It's more like Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho than the cleaned-up and "digitally remastered" release of Star Wars. It recreates the entirety of Half-Life in Half-Life 2's Source engine. But the scope of Black Mesa would have been an undertaking for any team. This is comparing apples and oranges a bit since there's a big difference between working in a well-funded, dedicated development team and a team of initially unpaid fans who are chipping away at a dream project while working day jobs. That's 16 years of development for a remake of a game that took only two years to develop.
It's been in development in one form or another since shortly after the release of Half Life 2 in 2004.
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The new suddenly stands out like a sore thumb, forcing me to recognize the difference between Black Mesa's hobbyist origins and Half-Life's now canonical, genre-defining level design.īlack Mesa's frequent overextensions don't detract from it as one of the most ambitious mods in the history of video games. When it fails like this, Black Mesa brings the whole audacious experiment crashing down. But too often, like the battle at the missile silo, Black Mesa's additions bite off more than they can chew, adding too many enemies, new art assets, and dramatic music in an attempt to turn what was once a simple, memorable room or beat into an action set piece. New or overhauled spaces are woven seamlessly into the original, and capture its spirit of sci-fi, corporate dread so perfectly, I had to check videos of Half-Life on YouTube to check if they were actually new. Some of them are so subtle, they're hard to notice.
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In the original Half-Life, I could end this fight with one well placed grenade, but here, in the lovingly crafted fan-made remake called Black Mesa, it is a long and drawn-out fight, where I scramble from cover to cover, reload, and pick off not-so-clever enemies until the path is clear.īlack Mesa is full of these embellishments on the original Half-Life. What was once a simple rectangular space with a missile silo lid at its center is now a sprawling arena filled with boxes, military equipment, and soldiers running around shooting me. I turn the corner, as I have many times before, but I don't find what I expect.
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