So, whilst we’re all still
twiddling our thumbs and scratching our arses waiting for Valve to pull out
their finger and deliver unto us the next instalment of the further adventures
of Dr Gordon Freeman, it was announced earlier this week that Black Mesa would
finally be released on 14 September. Well part of it anyway. It’s been eight
years in the making and it’s still not actually finished. Even loyal followers
of Valve seem unable to absolve themselves totally from the quantum peculiarity
of Valve time (which the original resonance cascade may or may not be directly
responsible for).
One day dammit, one day.
Essentially a remake of
Half-Life developed by around 40 modders using Valve’s Source engine, Black
Mesa is the Half-Life community’s response to the barely noticeable and
somewhat disappointing graphical changes to the original game when it was made
available on Steam in 2004. But this is not just further graphical tweaks;
Black Mesa is a fully realised remake. Supposedly it will divert little, if at
all, from the main storyboard, but the more tedious parts of the original game
have been streamlined and level maps increased in size to accommodate greater
challenge. It has even been suggested that Valve’s marvellous AI routines have
been tweaked and improved upon. If so, wowsers! As a bonus, Black Mesa makes
Half-Life look just as crisp as Half-Life 2, if not better:
So, Black Mesa has the
potential to be most excellent; although re-working a masterpiece means there
is added pressure to deliver. Look at the remakes of most movie masterpieces,
such as Psycho or the recent The Thing travesty. Oh dear. Then there’s the
eight year wait which touches more upon Daikatana time, let alone Valve time.
Let’s hope it’s just a perfection thing, rather than a ‘we’ve kind of ballsed
it up’ thing. More worryingly, from the video sequence above, there seems to be
a lot of swooping camera views. That means cut-scenes. One of the key reasons
as to why Half-Life worked so well was that everything in game was witnessed
from Gordon’s eye-view, absolving the need for an out of body experience and
making the game more interactive as a result. Please, don’t let it be bloody cut-scenes.
'No to cut scenes'. Gordon Freeman, yesterday.
Anyway, enough of the pessimism!
I’m sure it will all work out great in the end. Although Valve are not
involved, there is enough Valve in the starting point for Black Mesa to rise
above many a modern FPS. Despite only half a game (it ends in the Lambda
complex around the point Gordon dimension jumps to the alien world Xen) there’s
expected to be around 10 hours of gaming available, which means plenty of
alien-arse kicking with the now iconic crow-bar. But the really awesome news is
Black Mesa is being offered as a free download from the mod team’s main site. Bless
them and their Tim Berners-Lee approach to sticking two fingers up at
capitalism. Excited? I’ve just let out a little bit of wee…
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