Blast Pit was very entertaining :)

ValveTime just reviewed Black Mesa.



A lot of people disagree with them

People forget this is a fan-made mod and not made by a professional company. :S ValveTime are too harsh.

EDIT: Meh, I don't need to justify the bad points of the mod, I sound like a whiney fanboy. :P What's important is that I and many others are enjoying BMS.

Oh, and I tweaked some sounds to improve that enjoyment a little for myself.

Don't know how they can say the voice acting sucks, it's some of the best voice acting I've heard considering it's done by amateurs. I certainly did not experience it as a bother. Most of the lines and the way they are said have a typical Half-Life feel to them.

I do agree that all the added details in levels can sometimes be confusing, but I still prefer a highly detailed console over a flat surface with just one button on it. And yeah the framerate drops are disappointing, especially since everyone seems to have them it seems like this is something could and should have fixed.

Still I'm not going to judge a mod that a small team of people worked 8 years on without budget and without professional assets, based on the standards of a triple A title. And apparently Valve Time thought this was okay to do, which is kind of weird.

I like the voice acting so far (except for Eli's voice, which doesn't really suit him [with Kleiner sounding really like Kleiner]), that's true it's above the average fandubbing level.

I don't experience any framerate drops, works perfectly fine. Although, I've found a few (not many) collision bugs like a ladder that you can walk through

This. I mean I'll admit that my nitpicking nature keeps picking out stuff that could've been done a little better, and missed opportunities, but I do that with all games. All things considered, the BMS team did an outstanding job, and I'm not sure a professional development team could've done better.

If I were to knit-pick, I'd mention that nearly all the scientists sound annoyingly like Kleiner. I'd go on to say that it's annoying that there are so many valve wheels around, most of which don't do anything but many of which are vital to the gameplay, and yet there's no cosmetic difference.
There are one or two parts of the UI, the graphics and the modelling that I feel have been made 'retro' for no reason other than (I assume) nostalgia, which I think detracts from the absorption and otherwise excellent game.

If I was going really far I'd mention a door I encountered that had a large padlock on it borrowed directly from HL2. In HL2, said doors could easily be opened via the crowbar, whereas in this, it was a solid object.

But I concur with everyone else; the little things don't detract from the game. It's great fun, very solidly built and if I'd paid full price for it I wouldn't be disappointed. In the trailer I thought a lot of the sounds weren't great but having played it they do actually sound really good.

The only thing that really bugs me are the confusing valves; I spent ages at one point trying to turn one from different angles because I couldn't find another way forwards (turned out I was in a secret area and had missed the proper route). That and the concessions to nostalgia. But they're small things overall; the game is very well-made.

The only usable are (so far, I'm still playing) the red big valve wheels. That's true that there some red big unusable ones, but not quite many.

This is deliberate. In the original Half-Life, all the scientists had Kleiner's voice actor, and all the security guards had Barney's and G-man's voice actor. The BMS team managed to find two people who could emulate their voices really well.

While we are knit-picking, the music is TOO DAMN LOUD SOMETIMES!

I haven't spotted any non-interactive red wheels. In fact the distinction between interactive and non-interactive objects has been readily apparent to me thanks to the use of Valve's classic red=interactible colour scheme.

The only things that have thrown me are the aforementioned padlock and buttons on computer banks.

I have, one or two, so I understand that may be a little confusing

Although I usually rant about how quiet music is in most games, I have to agree there. But, fortunately, nothing holds you from turning its volume down

So... That's another concession to nostalgia?

I've not had trouble with control panels. At first I checked them all, as I did in HL2, but it didn't take me long to look out for the key objects - the big, red buttons.
I sometimes got a bit aimless, completing objectives then backtracking, not sure if I'd done everything, but then I had similar problems the first time in played through HL2; I guess I don't really listen when there's other stuff going on. But it is sometimes hard to hear the NPCs as they hand out their exposition if there's other noise, like the guard who whispers at you outside the silo with the three-arm-monster. Sometimes they talk to you when you're getting shot at, too.

While we're nit-picking, it's not spelled 'knit-picking'. FYI.

I was just copying Splat because I thought I had it wrong :(

The term comes from picking lice-eggs (nits) from hair - You're picking out tiny details which you don't approve of.

Man, thinking about it in detail makes my head itch. :P

Turn it down in the options.

Third part is now up! Featuring the resonance cascade:

Freeman's Mind in Black Mesa Source, Part 03

The difference between my version and other people's is that I try and retain BMS's dialogue and sounds where I can - Even making FM's audio work with the dialogue, which is hard. Maybe this could use even more polish, but I'm lazy.

