Quick Look: Black Mesa

Hey sorry if this comes across as pretty rough - I was having a lot of difficulty adjust to the way the camera moves and such for some reason? It feels a lot different compared to modern FPS engines, i guess.

I tried this a year or two ago and bounced off it quickly, however I'm about 10 hours into the newest release now and really enjoying it. It's like, returning home.

Wow the music that kicks in at 19:00 and THEN THE MUSIC REALLY KICKS IN AT 19:21 LOL!

Vinny mentions it so I have to say it: If you have any interest in horror comics at all, you should check out The Immortal Hulk ongoing run.

It's a soft reboot of the Hulk that casts Bruce Banner as the vessel of dozens of monstrous personalities, the most prominent of which is the Immortal Hulk. You don't need to know anything about Hulk, it touches on a lot of his history in the run, but there are a bunch of fun little homages.

It starts off with body horror and gradually creeps into cosmic horror, casting gamma radiation as a conduit of hellish energy.

It also has some straight up AMAZING art.

Recently got my first ever Gaming PC (glorious RTX 2080ti) and played through the entirety of this game to "break it in". Wonderful experience at 144fps on 1440p 144hz monitor with highest settings.

My first time fully playing through Half Life after a couple of false starts of the original version in the past and now I certainly consider myself a huge fan of the series.

One thing though, it definitely is too long in my opinion and based on my research the padded length is peculiar to Black Mesa and the original Half Life was much more succinct of an experience. Which shows you how wonderful an experience it otherwise is, that my only complaint is it being too long.

That length has left me too tired to jump straight to Half Life 2. I'm currently replaying Portal 1 and 2 as a pallet cleanser, then I'll probably give HL2 a go. And eventually I'm going to end up in a position where I've completed that and the episodes, and I'm going to start to get tempted to get an Index for Alyx...haha.

@rorie: You mean the leaning? You can turn it off in the settings.

"This is a longer level than I remember" is applicable to any part of Half-Life 1 or 2.

It's something more than that, but I need to try it some more. I was running my monitor at 1920x1080 and sometimes that makes performance in games take a nosedive compared to running the monitor at full resolution? It's really weird!

A rare Rorie quick look! Excellent!

I thought this game came out like 4 years ago?

How is the multiplayer in this? I was a beast in HLDM back in the day. Stalkyard for life.

@rorie: side note: the quality of your mic is the best on GB crew!

The lighting in this sucks due to it being Source 1. I highly suggest running Reshade with this. It'll really help out with the atmosphere. This is just too bright. I recommend the Levels shader along with whatever else you may like.

@rorie: Seems alright from where I'm sitting! And big thanks to yourself and the crew for keeping up the Quick Looks despite the general difficulties in doing so.

@rorie: Just got time to watch the video, there are parts of Black Mesa that stress the engine and cause noticeable frame rate drops even on my 2080ti, it's not terrible but since you had v-sync on it would have been pretty harsh, i can't comment on how resolutions run on your extremely impressive monitor :P.
Also BM runs on original Source with a few upgrades from the dev team, which might account for some of the larger areas killing performance.

I finished this back when it came out. they changed a lot of stuff, the train level is completely different and is much shorter for example.

I think the reason no-one really remember the soundtrack of Half-Life is because the music was streamed off the CD, but because the game didn't require you to keep the disc in the drive, most people never even heard it. Same thing with Quake 1.

@rorie@vinny Thanks for this, it does seem like a new take on the first game, new character models, new music, and some scenes which play out differently but for the effort that's been put in I wouldn't ever complain.