Its just 1 review relax, many people crashed more then 2 times you may just have a good system and i have NEVER EVER crashed in HL2, the only reason i would see a lot of crashing in HL2 is if you modded the game or messed with its files or just do not have things set up right.
ValveTime is allowed to have their opinions and their review was fine, do not take it that serious and like its the only review. Just move on go play the game and kill some headcrabs.
I thoroughly enjoyed the mod myself.
Just know that our reviews do not necessarily reflect the thoughts of all the staff. We are made up of Valve/Half-Life fans - most have been for a decade - but we tend to work independently from each other. It’s the only way we can bring consistent coverage of Valve news because of our varying time zones and schedules.
And no, the leak situation had no influence over the review… This is probably more of a case of, well, you’re going to see plenty of positive reviews from other sites, so our reviewer felt that constructive criticism would have been more productive.
Whether you agree or disagree with our review is the beauty of it.
Yeah we all know why valvetime aren’t praising this mod, its petty vengeance and that is all. I stopped watching this 4 minutes in as this review is exactly what I expected from them I would have been happy to be proven wrong. I wont be watching any more of their reviews due to how obvious their personal bias is, they did the wrong thing and wont accept responsibility. Unsubbed.
Not HECUs though. Those guys just didn’t feel menacing/badass like they did in original.
Sci’s and Guards were top notch though - that’s why HECUs stand out as really weird design choice.
@Bloodshot
I would like to address this. First off Bloodshot I’ve lurked around the forums a bit before. Not surprisingly I was keeping an eye on things a bit after the leak situation out of curiosity. You’re clearly an ardent fan and I really hope it doesn’t come off as sarcastic that you are the kind of fan any project deserves. Dedicated and passionate. Just remember that just as the users of Valvetime will reflect upon those that write for the site, that you as a committed member reflect upon the Black Mesa team. Be the fan they deserve. Take you fire and love for a very long project and turn it towards improving the community, in any way you can or desire. Projects like Black Mesa need Citizens more than it will ever need Warriors.
@Crypt19
I don’t want to repeat too much but just wanted to let you know I’m not skipping the Favored bad over good tone of the review. I mention it in my last post I believe. For performance I’ve heard of wildly varying experiences, from one crash such as yourself to so many that people give up for the night. Though they do return later. I myself suffered 3 in my play through.
For the music, I was unable to go into the detail I wanted. The music is VERY well done. It’s done by a clearly talented artist and he should be and I hope is proud of his work. Hell I am struggling to record a single singer/songwriter friend, so I have some insight to music production. My problem more lay in the direction the music took gameplay, or how the music itself was utilized or implemented in the mod. Sometimes songs would play too early. Or a song would trigger separate from an event. So the song is rocking along while I stand still waiting for an attack that never comes until I begin moving again. I also feel that the music was not properly directed. Perhaps the music was guided in a hands on way by a lead developer, I can not say. I felt, however, that in updating the music a lot of the charm and simpler musical atmosphere was lost from Half-Life while not quite adding enough to justify the change. In Half-Life the music felt more a part of the game and design something to augment the experience. In Black Mesa it felt much more aggressive and guiding, like it was telling me I was doing something wrong if I was not blasting a million soldiers to bits.
@Jeannotvb
“I find myself agreeing with some points in the review, but nothing serious enough to lower my personal rating for the game.”
No lie, THIS is why I review games. This is exactly what I was hoping for and even said as much in discussion about whether we post the review or not. I don’t want to change people’s minds, to prove people wrong. But if someone thinks about something and is at least willing to entertain the idea that another view might be right, then even if they ultimately reject my opinions then I am more than happy. Maybe even more so because how strong can my or anyone else’s opinion be if we can not let it stand up to the challenge of others?
I already edited my post as it was kind of harsh near the end! I was just confused about the review and only could hear a distinct sound in his voice that sounded basically like a “Hey this is what you get”. And people can probably agree with me at the beginning before half-life 2 was polished there were lots of problems hense the bluscreen in Black Mesa saying HL2.exe Etc.
I just compared the two after watching some YouTube videos. The HECU voices in HL1 were covered with more static and sounded a bit more mature, but the voices in BM still sound pretty faithful. They did stand out to me as well, but the same applies for HL1.
