Black Mesa Valvetime review

Black Mesa Archive The Cafeteria
#201

As my personal review posted earlier in the week, I stated that Ive played both for the first time when they came out both HL1 and BM. The thing is I gave HL1 back when new a 9.3 score and I still stand by that 9.3 score. BM on the other hand while I liked it it just wasnt up to par as the orignal. The story was there but large chunks of it was missing which resulted in me only giving BM a 9.0 score.

Now I didnt watch Valve Time video, but if their the people I remember seeing once or twice on youtube with nothing but cursing throughout the whole video with the two guys thinking its funny to be acting like that in a review well then I have to say I dont think their professional and dont see the point in why people are getting upset over what a bunch of amatures has to say about a game. I dont see people getting upset with the amature reviews here that dont hold up this game as the god of all games.

Like me, while I dont think BM is as good as HL1 was when comparing my experiances and how I felt playing both of them the very first time I cant exactly say that BM is total crap. Yea some of the voice acting is a little akward such as some of the voices sounding off like Eli for instance, but that is small fish to me when I am not seeing or atleast hearing about how the military is getting ripped to pieces and make it believeable that they are pulling out due to losses. Seemed to me they were actually winning against the Xenian invasion.

#202

A 9.0 score is a fantastic score for a mod. I know that you are comparing it with your review score of the original, but it’s still a great score on its own.

#203

Yeah I loved that scene, especially when the scientists start banging on the door screaming “Freeman…? FREEMAN!!? What’s going on in there? Oh crap, they’ve set a trap for him”, followed by a HECU shouting “Squad, neutralize Freeman!” before breaching through the skylight with jump ropes. So epic. The music kicked ass aswell :slight_smile: Infact the whole Questionable Ethics chapter was probably my favorite.

Oh, and I just finished the mod, 10/10, one of my favorite games ever and argueably as good, if not better than the original.Thank you BM team, can’t wait for Xen! :3

#204

yes the main problem with the review is with the attitude. It is a hate video, with the only focus on the bad parts of the game. not a review. i can accept that you dont like certain game aspects, but i cant accept that you are missing out the obviously good parts in your “review”

#205

i have to disagree with that. i tried playing the mod with both games in mind and it dosent feel like either at all. the crowbar is almost useless compared to the original(you know its bad when its a safer option to shoot barnacles instead of hitting them and taking health damage)

half-life 2 felt very much like the original especially the weapons, black mesa dosent. here with gameplay the crowbar has been nerfed so much you would only bother to use it against headcrabs, the pistols been nerfed beyond any moderate use, the machine gun has been nerfed to hell with the ammo restrictions that don’t make any sense.

and on top of weapon nerfing all of the enemies have been beefed up just to do it. the original and HL2 throughout the game built up to harder and harder enemies although in the original the easier ones stayed throughout which was a design flaw. here they tried beefing up the 2 enemies that were only meant to be stepping stones and made them more annoying than a challenge. the houndeye is still pretty easy to kill but now even more annoying with the faster attack time and vision distortion and makes me absolutely hate them whenever they show up. the bullsquid also got this problem when they beefed up the attack to be acid based like the antlion workers but from what i can tell has way to much of a splash range and is still easy to kill but just more annoying trying to not get hit when you first see it.

i tried playing the game like both and it dosent feel like either and thats when you know they are doing something wrong. they should have kept the original balance but gotten rid of easier enemies like bullsquid and houndeye near the end, not try to balance them. if it aint broke dont fix it so who the #$@# thought that changing the core mechanics was a good idea? im not talking about stuff that would have been an addition to existing gameplay like ADS, sprint, the 02 counter, thats fine but im talking about the core mechanic balance changes.

#206

Their intention was always to create the game as if Valve were making Half-Life with existing modern-day standards and technology. Of course things would change. Things are different now.

#207

What are you talking about? The crowbar in Half-Life was crap.

#208

black mesa is half life as gordon remembers it at the end of hl2

#209

Drowning the scientist’s audio out really works, it contributed to the build up. But I think making him inaudible is a mistake; I stayed down in the blast door ramp so I was able to hear him, and it really gave me a stand back little scientist man, I got this feel as the music and action crashed in. I hate to know that some players missed out on this because they went deeper into the room.

