3 Props and 3 Knocks

Black Mesa Archive The Cafeteria
#1

While certainly not new to the Black Mesa project (was cheering these guys on like 6 years ago) I just now finished the game for the first time. To celebrate I wanted to say three awesome things about the game and three not so awesome things, just as a sort of way to make a few suggestions. To start I’d like to say that Half-Life is my favorite game of all time, and Black Mesa (once complete) is by far the best version of it. Does this make BM my favorite game? Possibly.

Anyway…lists:

The Good:

  1. The appearance - While I could attribute this the the graphics, I would be remiss in not mentioning how much the developers clearly cared for how this game looked. I was in constant appreciation for the way certain aspects of the game were handled. Very little of the game could be attributed purely to homage and Black Mesa has never felt so real. Particle effects were done tastefully, and the rocket launch was particularly impressive.
  2. The music - Simply fantastic. More than I could have ever expected. That’s all I have to say about it.
  3. The little things - Just little things like Gordon jamming his hand up the Hivehand’s…whatever. The Gluon Gun was remarkably well executed. The voice work was pretty great overall. And even smaller things like the skylight in the room where the Tau Cannon is found. It’s these things that make me forget that this is a mod, and even when I remember that it is, it’s definitely the best mod I’ve ever played.

The Bad:

  1. The crouch jump - There is an egregiousness over reliance on this mechanic. Far too many jumps require its use. This is particularly frustrating during the portal puzzle.
  2. The final confrontation (spoiler alert) - As it sits the end of the game is prefaced by the beautiful but resource intensive portal sequence. This is the only complaint that is probably just me, but there seems to just be way too much going on. This is the only section of the game which caused itself to become unplayable because of performance. I found that the only way to complete this section was to reduce all graphical setting to their minimum, and run in circles around the portal to avoid both looking at the portal and to avoid the Alien Controller’s projectiles. Not sure what can be done to help this, but it was a fairly unsatisfying end to a very satisfying experience.
  3. Soldier AI - This is a little smaller scope than my other complaints, but Soldier AI is pretty…odd. I had one get stuck in an endless loop of grenade spamming the same location. Others are completely omniscient and can, in unison begin firing on me very accurately. This inconsistent behavior makes encounters with human adversaries frustrating. Soldiers are actually the hardest enemies in the game, especially because they are presented in groups. It gives the idea that the alien invasion is not quite as volatile of a threat.

I hope that the fact that this post ends in the negative doesn’t detract from the former positive part of it. Black Mesa is a great accomplishment, and I can’t wait for it to be completed.

#2

I hadn’t realized it until you pointed it out, but there really are times that I forget that this is a mod. The devs did an excellent job executing it.

As for your performance issues in the final room, I had no such problem. However, on my second playthrough of the game, I did get an inexplicable performance drop in some mostly empty room that made the game almost unplayable, but I just did a reboot and it worked fine. I guess the engine bugs out now and then? Did you try restarting your game/computer to see if the lag went away?

#3

I wanted to praise the overall “feel” of the game. Nowadays it’s kind of a trend to make everything look “scratchy”. Sometimes it suites the product very well (Gears of War) and sometimes it’s just there to give at least some distinctive look to a game (in my opinion, Resistance 3). It’s pretty much everywhere now (think Instagram). On the contrary to this industry trend Black Mesa developers made the game extremely clean and polished. Everything in the game bursts with colors. Anomalous materials lab is rich with blue, The HEV suit has a lifted contrast, the crowbar is deep red, bullsqids are dark yellow, man, just look at the Questinable Ethics labs! The Tau Cannon is just sexy…
The game even sounds clean, houndeye SoundFX for example. Even if you look at some abandoned part of the facility like Blast Pit it still manages to look great. It’s kind of like Portal 2, where every small detail appeals to the eye.
Anyway, in my opinion, this is the biggest plus of the mod. Amazing!

#4

I’ve had the same kind of issue as well, but on map where you battle the first group of assassins. I could run around and do everything fine. But if I so much as turned to face the giant room as a whole, it’d lag out extremely hard and it’d go down to like 2FPS.

Only room it’s ever happened to me. :S

#5

Regarding the low FPS at the teleport part, that only happens (at least, with me and others) when you reload a save on that map. It runs fine on my middle end system, just until I reload a save.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.