@RicheyEdwards
I had opinions about how Black Mesa presented themselves and how they have handled the development. I honestly wasn’t going into the game hoping to have the opinions I ultimately formed. I don’t really want to go too much into it, but I dislike my opinion being totally disregarded because of some imagined grudge.
My praise for the visuals is anything but false. Although I found a lot of things lacking in my opinion, the mod looks great.
As for a reaction, we did not hope for controversy. We knew that how we felt about Black Mesa did not reflect the current mass sentiments, and that it would be likely result in some negative reactions however. We did not write our review to snag a few cheap views on Youtube.
I understand that you may not believe me when I say we were just trying to get how we felt about the mod out there, and not to cause drama. I’d hope that my attempts to address and explain myself on this forum would provide at least some evidence to that.
@lucifer579
One problem we had was balancing for time. I believe I mentioned it last night but if we were to go into full detail on our likes and dislikes it would have been a very long review. So instead of focusing on the good aspects of the content produced and level work etc. That everyone else is already talking about, we wanted to spend the time pointing out problems we see that were not being brought up as much elsewhere.
Out of curioisty, how long of a review would you be willing to sit through? 10 minutes was already really long for us we felt, but if people would be ok with longer reviews I know I would be open to that.
For changes made to the mod later, I’d be willing to go back and reassess the mod should there be major updates at a later time. We’ll of course cover the Xen release, so perhaps then should changes be made.
@Codes
We did not intentionally ignore the good parts, but we decided to not focus on them. We would only have so much to say about how good the game looks. We did try to make sure it was clear that the mod looks fantastic, whether that properly got across or not is a different matter. In my experience with the game I found that once I stopped looking at well pieced together the mod was that most everything else was not nearly as solidly constructed. There was a lack of a guiding hand maneuvering the team towards a unified end goal. Sometimes they wanted to be a Remake. Other times a reimagining. It causes a disconnect that I found hard to reconcile.
Do you have any suggestions on how to better inform people that we’re reviewing Black Mesa as a HL1 recreatrion and that we don’t discount the visuals? I know we mention it in the review (I think twice?) but if there’s more we could do, I can certainly see about getting that done.
@Langenscheiss
I find the fact that every CoD game get’s such high scores actually really deplorable. That is something that is wrong with the game publication industry. When you recieve ad revenue from the very people you are supposed to be critiquing you simply can not have an unbiased view. I recall a reviewer Jeff Gerstmann who game Kane and Lynch: Dead Men a bad review. A TERRIBLE review even. He was fired. The suspected reason? Well The publishers of Kane and Lynch paid Gamespot for a full site skin advertisement. You can read about that here: https://kotaku.com/328244/gamespot-editor-fired-over-kane–lynch-review
Just to say, CoD would get a really, really annoyed review would I ever have the misfourtune to be forced to make one. Those games just not somethign I enjoy for multiple reasons.
I didn’t mean to imply that I put my negative opinion out there in the hopes that people reject it. I mentioned before that I am rather fond of my opinion, but only because it is mine. If I can sway someone with my words, that’s ok by me. If someone rejects that though after thinking about it, then at least they thought about it. I respect people’s opinions more (whether the agree with me or not) if they are willing to think about them. No matter the ultimate outcome.
