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Sep. 17th, 2012 08:07 pmHoly shit guys! Black Mesa Source! It's real! It's finally out! After eight years of development - damn! There cannot be enough exclamation points!!
The original Half-Life was a big part of my kidhood (along with Quake & Team Fortress & Wolfenstein), so I've been looking forward to this remake mod ever since I first heard about it in... oh... 2005. After a false psych-up for a 2010 release, I'd stopped hoping it would ever come out. And then, of course, without any fanfare, they announced it would be out in fifteen days. And then it actually was out. And my, it's mighty fine.
One of the things I've loved about all Valve games, but specifically the HL series, is the emphasis on story. The original HL didn't actually have much of that - moreso than it's competitors at the time, but still. But still. It was a game. You didn't get much out of it beyond something had gone horribly wrong and now you got to kill all of your coworkers (and the monsters, too, of course).
But now... wow. The mod team didn't change much, but what they did has made this game so many ways more disturbing. The first time (and third and seventh) I played HL it was kind of amusing to kill the other scientists. They were in the way, after all. And annoying. But now it's actually pretty horrible. I didn't kill the first guard I saw and take his gun - I kept him with me to help keep the horrors at bay.
Like I said, the changes are small, subtle. The NPCs have more dialogue. They engage with you more. There are references to life outside the lab. And it helps that with the graphics update they look a whole lot more human. And then there're the labs themselves, the details they put into every empty office and corner. It's brilliant. It's beautiful.
And it makes that post-catastrophe world so much more immediate and terrifying. Immersive. In the original version when you first leave the test chamber and begin to comprehend what has happened, you're first greeted with the corpse of a security guard. It doesn't have a weapon so you move on.
In the new version, this is the guard who greeted you with "hey hombre" and a nod and now there's a scientist futilely pumping away on his chest and you can see even from where you stand in the doorway that his eyes are open and blank. Dead.
It's horrible. It's brilliant. And it just goes to show that for stories the details make or break it. Even in video games. Especially in video games.
The original Half-Life was a big part of my kidhood (along with Quake & Team Fortress & Wolfenstein), so I've been looking forward to this remake mod ever since I first heard about it in... oh... 2005. After a false psych-up for a 2010 release, I'd stopped hoping it would ever come out. And then, of course, without any fanfare, they announced it would be out in fifteen days. And then it actually was out. And my, it's mighty fine.
One of the things I've loved about all Valve games, but specifically the HL series, is the emphasis on story. The original HL didn't actually have much of that - moreso than it's competitors at the time, but still. But still. It was a game. You didn't get much out of it beyond something had gone horribly wrong and now you got to kill all of your coworkers (and the monsters, too, of course).
But now... wow. The mod team didn't change much, but what they did has made this game so many ways more disturbing. The first time (and third and seventh) I played HL it was kind of amusing to kill the other scientists. They were in the way, after all. And annoying. But now it's actually pretty horrible. I didn't kill the first guard I saw and take his gun - I kept him with me to help keep the horrors at bay.
Like I said, the changes are small, subtle. The NPCs have more dialogue. They engage with you more. There are references to life outside the lab. And it helps that with the graphics update they look a whole lot more human. And then there're the labs themselves, the details they put into every empty office and corner. It's brilliant. It's beautiful.
And it makes that post-catastrophe world so much more immediate and terrifying. Immersive. In the original version when you first leave the test chamber and begin to comprehend what has happened, you're first greeted with the corpse of a security guard. It doesn't have a weapon so you move on.
In the new version, this is the guard who greeted you with "hey hombre" and a nod and now there's a scientist futilely pumping away on his chest and you can see even from where you stand in the doorway that his eyes are open and blank. Dead.
It's horrible. It's brilliant. And it just goes to show that for stories the details make or break it. Even in video games. Especially in video games.
