i am supposed to be cleaning my apartment today instead i spent the last several hour trying out Black Mesa. (for some reason while i played i was tempted to quote the "freemans mind" series lol)
anyway, i think they did a pretty amazing job. Last time i played the original Half life was about 3 years ago, and from what i remember you almost immediatley get your crowbar a gun as soon as you get out of the chamber after the manure hits the ventelator.
What i really loved how they changed it. You dont immediatley get a crowbar or a gun, first part of the level, you really feel like a helpless nerd constantly hiding behind the security guard. and when you finally do get a crowbar later in the level, its your savior and salvation for the rest of the level (ok you get a gun but with too little ammo to last long)
Good job at overglorifying the crowbar!
the detail is amazing, i was Psyched when i found a younger version of Dr Eli and Dr Kleiner (sp?)
another detail i found funny is if you run up to one of the computer terminals in the beginning and activate it, it will return a BSOD speaking of which...
Black mesa runs on Windows 98????
I loved how a security guard and a scientist made a bet if freeman shows up tio work that day or not, and the group of scientists who politley bickered with each other throwing mild insults mixed with scientific jargon.
The soundtrack is AWESOME! if my guess is correct, its original fanmade soundtrack, but they managed to make just the right type of music to that dosent stick out against HL2 soundtracks and fits in very well in black mesa sourse. (the music that played after i put on the hazard suit made me feel so badass)
the awesome special effects like explosion is what really took me by surprise especially when i remember where in the oeiginal game something might be scripted to explode in your face so i was mentally prepaired for that exept i failed. When stuff started blowing up in the game, i actually got scared because of how realistic they were compared to original HL.
Finally the amount of beautiful graphics in B.M.s. nearly burned my videocard!
my radeon 5870 had its fan speed only at 20% (for some reason almost all radeons have that weird issue) i havent figured out how to get the fan at full speed via drivers, so for a while i used ATI tray tools to run the fan at 100% but as time went by i forgit about that, and i just kept it at 20% and it never gave me any problem with any game untill today my graphics card died from overheating. It started working again tho after it cooled off a bit so no trouble. the first game i ever played that actually threated to fry my GPU (in a desktop, games did fry several laptop GPUs in my lifetime)
To conclude my rant i wanted to say with genuine honesty that i seriosly dont think Valve themselves could have made a better HL1 remake (well they kinda did with HL1 sourse but it was the same unaltered game running on the sourse engine with shaded water effects and physics)
the only dissapintment is that Black Mesa Sourse is only up to lambda core which is about 2/3s of the original game. I seriosly hope they finish it. Also, they should remake Blue shift and Opposing force. I was always curious about what happened to Shepard, ... well a reamike wont explain anything new but it would still be very nice to play as Shepard once again.
dont hate people who rip you off,cheat and get away with it, learn from them