Still, it's a little more complete and thorough than the first one.

Oh, I assumed it was something to do with knitting, which having watched my (amateur) sisters, seemed to involve a lot of... nit-picking.

I am loving the shit out of the Black Mesa Soundtrack. Joel Nielsen did an amazing job on that.

Speaking of the soundtrack, who else thinks the music near the end of Blast Pit should have been synced like this?



(Currently it plays when you enter the silo a third time, which can be hit and miss depending on the speed of the player)

I've suggested this to the BM devs and already have one of the moderators on the forums there agreeing with me.

Some of the music is indeed in the wrong spot. Sometimes they get triggered before the action starts, which is kind of weird. Same thing when you get to the surface for the first time and the action music starts before the marines even know you are there. Just a few things that could be better tweaked in a next patch.

While that video does it very awesomely, you can never accurately predict how fast the player moves. You'd have to trigger it with something that is timed with the music and the event so the player is already in the right location when it starts playing. If the fire button would be trigger it would have to trigger the blast a little later to sync with the music, though it might feel a bit generic to have the music start when you hit a button.

It should be easy enough to split off the start of the song from the bit where it picks up, like they did for the Garg sequence in Surface Tension. (Where incidentally, they cut off half the level! How dare they! :P)

Blimey, that used to be even longer? That one seemed really long to me! (Or maybe I was just phenomenally bad at it.)

Just got Back Mesa a day ago, I couldn't put it down until 2:00AM.

Freeman's Mind in Black Mesa, part 4:



I dunno how I made this one work so well apart from flying through the map first to add and remove a few NPCs. Also filming the laser dodging part took about 20 takes to get as close to correct as I could get it.

I sure put a lot of effort into something that I claim not to care much about. :S

Don't you get the crowbar much much later??

"give weapon_crowbar" "impulse 200"

Same for moving/removing NPCs around - Else I'd have to skip some dialogue 'cause it wouldn't work any more.

Now you're making me want to replay the start even though I haven't yet reached the end.

Okay, So I played a bit more of BM after playing some Half-Life 2 and it only just occurred to me that the Crowbar animations are...well...awful.

Does anyone notice them to be bad? Because to me, it looks like Gordon is tapping things to death whereas on HL2, the Crowbar actually swings around.

(I know it's minor but hey, I look too much into things when it comes to games :))

They're different than normal HL1 and HL2 animations. I have no idea why. It annoyed me, but I think I got used to it

I thought they used the original animation from HL2. But yeah the animation isn't great. Then again, how often do you even use it after you get a gun? After the first 2 levels you can rarely get close enough to use it anyway.

I hit everything with crowbar. I'm too badass to use other weapons if there's no need

I use it a lot; Never waste ammo on Headcrabs. Half-Life rule number 1 :tard:

Besides, you can sing baseball riffs when you punt them across the room with the crowbar.

It was completely supplemented by the Hivehand once I got that, but until then it was very useful.

The crowbar animation is, I suspect, another disappointing Concession to Nostalgia.

Nah, original HL1 animation crowbar swings were a lot better as well, I'm not sure why they made them crap in BS. :S

Anyway, today I learned how to use Sony Vegas (Movie Studio 11). I gave in. Aside from Vegas's bugs, Windows Movie Maker just can't hack stuff like this - After having to put up with it for over a year no matter how many workarounds I've come up with, using Vegas is incredibly liberating in comparison. If only I had it for the Minecraft Abe's Oddysee intro machinima.

Freeman's Mind: Black Mesa edition part 05:



Turns out making these things is good Vegas practice.

Ah, the noble heart of the One Free Man...

To be honest I have to say you got away with quite a lot using just Windows Movie Maker. That crap is so limited I probably couldn't do half the stuff you did with it.

I rarely play computer games and don't keep track of modern releases. Вut liking Half-Life setting in general and Half-Life 1 in particular I was looking forward to this Half-Life re-make. I've tried out Black Mesa these days off and got to the Silo D so far. Keeping in mind that the whole thing was done by a team of enthusiasts, Black Mesa looks impressing. I really like how they've done the architecture: on the one hand it instantly reminds of Half-Life, on the other it's quite thought-through and almost nothing looks out of place; this goes both for office, laboratory and industrial parts. The gameplay is alright too, though there's one thing I don't like - the MP-5 is next to useless with its fire spread and low damage. There are also some geometry and animation glitches but they're neglectable.