![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlSo... most of this is real good. About 75%.
Black Mesa is a remake of Half-Life, the much-lauded Best FPS Ever, paragon of shooterhood, harbinger of Steam, etc. And like, 75% of it is in fact Half-Life but made better, shinier... I admit, I used a mod to restore a bunch of the classic-style encounters and map design because I really like that kinda thing.
Then there's Xen. Because Xen was A: short and B: widely regarded as bad, they threw out Xen completely and just made an all-new final level set for Black Mesa.
Most of it sucks. Not all of it! Some of it is fun, like most of the chapter "Interloper". But a lot of it goes on far too long, has nothing whatsoever to do with the original design of Half-Life, and... I spent most of it watching for my favorite stuff from the original game to make improved reappearances, like with the rest of Black Mesa. None of it did.
No leaping around on the backs of alien stingray-birds for you! Those are just for decorative purposes.
Black Mesa's Xen may be an okay set of FPS levels but they're not Half-Life's Xen levels and so I sort of don't care about them, and they utterly murder the pacing of the game when I just want to wrap it up and go home. Happily I think there's a mod to get the real Xen back, but uff. That was a letdown.
Oh well, done now.
Black Mesa is a remake of Half-Life, the much-lauded Best FPS Ever, paragon of shooterhood, harbinger of Steam, etc. And like, 75% of it is in fact Half-Life but made better, shinier... I admit, I used a mod to restore a bunch of the classic-style encounters and map design because I really like that kinda thing.
Then there's Xen. Because Xen was A: short and B: widely regarded as bad, they threw out Xen completely and just made an all-new final level set for Black Mesa.
Most of it sucks. Not all of it! Some of it is fun, like most of the chapter "Interloper". But a lot of it goes on far too long, has nothing whatsoever to do with the original design of Half-Life, and... I spent most of it watching for my favorite stuff from the original game to make improved reappearances, like with the rest of Black Mesa. None of it did.
No leaping around on the backs of alien stingray-birds for you! Those are just for decorative purposes.
Black Mesa's Xen may be an okay set of FPS levels but they're not Half-Life's Xen levels and so I sort of don't care about them, and they utterly murder the pacing of the game when I just want to wrap it up and go home. Happily I think there's a mod to get the real Xen back, but uff. That was a letdown.
Oh well, done now.
