AWKWARD ZOMBIE

(HL1 Remake)

It's out btw.

http://release.blackmesasource.com/

It's epic. I'm to the rocket test chamber with the hentai tentacles from hell and called it a day last night. Valve needs to hire everyone who made this game and give them a job. It isn't entirely complete yet, Xen is to come later. But it HAS been since the release of Half Life 2 that they've been working on it, so it is about time they released something. And now they can say it with all honesty, Black Mesa came out before Half Life 3, lol.

A Black Mesa thread? The perfect place to put this.

oh god my sides

I wonder if they'll ever do Blue Shift or Opposing Force

From what I've heard there WAS a team working on Blue Shift, but I haven't heard from that camp in a couple of years.

Tbh, I could never beat blue shit because a scientist would always die and you need them to not die.

I doubt it

I'm really enjoying this mod a lot. Singing its praises would be a much longer list than listing where I think it could use improvement so here's what I think could be made better (mostly nitpicks. nevertheless, they stood out to me)

crowbar's swing animation looks terrible to me. No one else seems to have mentioned it, but I think it looks like a forgotten placeholder animation.

magnum sounds really really weak when firing it. Just does not do justice to the 1-hitting beast it really is. Also I think the iron sights seem really imprecise. Way too large.

AI seems pretty flawed. This one is actually a genuine problem. Sometimes they detect me when I'm crouchwalking several feet behind them, sometimes their awareness seems more normal. Sometimes they snap aim to my head and deal massive damage when I hardly have time to react. Yet, still, I once killed 2 soldiers at point blank range without taking damage just by spamming strafe keys and getting glock headshots.

There's no option to use HL1's style of weapon switching. I'm sure this is just a minor inconvenience for most people who just get used to it after a couple of hours. I'm just... a slow learner, I guess. I get into a way of doing things and I have a very very hard time changing. Right now I'm NOT playing because there's a fairly tough combat scene that I can't beat because every single time I load my save, at some point, I screw up and try to bring out a weapon in the way you would in HL1, causing me to bring out the whole wrong weapon. I've been doing my best to adjust, but it's just resulted in repeated failure and frustration. It wouldn't have been hard to include an option for old-style weapon switching and I would have very much appreciated it.

Other than that there are a few one-off spots where I disagree with decisions from a game mechanic perspective. But the rest of the game (most of it) is solid to me and the mod is, really, just about exactly what I hoped for: The chance to replay the game I love but with better graphics and new details and nuances to discover. Sort of breathing new life into a game that had previously shown me everything it had to offer.

Curious, did they keep the Female Black Ops assassin's booby bouncan' in? I'm only at We've Got Hostiles so far so I wouldn't know.

Maybe we can get the team to make HL3 while they're at it

not that I noticed. It was actually removed in later steam versions as well, IIRC. The wiki would tell you that tidbit for sure
http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Black_Ops

I'm interested in reading what you guys think of this review of the mod.



I'm especially wondering if it's fair to change the way you judge a game based on if it's a professional game, or a mod/ indie game.

I think it's a bit unfair to judge a mod the same way you'd judge a professionally made game, especially since a lot of people who make great proletariats aren't what you'd consider professionals. That said, for something like Black Mesa which is a recreation of an entire game and also has been building hype for so long, I think it's perfectly reasonable to compare it to Half-Life 1.