as said in this forums, you act like Half Life’s V.A. is any better
there’s obviously a grudge for such lame ass review
Disliked video and will never subscribe.
This guy in this thread “James Rossi” keeps responding to all of us just to keep the thread active and to keep it at the top of the forum. He is just doing it so that this topic with the URL to his video stays at the top of the list this way a lot of people click the youtube link and he gets his video views.
It is obvious that such a negative review for such a great game is done for their own benefit to get as much attention as possible to gain popularity.
^this
Because it’s IMPOSSIBLE that someone might not actually like Black Mesa, right? No, must be trolling or lying or scheming. Free will is for the birds.
But they (according to the video) actually liked Black mesa, right? oh man, what a mess.
So did I, and I’ve already incurred several “Stop whining!” replies as it is, one to asking why there are lights in air vents and why the use of the flashlight seems to have been diminished. People like me tend to me even more critical of things we like, because those are things we care about. I have, what, 100 posts in three days? You won’t catch me spending that much time discussing, say, Counter-Strike or Firearms.
Liking something doesn’t mean you’re willing to let its flaws slide, is what I’m saying. Not necessarily, at least - it depends on the person. I love Black Mesa and I was still sorely disappointed in the various ways it broke away from Half-Life to the game’s detriment, and I do agree with a lot of the complaints in the review. If anything, seeing how GOOD Black Mesa is just makes me that much more bugged knowing On a Rail got cut in half, or that Marines have displaced the alien threat.
sure, if the points you make for not liking it are valid, which is certainly not the case with that review
except for the HECU thing, but that can be changed
Actually everyone is saying that. But an unbalanced review has little to gain from this line of defense.
I believe there is a whole section here for game bugs, and the cafeteria is full of feedback for stuff that people suggest they should be changed or not cut or tweaked or whatever.
I’m not accusing anyone of that, and I’m aware that you’re not accusing me of accusing you.
Are you implying that you have some form of duty to critique Black Mesa in lue of the fact that other publications won’t? I’d very much agree, and as I’ll say again I even agreed with a lot of the critical statements made in the video.
The problem is what the video lacks to form a review and what needed to be said to separate it from just being a critique - you have to at least attempt to give due emphasis, but more importantly, explanation as to what you liked about the game. The disparity was painfully obvious; usually when a positive statement about the game was made, it was modifying a previous negative statement for the sake of clarity (EX: XYZ was disappointing overall, except for Z, which was satisfactory). This doesn’t mean you can’t dislike more about a game than you like about it and vice-verse; you just have to communicate. I understand time constraints, and when you have to cut, cut proportionately. As to the individual significance of points, it’s entirely up to you and how much they impacted your experience.
Whether or not you’ll see it this way entirely depends on the goals of your review. Typically reviews are designed to inform an audience so that they can make a better decision on what products they should spend their time and money on. How effective and useful you are for this purpose depends entirely on how often your audience agrees with you, and how much they value your opinion. Considering Black Mesa is practically free and so widely known to your audience that you won’t be introducing the product to many people - the entire purpose of doing a review is in question - outside from the members of the audience who just want to know your opinion.
Now, if your main intention of this review was to be critical the weaknesses and missteps of the game, then call it a critique, which has a very different agenda from an entire review. The criticism contained in the video was adequately constructive and in that respect, I think you did a pretty good job with 10 minutes. But if you misrepresent your content with a misleading title, the outrage is justified.
I wasn’t speaking of Black Mesa when I mentioned media of popular consensus, I was referring to any hypothetical to demonstrate a point. Not accusing you of accusing me, again.
I won’t try to explain your numbers, but I do know that a portion of your votes are from users who regular your channel, and that I personally voted it down even though I agreed with most of the individual points expressed, because the content was so heavily biased towards critique that it’s disgraceful to call it a review.
And on another note, I’ve been waiting for the day that someone stops giving letter/number scores to things that aren’t quantifiable. I highly encourage you to do just what you mentioned and rely on good communication to get your case across.
Bad review is bad. I only skimmed through this thread, but felt I had seen enough when I read the guy say something along the lines of “Oh we actually liked a lot of things about the mod, but didn’t feel the need to talk about those things as others will”. This is not what a review should do. They should have done a much better job mentioning reasons why they did like the mod if they had them. Watching that review it comes off as ‘this sucks this sucks and this sucks, but hey get the mod!’
I know I am going a bit off-tropic here, but I really don’t get the feeling that Half-Life took itself super-duper seriously. If anything the original game feels like a tribute to the best elements from weird-science/action pulp stories, with some survival-horror mixed in. The only serious thing about it was that it played these elements relatively straight, and managed to pull it off rather well.
I feel that Black Mesa managed to catch that atmosphere very beautifully, and that is a part of the reason why I really like it.