You guys should also look at the music volume throughout the entire game. Sometimes it’s so loud that not only does it cover up SFX and dialogue, but it becomes dramatically inappropriate for places where the music needs to be more subtle, non-action segments being the best example.

In my play experience - make that several experiences, I failed to win the fight several times on normal difficulty. I went in with high health, power, and ample ammunition. I still failed every single attempt that I left the door ramp to use even the smallest portion of the room as a play area. The desk and boxes were cover for the grunts, not me.

Slowing reaction time with convars greatly improved the situation into something that sounds like the same game you designed. But as of release, grunts are so fast on the draw that use of imperfect cover is suicide in some segments, and restricts the player’s use of the field to the point of being unfun for most of the game - stay put or lose. In the original half-life I was accustomed to changing position/angle-of-attack and had a good time doing so.

Off topic, but while you brushed the subject I think it’s important enough to get my voice out.

#210

No offence to you John Rossy, but here is a bit of critique to your review. Not the opinion expressed in it, only on what I feel is creating a different message than what you say that you want to convey.

The problem here isn’t that the you are wrong, everyone is entitled to their opinion. Frankly, the problem to me was that the review was poorly made. A good review takes up both the good and the bad points of the game, and besides for a few quick positive glance-overs, your review did not portray anything positive about the game. As others have stated, this video was a critique, not a review.
If you, the reviewer, want to convey that you liked the game, you should have devoted a part of the video for conveying this to the viewer. If you feel that you cannot fit your opinions on a certain ammount of time (as you have said in this thread) then you should either not publish, or devote more time or space to the review, simple as that.

This video seems like obvious flaimbait to me. The fact that you are here, politely taking the debate with us is a great gesture, and it makes me less inclined to think it actually was made for flame-bait, but I am not entirely convinced. If the review was double the lengt, using the same ammount of time on the positive sides of the game, I think a lot of people would like the review a whole lot more, and you would have conveyed everything you did, while not looking like a complete jerk, like you do in your video now.

Also, I think that recording a review when you have not slept for that long is a really dumb idea.

#211

in the original it worked against headcrabs, zombies, barnacles, hound eyes and possibly vortigaunts if it wasn’t a group and you fought in a hit and run style although you rarely had this kind of an opportunity.

now its only good on head crabs and a little bit on zombies. that’s terrible re-balancing if you can even call it that.

#212

You weren’t supposed to run around like Rambo in the first game swinging your crowbar around. I think you are confused here. HL1 was unbalanced more than BM is in my opinion. Heck, if I have to hear one more time that the crowbar doesn’t do anything, I am going to buy one myself and use it. The Devs designed the game so that certain weapons were better suited for certain enemies, not for ONE weapon to be overpowered and have tons of ammo so that you can be RAMBO. That is RUN AND SHOOT. This is Gordon Freeman…which means you RUN. SHOOT. THINK. LIVE. ETC. Many players have said many things are fine if you use them correctly. There are some things that seem universally across the board as needing tweaked. I have heard the same people complaining about the same things in every thread. If I could run through this game killing 50% of the enemies with a crowbar…then what does that prove? It is overpowered? If it can effectively kill 2-3 types of enemies then that seems to have done rather well. I have seen people use the mp5 wonderfully, I have seen the pistol be used in the clutch. If some people can hit the head and the enemy dies faster, then…aim for the head?

The keyword in all of this ranting is “THINK!”[/SIZE]

I don’t play a game on the hardest difficulties first. Oddly enough, I start at easy so that I can get adjusted to controls, weapons, enemies, aiming, etc. Then I move to the harder difficulties. I have seen people run into this game on hard and fight through it…I have seen people run into this game on easy and struggle. It is not always easy for everyone. I played on normal and felt pretty challenged. I used all of my weapons unlike HL1 where I used the mp5 and shotgun most of it. I am sorry if I seem like I am coming across like a dickhead but I am just trying to show that the game has a learning curve that many players aren’t respecting and are getting punished for it. There are players who play every game on hard and breeze through it. There are players who play many games on easy and barely make it through. Hell, I can’t remember the last time I played a game on hard without using cheats halfway through. Will I do it with this one? Doubt it from what I have heard from others. I am not a master player so I tend to stick to what is fun and exciting.

