Black Mesa is a remake of the video game Half Life 1(HL1) which was a First Person Shooter released in 1998, I bought it more recently like in 2005.
Half Life 1(and by extension Black Mesa) follows the events of whats called the Black Mesa Incident, in which there was a resonance cascade during a experiment causing a portal to be open to an alien planet called Xen, where a powerful alien latched onto the portal and forced it to remain open and started sending various aliens across to earth. the game has you playing Gordon Freeman, a scientist who was at ground zero, as he attempts to escape the complex, and then later is tasked with the job of closing the portals being held open, fighting aliens as well as a military force sent in to contain and "silence" the situation.
first thing to note about the mod is it doesn't include anything in Xen yet, it goes to just when you jump into the portal but stops then, so its lacking about 10-20% of the whole game but that's a minor point as it will probably be included in a later update.
First thing that pops into mind is "what did they change things from the original game" and the answer is; very little they replaced a very limited number of parts with physics puzzles that were really just basic jump puzzles in the original game so they are actually very nice addition.
The map layouts are pretty much the same, to put in the best way I have beaten HL1 multiple times, to the point that I can play through it without much thinking of where to go next, two of my friends who never played HL1 asked me what to do at several points in the game (I had just beaten black mesa about a half hour before) and when I tried to explain I realized, I didnt really remember, the mod so accureatly recreated the map layouts in the original game I was sort of auto navigating through the levels from my memories from HL1 which in my opinion is an amazing thing.
The gameplay is roughly the same as HL1, the damage rates of most things are higher resulting in a bit of irritation when you get to a large group of varied enemies or your health gets reduced to around 10% and your barely able to do anything without fleeing almost everything you encounter.
The graphics are very good, especially for using the Half Life 2 engine, they maintain the visual appearance of HL1 but with having nice updated graphics, one thing I noticed is every character has its own variation to it, I didnt see a single repeated character model except for the military grunts and aliens, in the original HL1 the scientists and security guards all had cookie cutter models.
All of the audio, music sound effects and voice content has been redone, this results in new dialogue here and there but none of it affected the story just added to it.
A good thing to note is the two main characters that appear as primary characters in Half Life 2 (the two characters used scientist models from HL1 as their character base) Kleiner and Eli Vance both have special models that are nicely reduced in age, and the two voice actors playing them did an amazing job imitating the original voices of both characters as they were heard in HL2.
All in all this mod is an amazing remake of HL1 and more then worth the time to download and play.
Your post very thoroughly explained the game to an "old-timer" like myself who played games such as pong, asteroids, pac-man, ms. pac-man, in the dinosaur age. -Deborah Avery
ReplyDelete