@Bloodshot
Yeah, I brought up the youtube views as its the only benchmark of any kind with real numbers that I have right now. It’s an incredibly poor benchmark. Who knows how many people have tried to game the votes on either side, or what their reasons may be for voting aside from the video itself. If I ever get better information I’d toss out the Youtube likes/dislikes in a hearbeat.
What I liked about Black Mesa was largely the aspects it replicated from Half-Life. The relative placing of set pieces (ignoring for a moment they lost some sections due to the loss of a team member). The variety of enemies and weapons. There is a bit of a problem in this though that the hard work had already been done by Valve. Level layouts, content balancing, testing of these core values. Replicating them is not small task, but creating them from scratch, concept and all is a much more admirable and monolithic one. In this regard I am less impressed with BM because HL set up such an extensive ground work. It’s like someone took a DaVinci painting and remade it. No matter how impressive it is, DaVinci still pulled the weight that results in massive portions of the final product.
I am reminded of the scene in the labs with the scientists discussing the value of replicating someone else’s experiment. In the end when Black Mesa replicates Half-Life the best it can be is a copy or an incredibly good project. When Black Mesa reimagines Half-Life it is held to a much higher standard. I keep talking about visuals; the level design, custom models, textures, recreations of the NPCs. These are all done incredibly well and is what blew me out of the water. The rest just did not live up in my opinion. If I could I’d take the visuals of Black Mesa, but leave the rest.
@pinkribbonscars
A single example of good or bad acting does not indicate that any opinion is wrong. There was also some interesting info I noticed in the game files. A large percentage of the voice over work was over 2 years old. I can’t check as I am on my laptop but the final scenes DO sound better than earlier content, and that could be attributed to the continued impovement and devlopement of the voice actor’s skills, with the final scenes having been recorded much more recently.
@ShadowNate
It was me and another member by Omnomnick who did the full writeup. Others such as Hectic Glenn did some oversight and advisement on the rare tweak. We both played and discussed as we went through the mod and had similar opinions on what we were seeing. Largely we were in step with each other. If I saw anything really biased and unjustified I’d have personally removed it.
I don’t wish to argue the point about my quote from our site, but I don’t agree that I have been proving wrong.
My belief is that continued delays would only have harmed Black Mesa’s brand. It had been called vaporware by people long before our thread ever existed. Additionally continued delays would further age their content. I can’t say for sure, but I’d imagine that there’s been more than a few renditions of things like the Health Stations over the years.
As for our review being part of some destruction in the faith of developers the idea never even crossed my mind as we were writing. I didn’t even recall that statement until just now. I still stand by it though. Had 8 years of work been released to people claiming it was only a “meh” piece of work, than I know I would have difficulty wanting to continue mapping on Xen, which I can only imagine will be frustrating and difficult due to the nature of the borderworld.
@Problematic A-hole
Half-Life’s Voice acting is not amazing, but I feel it fit the game better. There was a strange kind of consistency to it all as a whole. In all reality I would prefer the original voice acting to what Black Mesa was eventually given. Regardless if the original voice acting was better or worse, I feel that overall the Black Mesa voice work was poorly guided and directed and as a result does not work as intended.
@orudie
I’m not trying to gain more exposure for a video that is probably already watched by the people willing to discuss it here. In fact, I’d have no problem if Bloodshot wishes to remove the link. I mentioned it before, but it is disappointing to me that an opinion I sought to form using my personal experience, skills, in some cases actual training, as well as giving the game a fair shot and keeping an open mind to what it is and trying to be in comparison to a great game is just discounted because if I disagree I must just do it for attention. I wrote it to express my views, not to upset people or drive traffic anywhere.
@ShadowNate
People are allowed to have opinions that are more complex than “like” or “dislike”. At least I would hope. There’s plenty good about Black Mesa, but we also saw some glaring issues.
About the crashes, I’m playing on a really horrible computer from 2006 (Glad I’m getting a new one this week) and I still managed to play Black Mesa, no crashes, almost no lag… Almost.
The best a game or mod creator can hope for in a review is an honest and forthright handling of the subject matter, and it seems pretty clear that ValveTime did just that, despite some of the rhetoric and hurt feelings here. Content creators generally don’t want fanboy praise because you don’t really know what you’ve accomplished with that, you just know that people are kissing your ass. In addition to that, ValveTime handled it constructively and without bashing. Addressing negatives, if they are genuine opinions, does not equate bashing, and no one has any obligation to be ‘fair and balanced’ in an opinion piece. If ValveTime felt the negatives deserved more time than the positives, they’re completely entitled to that point of view. There is no 50/50 journalistic requirement.
Catcalls against the review equate to nothing more than attempts to silence a dissenting voice, which is shameful and cowardly. Intelligent and dignified discussion however can lead to greater understanding and maybe even a modification of opinions in some cases. If I disagreed with the review (and I’m personally on the fence), I wouldn’t want Rossi to “shut up” and then pretend that he never said anything, I’d want to convince him of why I thought he was wrong, while being open-minded enough to possibly be convinced by him that I was wrong. Anything else is just so much shouting and posturing and has no place in an intellectually honest public discussion.