I think that was made pretty clear at the beginning of the review.
So I’d imagine that you re-played the original half-life to make a clear comparison between the two?
Or you did comparison to your memory of what half-life was like?
Does half-life or half-life :s ource have crashing, visual and game-play issues on the same PCs? How many compared to BM?
I understand the necessity of pointing out the shortcomings of a game, but there was a clear bias towards the negatives in this review and a glossing over of positive points. The opinions of the authors clearly count in constructing a review, as much of the experience is obviously subjective, but
I found this review to be extremely one sided and harsh of the game, mod or not, recreation or not.
I feel the need to be defensive of BM because of the points above, you are distorting the reality of the game, and diminishing it in some way by doing so. After following the development from the outside for so long, it is disappointing to find somebody doing that, especially a game news site.
If you believe either
A ) This review is honest, heavily biased or not, and the opinions are terrible
or
B ) This review is dishonest, and not only biased, but designed to produce controversy
You probably shouldn’t be posting the link and turning it into a subject for discussion. You are feeding them views and ad revenue. But hey, being mad at someone else on the internet wouldn’t be as entertaining as a positive review - so we can be thankful for that.
I’ve been furious at better games, movies, and tv for a lot less. Sometimes you’re just trying something new and for one reason or another you have a short fuse. Can I believe they went in with impossibly high expectations, and some things just rubbed them wrong? Definitely. I’m going to give them reasonable doubt.
I agreed with a lot of what they said, but what amazes me is how those points only briefly entered my mind while playing the game, yet to them, they deserve a magnifying glass and encompass the entire review. If its such a great game and accomplishment with a handful of gaffs that hold it back, why didn’t the review sound like that?
Completely speaking on behalf of myself. Who cares about their review anyhow. “most of the characters seem hollow and two-dimensional”. Yeah because not every scientist and guard looked exactly alike in the original. Call me stupid, but I failed to find any constructive feedback out of this review, expected as always from ValveTime.
I think we lived true to keeping Half Life’s roots in our modification. Did you guys really want us to go over the top and destroy that?
It’s a little ironic that ValveTime expresses their disappointment in the “hype from the fan base” When the ValveTime video leak was one of the biggest factors in building up “hype” for us. ValveTime contributed the vast amount of the hype leading to our launch. Their video was covered by every major gaming media outlet.
Saying there is any thing wrong with “hype from the fanbase” is ignorant. It WAS hype from the fan base. I personally have stuck around, making a few posts before launch, sharing info with friends and stuff. I added to the fan base hype, and we all did. Why? Because we wanted the game! And now the game is out, and it kicks ass!
@metalmunki
I can also jump on their heads, and it’ll do about as much damage to them as tossing lab equipment at them. Although, I do find the fact that it might stagger them enough to let a Barney shoot them down to be very interesting and something i certainly did not try. Next question though is was it intentional, and I guess whether that matters or not in terms of game play flow.
@TrantaLocked
I am not trying to be an jerk but is playing a game refusing to look at the good things any different from playing a game and refusing to look at the bad?
As for our users. They are an impassioned lot at times. I’ll just leave it at that.
For voice acting I address that in greater detail in a previous post.
@MaxTheLimit
Honestly I don’t know if it was discussed for us to pre-address the issues of a supposed grudge. I know I was not personally involved in any however. In the end though I don’t think it would have mattered. Even if we talked about the events before hand people would still make their own assumptions as is their right.
For the metric of our grading; I wish I had a better answer. We’ve only recently started with the reviews having only done I want to say 2 others. We’ve far from refined our criteria and methods for grading. I myself am against grades entirely. They serve to diminish the actual review content, favoring quick “This game looks like an A-!” as opposed to actually considered and contemplated opinions of the usage and utilization of visuals.
The best I can say, and it is woefully inadequate, is that our reviews right now do not correlate to each other in any meaningful way.
@ShadowNate
All I can say is I appreciate that is your opinion, but that it is also a bit unfair to attempt to hand wave a rather lengthy reviewing process enacted by myself and others due to the actions of a few community members or even un-involved staff.
@smash
Sup, Bro?
