for free. I have gotten to the cliff-side portion of "Surface Tension", and so far the love that was poured into this project have shined brightly through all the way.

The atmosphere fits to a T. It hits that perfect blend of survival-horror and action-pulp that Half-Life represented, there is a multitude of wonderful small details, and the humor feels right up Valve's alley. The soundside is fantastic for the most part; the soundtrack is one of the best and most fitting things I have ever heard, and it comes to the voice-acting the security guards and scientists are just perfect, with the female scientists and the HECU marines being kind of average mod voice acting, and Eli being kind of terrible.

The Gameplay is fun, but is bugged a bit down by a couple of things. The jump height seems to be gimped a bit too much in order to enforce crouch-jumping, and it doesn't feel very promising when you consider yourself more acrobatic than the character you play. The marines are a bit too good; they drain your health like crazy, and can now run and gun at full auto at the same time. I must admit that I like the way they behaved in the original game (occasionally stopping to shoot in small bursts) better. I hope they will tweak these things in a later update.

Overall; I really, really dig this game, and I can barely contain my excitement for the Xen chapters!

Though I'd like to add that my problem isn't so much with the marines being strong, more with the mp5 being kind of not good. Though not sure if simply making the marines weaker would be a better solution than buffing the mp5. And I do wish they included the option to switch to the M4 model via console like they had originally planned.

And, like mentioned above, it has the same kind of "soul" the original HL had as well as their own "soul", which is just magical.

Oh, and the soundtrack is amazing as well.

 

[Vivi22]

It's an awesome game, but I have to say the jump mechanics are really frustrating. Your basic jump has a max height of about 2 inches and is literally useless for climbing and platforming. To do that you have to use the crouch-jump which is really awkward and not very intuitive.

Anyone else having this problem? Just doing the first platforming section when you're hopping up the pipes was an exercise in pain.

As someone who crouch jumps as a habit anyway in every Source game I think it would annoy me if it didn't use it.

I'm used to crouch jumping as well, but the jump does seem a bit gimped in this compared to other source games. It is definitely a smaller jump than it should be compared to other source titles, or even the original HL, and it just doesn't feel right. Hell, I've screwed up on several jumping puzzles so far simply because I'm used to being able to jump higher, and that was with me crouch jumping. And as far as I can tell, there's no good reason to limit the jump height like they have. I'd rather see it patched so they can increase it a bit, because having it where it is makes the margin for error a lot smaller than it needs to be to make things challenging.

So... TF2? Which is free? So... the whole world can now play Half-Life 1 for free? And Valve not only doesn't care, they're gonna distribute it on their platform! It's a good time to be a gamer!

Considering how easy it is to grant a mod team a limited license to make the mod and not give up any IP rights, the only reason other companies would C&D stuff like this is because they don't want a team to either do it better than them, or so they can re-release the game with an upped resolution down the road and milk people for more money. I doubt Valve has any interest in that though, and I even more highly doubt they have any interest in making a full remake themselves, so no reason for them to try and get in it's way. Especially when the mod community played such a large role in the success of HL, and Valve's present success. Odds are they wanted to play it as much or more than everyone else so good on them for being awesome.

Why did you bring up Valve to this topic when they are irrevelant? This is a fan made mod.

Valve has everything to do with it. You think they had no input in this mod whatsoever? To think so is... well its just naive.

I really doubt Valve did much of anything other than not getting in the way of this mod.

Somehow, the 7 or 8 years of hard work this mod team put in to make this is nothing more than an attempt by Valve to distract from HL3 because they're lazy? Give me a break. That might just be the most convoluted conspiracy theory I've ever heard. And it is nothing but a conspiracy theory since you have no proof of it, not to mention Valve's releasing at least one game a year for most of the last ten years kind of shoots your "they're lazy" theory all to hell.

 

[bafrali]

Why did you bring up Valve to this topic when they are irrevelant? This is a fan made mod.

Valve has everything to do with it. You think they had no input in this mod whatsoever? To think so is... well its just naive.

Where is your proof of that oh paranoid one?

 

[Dense_Electric]

Am I the only one with no desire to play a 14 year old first person shooter with updated graphics?

People even complain about free stuff these days.

It is more than just Half Life with pretty colors. Just play it and see for yourself.

I REALLLY want to agree with you, but I can't.

I just passed the point where you have to kill the giant dude with the airstrike using the screen, and as far as I can see so far, it's Half-Life with drastically improved graphics. Yes, there have been a few improvements (like the shortening of On A Rail), but they kept so many of the same flaws that made the original a pretty meh game even for its time (yes, I know, LYNCH HIM).

Crappy and painfully unclear level design, puzzles that aren't intuitive and require a manual to decipher, enemies that are simply too overpowered for the simplistic gameplay, and most annoying of all, the FUCKING JUMP HEIGHT. Of all the simple fixes, they could have raised it to 49 units like most source games, but here I am setting off trip-mines and turrets because Gordon apparently can't jump more than half an inch. Crouching at the top of a jump to gain some extra height is fine, but I shouldn't have to do it for EVERY FUCKING JUMP IN THE GAME. It should take exactly one button to tell Gordon to climb on top of a crate, not two (or three if I have to sprint).

Honestly, the biggest thing Black Mesa has made me realize is that Half-Life just wasn't that great of a game. Like, at all.

 

[Vivi22]

Its simple common sense, you think valve is going to let some random assholes steal their ip without controlling the strings? Common sense says hell no

So in other words, no, you don't have proof? Let's face it, Valve has been making business decisions which fly in the face of "common sense" for years now. It's one of the reasons they're so successful.

 

[bafrali]

Why did you bring up Valve to this topic when they are irrevelant? This is a fan made mod.

Valve has everything to do with it. You think they had no input in this mod whatsoever? To think so is... well its just naive.

Where is your proof of that oh paranoid one?

Its simple common sense, you think valve is going to let some random assholes steal their ip without controlling the strings? Common sense says hell no

It is called modding and as far as i remember Valve has let several "random assholes" to mod their every game ever without restrictions. What makes you think they would lose their shit over this project?