#213

It is. I throughly enjoyed the game. The comparision I made though was how I felt as I played it vs how I felt when I played the orignal. Playing the orignal back in 1998 when it was new felt slightly better than this does but I attribute it to the fact that I already knew the story. What caused me to give it .3 points less than the orignal is that I noticed the flow of the story seemed faster than the orignal and the fact that when I heard report of how the HECU were pulling out I thought to myself wait why pull out your winning.

#214

I doubt their intention was to create Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Half-Life. There’s a reason Half-Life remains a classic to this day, and part of it is that it DOESN’T conform to the rules of modern realistic tactical military shooters. If I had one complaint about Black Mesa that really can’t be looked past is that it does, indeed, feel like a modern military shooter. Too many fights with too difficult soldiers and not enough fights with aliens.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

coughmagnumcough Sorry, dry throat.

#215

Actually, back when Half life was released, it was the most realistic Fps you could get in the market. We are talking about an era where shooters were either gray shooter galleries with floating weapons like Quake or colorfull tongue in cheek parodies like Duke Nukem. If anything half life started the trend of realistic shooters.

#216

I beat the Questionable Ethics fight on Hard not too long ago. It was surprisingly much easier than I had anticipated. I went in with around 80 HP and no more than 30 HEV, and it only took me around 5-6 reloads - fewer than my Normal playthrough, even. I’m not exactly the best FPS player around, either. I love the Marine fights on Hard, they feel just right to me. And though this is at first a really difficult fight, if you stop and think about what you’re going to do, and then execute it well, that’s really all there is to it and in the end, it’s not too difficult.

If you’re using the Magnum as your main HECU weapon, that’s the problem right there. On Normal and Hard, you really need to be headshotting them for it to be effective. On my Hard playthrough I’ve mainly been using the crossbow and Tau cannon for medium range, shotgun for close range and believe it or not, the MP5 for long range. I only really use the Magnum at medium range when I’m out of their sight and have a clear headshot - or when I’m feeling like Clint Eastwood and want to try my luck.

#217

Up to a point, however. Half-Life didn’t focus so much on how real war would be fought as on mixing some degree of realism and some degree of sci-fi. Remember, many of your enemies are armoured aliens and a good half of your arsenal comprises organic or impossible weapons. That’s more or less what I’m saying - it played with more realism than everything at the time, but it still played fast-and-loose with its combat to where it wasn’t specifically “real.”

I get that fights against the Marines aren’t supposed to be won by tanking their fire, bum-rushing their lines and gunning them down… But that’s how it ends up playing out for me. Because it’s next to impossible to not take large amounts of fire on account of their accuracy and to take shots without suffering return fire on account of their reaction times, the most effective way often seems to be to let them shoot me long enough to line up a shot and take them down. I’m tanking their damage, sure, but I take more if I try to hide from it.

I try not to, certainly, but the Magnum is so effective it’s difficult to resist a lot of the time. To be fair, I just played through Half-Life, Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and the Magnum is just as effective and enticing there, as well. I mentioned elsewhere about a skirmish in Blue Shift that put me against something like 18 Marines in four waves, and I did a lot of that with the Magnum, just because I was under such pressure I ignored my compunctions to “pretty” combat.

#218

Because it makes sense that there are so many soldiers. The facility is overrun with aliens and that’s practically all you see in the start before the military takes over the whole facility and pretty much begin killing everything in there.
You get topside only to see the military everywhere trying to take care of the disaster. After that you get near the Lambda Complex and what do you see? No military, only assassins, scientists and aliens.

#219

Err… people know that Valvetime is in no way affiliated with the Valve Corporation, right?

#220

Mh. My bad.
Sorry if I’m not searching on Google about it but… why are they called like that, then?

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.