@OldDirtyBastard
This is in response to you and your quote about the VO being like the original HL. I see the words re imagining and remake tossed around a lot to justify decisions made by the developers. Which is it though? Was the voice work remade or re imagined? I’m not a fan of inconsistency myself, it can fracture the global front you want to make with a game. In this case they did both and it caused such a rift.
worst review ever, anythign that focuses 90% on the bad is bad, even if it gave it a ok in the end the way that review presented things was complete crap.
That’s fine. We appreciate all feedback, and we’ll use it in the future, for sure.
Looking at it another way, the zombies wouldn’t be very scary if you could brain them with a coffee mug easily. To explain further, I don’t think the crowbar missing was ‘forced’ the negative way you imply. I feel it was deliberate to play on the expectations of the HL1 fans: “This is our game, not quite the one you remember”, and also happened to be a nice little tutorial on using allies.
Just remember everyone, not everyone will 100% agree on everything. Hell, you could take a vote of people who like living and I am sure there are people who would vote that they don’t like living. It is a fact of life. Now, many of you have seen in the forums people saying one thing or another that they wanted tweaked or didn’t like. Certain aspects of games affect different people…differently. Some people look very strongly to visuals. Others focus more on the gameplay or voice acting. It could depend on anything…how they were raised, their career, etc. I’m in psychology so I love to analyze the situations a bit when it comes to how the characters react and if they do it convincingly. Others are into voice acting, music, etc. Each has their own opinion. Sure, the review seemed to lean into the negatives, but I am sure that it won’t make any of us stop playing.
Call it bias, call it hate, call it christmas if you want to, but just remember that just because 75% of people like apple pie doesn’t mean that those 75% of people are going to be doing the reviewing. I am sure that if all Black Mesa fanboys and girls were doing reviews it would be like crazy positive…which in a way is biased as well. Take the good with the bad.
Let’s all take a deep breath and think…what would Raminator do?
Raminator would shoot everything in this topic with ban hammers… I think.
But we don’t know unless he himself posted. If he doesn’t, then we can’t assume for him. For all we know, he might just say “Bah!” and wave his hand dismissively…or just watch.
As for the BM voice acting, they made an astonishing work, even for the HECU. Just compare it to HL1: aside the poor quality of sound (yeah, it is 90’s game), you cant understand the hecu voices… Their voices seem like robots. And even Mike Shapiro has an amateurish VA in HL1.
So, comparing this with the mod, the BM voice actors (all them) deserve a lot of credit. Their quality is on par with any good VA out there (like hl2 for example).
Oh, and I’ll not even talk about the ambient sounds… Immersive, to say the least.
Just my 2 cents.
@Codes
It was glossed over for a pretty important reason. The mod is incredibly pretty. It is at times and incredibly strong faithful recreation of the original Half-Life.
How many reviews, comments, tweets, facebook updates, forum posts end there, when they should just be beginning? Viewers don’t need to be told this again by us. We mentioned it, stated it plainly as as the fact it is and wanted to move on to the problems we saw as we played. It’s been a while since Half-Life for myself, maybe a year or less. Less than a month since the co-writer played. He corrected me on many points. Ultimately we went into that game at stages likely even more recent than many other players have played these games.
It’s also fair to be defensive and its damn understandable. I’ve been in the exact same position countless times. We all do it, often all the time. Just know we’re not trying to distort anything. Either people will agree with us or not. Either way the game itself is going to be what it is.
@Sable
When it comes to the negative points being put under a magnifying glass, I won’t claim otherwise. When I review I want to know why something is the way it is. Who made it. Who designed it. Who signed off on it. Who tested it. By answering these questions you learn a lot about the people and production behind a project. I feel like we built a case that in the pursuit of making a recreation of Half-Life somewhere along the way design decisions were made (or not made at all) that resulted in a game that lacks in many cases the charm, polish, and professionalism or the original they attempted to copy.
It’s good, yes. It’s amazing for a mod, yes. Is it amazing for a mod that is trying to copy one of the most influential video game experiences of all time, I would disagree.
@Hubicorn
Your own community seems to care, that’s why we are having this (honest to god) pleasant discussion.
Also, I’m not sure why you claim we were disappointed that hype came from the fan base. Unless I wrote something I forgot, I never said that. I simply felt that is where the game’s hype over the past 8 years has strongly originated from. That wasn’t an attack on people who have followed and liked a game.
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.