At any rate, the only thing I persoanally take issue with in the review is the call for more playtesting and longer delays … Nooooo!!! 
Yes. It had not been called “vaporware” the day of the announcement of its release by anyone else, which was the issue there. Was it not clear that that was the problem there?
In your quote, you used some generally accepted facts to build towards a tone of “the developers are now grasping for scraps”. Which is why I’m saying you were proven wrong. Otherwise your post surmises to little purpose/essence. Probably I’m imagining stuff.
Like that little cough when you mention “leaks” in your unaffected by the whole leak issue review. Yes, nice touch.
Not my point when I said that “what a mess”. It’s that i find your review that bad. You claim one thing, then change to sarcastic tone. But if you are called on about the latter, you can use the former as a defense. And so this thread can go on forever.
@Sable
You do have a point about using the term critique versus review. There are subtle changes to how something would be viewed by people willing to take that into consideration but unfortunately I don’t know how common that is. I will say for all intents and purposes when I was writing, it was from a critiquing stand point. I do QA work and typically play games from that angle. I tend to personally review from that angle. As a result the language I personally used at times may have been more directed to that end than a review. I don’t really know how big a difference that tone would ultimately have made were it fully directed in a review sense, as I’d still have had more to say on the negative aspects than the positive.
I also agree about the desire to not see scores. For me, I never do that part, or even offer input on them. Others do that. For me, the review in what is discussed THAT is the important part. Those numbers and grades are just shorthand for people who might want something quick and easy, but they are not what I personally consider important. I try best I can to make the numbers largely unimportant.
@Lumbergh
I would personally have called for more extensive play testing which would take time. And it frankly a slog most of the time. I do QA work on Dino D-Day and it sometimes comes down to spending an entire night getting killed in some obscure way in order to try and replicate a tiny bug that keeps happening. It’s not easy with such a big project and having no knowledge of how playtesting was handled by the devs, without proper systems in place to report and resolve bugs, and without proper training to identify those bugs, you can test a lot without getting anywhere. In a single play through I found multiple bugs in mapping, modelling, sound, balancing etc. If I had been a tester there would have been pages of notes, but that’s only because I have been doing it for a couple years. I learned on my own and I’m far from a refined tester. With proper training and systems in place the testing could have been much more successful and prevented many issues found I feel.
@ShadowNate
That “vaporware” thread wasn’t started by a staff member. So I’m not sure why it is that important in this instance.
The cough thing about the leak was also a joke.
Lots of nitpicking in that “review” - also the guy’s tone felt very sarcastic, quite annoying. He did make some valid points about the grunts and other bits and pieces, but overall it was just a nitpick-fest.
what points were not valid? the one where the game crashing breaks the flow of the game? the one where he says the animations of the crowbar is below quality? the ones where he says that some eviroment are overdetailed and finding a button is somehow hard? the one where the music is loud and overshadows npcs talking?
because all those points are valid. Fanbois…
It seems like Black Mesa is so good that it’s being judged as a complete retail game release, and not as a free mod by fans anymore 
Crowbar could use some work though, that’s true.
Lots of details is not a bad thing. Buttons are not supposed to be huge and red with arrows pointing on them. All the machinery looked great to me.
About music - you can lower the music volume in settings. It’s so easy that complaining about it seems lazy to me 
Swap “serious” for “plays it straight,” then. I’m not saying Half-Life was some grim work of dark drama for our times… It can be quite goofy at times, as I just found out playing through it on the tail end of Black Mesa playthrough. But where Half-Life is goofy, it is because the designers failed and a particular encounter or location ended up an unintentionally silly flub. Having Barney walk into a room with Snarks, then run up and hit the release switch only to be killed by those same Snarks is silly because the developers tried to inject some danger, but did it in a really bad way.
But there’s a difference in trying to take yourself seriously and failing (with the technology of 1998, that’s par for the course) and AIMING to not take yourself seriously. To me, when Black Mesa is at its best is when it agrees with Half-Life on what the tone should be, that tone being one of menace and foreboding. Half-Life may have turned out campy in places, but not because it shot to be campy intentionally. It isn’t a mockery of the genres it draws inspiration from, so much as a tribute to what they could be.
Honestly, for almost its entire time, Black Mesa is just as good and manages to take itself just as seriously. Without knowing the VO direction the actors were given, I just thought that whoever voiced the Marines simply wasn’t very good, but even knowing that, they’re close enough to be believable. About the only thing that REALLY bugs me is the fourth-wall-breaking silliness right at the start of the game, because I have to walk past ALL of it to even get to anything in Black Mesa that can grab me.
Basically, Black Mesa is at its finest when it takes itself seriously, as a legitimate professional work in its own right. And it’s at its most painful when it tries to shoot for comedy by referencing unintentionally campy elements of the original, or otherwise sounding like a sit-com (“What do you mean OLD?!?” oi…)