Introduction:
Valve’s heavyweight Game of the Year receives a mind-blowing high-definition reappointment and expansion for the ages.
Background of Half-Life:
Half-Life was Valve’s first game produced upon their founding in 1996 by Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell. Using the Quake engine licensed by id Software they were able to produce a horror first-person shooter that provided many innovations such as NPC (non-playable character) interaction, highly intelligent AI (artificial intelligence), and unique operational properties of the game’s vast arsenal. Couple all of these various facets to an engaging narrative across a sprawling setting and you get the recipe for Game of the Year. Released for Christmas season 1998, Half-Life’s influence on the genre was seismic with its multiple iterations of deathmatch and teamplay modes and modifications including Team Fortress Classic and the vaunted Counter-Strike. With the advent of its sequel in 2004 along with the rise of the Steam platform for purchasing and managing a library of games along with interconnectivity with a Friends list to communicate and gather gamers to play together, Valve gave the 1998 release a visual upgrade using their new Source engine. Half-Life: Source as it was called was a direct port of the 1998 game offering no new features.
Unlike some of its contemporaries in the FPS genre of the time, Half-Life isn’t about going room to room and slaughtering large quantities of monsters. Instead owing to its horror survival dynamic, the majority of the game entails traversing a wide variety of puzzles such as getting around locked doors or reactivating machinery to progress through the levels. Much of the game appears very empty and haunting, with a number of conflicts arising with an array of enemy characters throughout. The game’s protagonist, Gordon Freeman, is a Theoretical Scientist that takes part in an experiment that goes very wrong. The experiment opens an interdimensional gate that plants alien beings from another world on Earth that attack every human in sight. It’s up to Freeman to progress from the wreckage of the underground Black Mesa facility to the surface. In addition to the alien monsters the other opposition will be HECU (Hazardous Environment Combat Unit) Marines sent in to eliminate all witnesses of the accident and the Black Ops, which are there to kill all scientists and even the Marines!
Enter Black Mesa:
Several years after the release of the original game came a third-party remake called Black Mesa. It was intended to expand upon the original game with greater depth of the building structures, hazards, and puzzles as opposed to the direct recreation in Half-Life: Source. The project’s origins came from two separate modification efforts, one being called Leakfree and the other Half-Life: Source Overhaul Project. The two projects merged into a single development team known as Crowbar Collective, and thus became a mod known as Black Mesa. Intended for a 2009 release, the team backed off and changed its release date to “when it’s done”. On September 14, 2012, Black Mesa was released featuring recreations of all of Half-Life’s chapters except for the final showdown in the alien world Xen, which Crowbar Collective intended to rework heavily later. This was due to Xen being considered the weakest point in the original game and the team wanted to improve upon it to give the game a more fitting ending. 2012 saw Valve’s Steam platform roll out a program called Steam Greenlight, which allowed Steam users to vote on games to be included in Steam’s online storefront; Black Mesa was one of ten titles to be admitted to the Steam store by user votes.
Black Mesa received many updates between 2012 and 2020, the last of which has been named the Definitive Edition, which is what will be covered in this very article. Definitive Edition employed several graphical updates and also revamped all non-Xen chapters to be more challenging than before. It was released on November 25, 2020.
Aesthetics & Experience:
So with all the factual details out of the way, now I can share my experiences with this incredible mod. From the opening tram ride, which was largely a lot of empty space in the original game, you will find a significant expanse of office buildings and a food court, along with what just appears to be an ecosystem for the NPCs to just go about their business. I wanted to noclip out of the tram and just walk around the rooms to watch the scientists and security guards operate. Once you enter the Sector C Test Labs you will find so many computers and machines with such intricates details as having blue screens of death (probably in reference to the “system crash”) and high resolution textures for the dials and faces of instrumentation. The sequence of obtaining the Hazard Suit is way more involved, looking more like the heads up display of the T-800 Terminator than anything else.
As the game progresses, then comes the science experiment gone wrong. The visual effects of the resonance cascade are far more involved, and as Freeman is pulled into the alien universe and back, there’s the added effect of making it appear he was knocked out and physically gets back up to jump into action. Among the many upgrades seen in Black Mesa, you are capable of breaking glass and jumping through it (!) to slip into office rooms to get around obstacles. While the original game employed what was probably a unique innovation then by having to spin valves to turn machines on or open pipes, Black Mesa takes it a step further where there are parts where you need to find the missing valve and plug it in to activate it. There are a number of puzzles throughout where you use the Pick Up feature like this to plug into the spot the part needs to go to progress forward in the levels.
The enemy AI is far more challenging, I found even the simple little Headcrabs a lot more difficult to kill than before. While a lot of the old dialogue was re-recorded with new voice talent, there is a lot of extended speech throughout as well. Immediately after the accident there are radio transmissions in the offices trying to play up the disaster with an emergency broadcast message. You will even find crashed cars with the doors open and airbags deployed making the open door ding sound. Virtually every audible aesthetic imaginable is featured, the enemies even have dynamic speech depending on how much they’re attacked.
If there were areas in the old game that seemed very bright, they are much darker in Black Mesa to lend to the horror survival effect. The flashlight doesn’t appear to have any battery capacity, so you can use it as much as you want. The dynamic shadow effects flashing the light on objects is like something out of a dream. I liken the visual aesthetics of Black Mesa to seeing Jurassic Park (1993) for the first time: you can’t really believe your eyes and you’re filled with an array of intrigue and wonderment. The On A Rail chapter adds water which was absent from the 1998 game and has the most brilliant use of reflections I think I’ve ever seen in a game. The level of detail is so spellbinding it’s no wonder the full game installed exceeds 37 GB.
Like other Source games, the main title screen will feature a different background of the chapter you’re presently on. Seeing the creatures crawling around on this page with the droning moody soundtrack is among one of the most overlooked cool aesthetics in the game. All original Half-Life releases along with the expansion packs had very minimal music that seemed very few and far between throughout the games. Black Mesa employs a more intricate soundtrack to amplify the mood to an 11.
All in all, Black Mesa is undoubtedly one of the greatest creation ever for one of the most iconic and inventive FPS games of all time. It really helped me remember what made Half-Life so great that Christmas 1998; it’s not just an FPS, it’s an immersive horror movie-like experience like no other. Survival horror wasn’t invented or stopped with Half-Life, but it’s hard to dispute that combined with all the other items in its collective arsenal that anyone did it better.
Half-Life
Developer: Valve
Released: November 19, 1998
Engine: GoldSrc
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 2, OS X, Linux
Black Mesa
Developer: Crowbar Collective
Initially Released: September 14, 2012
Last Release: November 25, 2020
Engine: Source
Platforms: Windows, Linux
Tech Tips:
So my machine is an old i7 920 with 16 GB RAM and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 video card and it runs the game exceptionally well given its age. I found a few quirks along the way where the game would spontaneously freeze up (and I would have to use my blind Alt+Tab Task Manager ‘end task’ trickery to escape) and it turned out to be some settings in the Nvidia panel that weren’t set right. Ensure Power Management Mode is set to Optimal power, Low Latency Mode is set to Off, and Texture Filtering Quality is set to Performance. Upon changing these, the game has mostly worked fine since… I did manage to get an out of texture memory message, but that’s to be expected with how huge the game is and me having about 100 Chrome tabs open in the background.
Check out the Photo Gallery to see the game’s mesmerising imagery and some of the features I mentioned above.
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