Half Life 1 was my best memories of FPS gaming. Pretty much all of it. It's all amazing. I even liked Xen - I know a lot of people don't.

Finally after about 9 years in development, the free Half Life 2 mod, Black Mesa, has been released. This is a re-make of Half Life 1 using the HL2 Source engine.

So far I've played up to Power Up and it's awesome (although actually kinda hard, on Normal difficulty). Here's a torrent for it: http://www.mediafire.com/?khmzyygg4vetko0

Here's the official site: http://release.blackmesasource.com/

Question

does one need to have Half life 2 to play this? (i'm guessing yes)

No, HL2 (or any other game) is not required.

Yer I was following this eagerly back in the day. Of course... then I realised the game was being made in Valve time. ._.

Finally it's out (or at least a beta) and I have to say what I've played so far is pretty awesome. They've even got entirely new voice actors, and way more custom models, especially for the scientists (they actually have younger versions of Eli Vance and Isaac Kleiner).

I've spotted the G-Man once so far, but have yet to see Barney (or maybe I just didn't pay attention previously...)

Right now I'm up to the point where the military start shooting up the place.


This mod is good for me because, to my shame, I never actually played Half Life 1 to completion. I only ever purchased it AFTER I had finished Half Life 2 (actually I got it for free with Half Life 2 I think). And I didn't really finish it because by then the graphics were too old for me lol. So yeh this is very good for me.

Good old Orange Box... damn Valve why don't you do this shit anymore (Half Life 2, Half Life 2 episode 1, Half Life 2 episode 2, portal, and team fortress), there has never been a bargain such as that before or since in gaming history...

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 16 2012, 8:36 am by Oh_Man.

Given the quality of Black Mesa, I wouldn't be surprised if Valve ends up with some sort of formal relationship with the developers (either hires them all, or adopts it as their own product to sell and gives a cut to the devs, or port to consoles, or release the Xen levels in conjunction with Episode 3 or something).

I've just finished it now. There are a few niggles with it (as experienced by myself and others on the official forums):
- The marines are too strong. They react far too fast - if your leg just barely peaks out from some scenery and they're 200 feet away, they'll start blasting at you full-bore. It's even worse when you're up close. The shotgun guys in this respect can be a bit easier since they pause to reload, but they do a lot of damage in a hurry. They're also very accurate from long range, more accurate than they should be. There are a couple of very difficulty battles as a result of this. Vortigaunts don't have a long enough charge up for their attack; Houndeyes are also quite quick to let-loose but given they were almost entirely non-threatening in HL1 this is a good change.
- Some levels are cut down quite a lot, particularly On A Rail (which I always hated anyway - new version is much more fun) and Surface Tension, which is a pity because the original ST was very fun, however the OP marines make this less enjoyable. Some of the later levels are verbatim HL1 with very few changes, if any.
- MP5 machine gun is too inaccurate and the clipsize is too small to actually kill marines with it, so almost never use it. This leaves you relying on the magnum and crossbow a lot. Also the glock is surprisingly powerful, I was using it right up till the end, mainly because the MP5 was so useless.
- A few crashes, particularly during Surface Tension, and very weird FPS issues with the Garg battle before Forget About Freeman.
- Assassin's way way weaker than in HL1, but they were quite frustrating there so maybe not a bad thing.

Also I found in BM that there were some weapons I pretty much never used, whereas I did use them in HL1 itself: snarks (marines kill them too quick), trip mines (no real opportunities). GLUON gun seems to chew through the ammo just a little fast, but very powerful.

Wow so you can play right up until the end? I wonder why they are calling it a beta then.

just downloaded this, but I couldn't get any farther than the part where the crowbar usually is because the crowbar wasn't there. Does anyone know how to get the crow bar or if I'm doing something wrong?

AFAIK they aren't calling it a Beta? It ends at Lambda Core - the Xen levels aren't finished yet. Probably sometime middle of next year for them (not this year, anyway).

What actually stopped you from continuing? It's a re-make, not an identical copy. The crowbar comes a little later, but you can't miss it because you must pick it up to proceed. Use flares to set zombies on fire and keep your barney alive.

Well there are definitely parts you CAN skip I know that from experience. Picking up the crossbow for the first time, for example...

And wait that was Barney back then? I guess I missed that... I could of sworn his face wasn't the same face from HL2.

And I dunno where I heard it was being called a beta... from somewhere...

In the hallways while leaving the test chamber area, the door at the end of the hallway with the two lasers shooting out of the walls. From what I remember you smash the glass on the door with the crowbar that's normally laying in front of it and crawl through.

That wasn't Barney, it was "a barney" - a generic term for any security guard in Half Life.

Half Life: Blue Shift established that Barney is at the very start of the tram ride that is banging on a door with a flash light. I believe he was included in Black Mesa as well.

Couple of other bad points:
- The tentacle monster in Blast Pit is a little screwy. I personally didn't have too much trouble with it, but others have. In HL1 there was no sprint, but there is in BM, which makes this segment fairly easy - it's safer and faster to distract with a grenade and then sprint to the ladders, rather than crawling (BM has no 'walk' mode, despite it being in the controls section).
- Infinite sprint is a bit cheesy
- The first Icathysaur that you're supposed to kill with the crossbow, I just fell in the water and killed it with my pistol, it didn't even charge me or damage me at all. Later on there are others and they did charge and did significant damage, but still very easy to kill with a pistol.

This door still exists, except it's filled up with junk. If you get near it, it tells you to pick it up with E and throw it away with LMB.

Yer, that's how I missed the crossbow. I thought it was a little to easy, so I reloaded and did a bit of exploring, and found a scientist who told me to get the crossbow to kill the fish thing. Did you miss that too?

I was talking about how I did that section in BM. In HL1 I did it properly with the crossbow.