

It got to the point where I didn't play it for weeks because I felt like I had nothing new to say, and didn't think people would want to listen to me just complaining about the game. At some point along the way, it moved too far away from the original and lost what made that game fun.Īs I played through Black Mesa while commenting on it, the times where I was impressed or surprised were increasingly replaced with times that I was frustrated or annoyed. This, I think, is the games ultimate folly. It just kept getting pushed further and further back. They wanted to "re-imagine" the game and put their own stamp on it.
Black mesa half life mod#
At some point, however, this mod project seemed to grow way beyond this simple scope and premise. Just take what was already there and implement it in Half-life 2. All the game code for Half-life was already available in the mod SDK. On the surface, it sounds like a pretty simple mod: just remake the existing Half-life content with Half-life 2 textures and models. I hadn't really paid attention to a mod community in a few years. Partially out of intellectual curiosity rather than a desire to actually play it. I had been looking forward to Black Mesa for a while.

Black mesa half life how to#
I could identify how future FPS games learned from Half-life: more atmosphere, more NPC interaction and dialog, cinematic scripted sequences without taking control of the player camera, and how to use level design to draw the player's attention to those scripted sequences naturally, and that jump puzzles in FPS games just do not belong. I knew what its strengths and weaknesses were. I had the first 1/3 of the game completely memorized, and had a pretty good idea of how the rest of it went. Like I had done for Quake, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D before it, I downloaded a ton of mods and custom maps for Half-life. I played a lot of Half-life when it originally came out. I figured I would strike while the iron was hot and try to get some attention by playing through the game and commenting on it while I played. Around the same time, the Black Mesa Half-life 2 mod was finally coming out after being worked on for the better part of 8 years. I really like talking about video games and trying to explain them.

Several months ago, I had the idea that I should start streaming or making video game related Youtube videos.
