Black Mesa

Finally finished Black Mesa today - took about 4 days to complete. Overall impressions are its rather "meh".

First off, it crashed - frequently : In game and whilst loading on multiple maps

The graphics are nice and the sound is decent (although all scientists sounds exactly the same), but there are a few inaccuracies with shadowing. But is Gorden a midget (or rather, to be politically correct a vertically challenged person) ? Eyeline level reaches door knobs and everyone seems so dumpy and small, compared to the surrounding objects.

The fight just before the would-be teleportation to Xen slowed down a hell of a lot for me unfortunately, although the rest of the game was fine.

The main problem with the game is that it mainly consists of irritating, vaguely sign-posted puzzles, with three maps being considerably irksome : Waste Recycling, warehouse with mines and the Lamda Core section, and the occasional fight sequence tagged on. It isn't helped by the need to use CTRL+SPACE to jump more than a centimetre off the ground - so if you want to jumo onto a ledge, you need to be pressng SHIFT+W+CTRL+SPACE to get to it. Not exactly finger friendly combination...

Whoever thought CTRL+SPACE is a good combination really needs to think again

The intro sequence is a good 4/4 minutes (and which can't be skipped), and once you do arrive, you have little help in know what to do, where to go or who to see, which also applies to a fair few other levels...

I never brought Half-Life when it originally came out - I played a friends copy for a short time and instantly disliked it, although I do have HL2 (although brougth for me and not by me), playing this hasn't really enamured the series to me.

Whether I'll bother with the second part is unknown - would really depend on whether I can be bothered to download it...

Last time i touched and played anything half life was the 360 version of the Orange box which was at the time 4 games in one so it represented decent value.

One of those games that really you need to have a high end PC to play,even on my so called gaming PC i had at the time built by Scan computers half life 2 slowed to a crawl at certain stages and if i remember correctly during some of the more intense scenes and using FRAPS i was getting something like 4 fps which made the game practically unplayable.

Another reason why i completely did away with PC gaming many years ago.

I did away with consoles many years ago mainly because you can't program them - with the XBox being the exception - and then you can only use C#

In reply to a post by time2die:

Last time i touched and played anything half life was the 360 version of the Orange box which was at the time 4 games in one so it represented decent value.

One of those games that really you need to have a high end PC to play,even on my so called gaming PC i had at the time built by Scan computers half life 2 slowed to a crawl at certain stages and if i remember correctly during some of the more intense scenes and using FRAPS i was getting something like 4 fps which made the game practically unplayable.

Another reason why i completely did away with PC gaming many years ago.

get with the times m8, those 2 games are nearly 10 years old infact halflife is 10+ years old maybe in early 2000's when we only had early directx 9 that was mostly "software" driven that games had issues.

now i play black mesa with well over 200fps and not a single slowdown but it did crash a few times, overall the game is great and plays awesome.

halflife 1 is the game that shaped all fps's from then on. like cod?, bf3?, unreal tournament ect? then you only have valve and halflife to thank!!

I am with the times mate i have a 360 and a Playstation 3

What the heck you going on about .........Get with the times ?

I was simply saying i had a PC built by Scan computers that was suppose to be a high end Gaming PC because it cost the best part of £2000 6 years ago.

When playing half life 2 [notice i said 2 and not Half life 1 i experience some shocking slow down which by all accounts should not really happen when you have twin geforce and 8 gig of ram at the time.

Personally mate i don't care what you think as I've had it with PC gaming years ago but i was just answering the previous thread until you turned up from some Bat Cave or something.

Troll of elsewhere mate you wont be missed on the Gaming forums and like i said i have never seen a single post from you on here in the 9 years i have been on these forums.

Possibly the resolution was too high - I've never had a slow down and I use a single card 9800GT

Could well be mate or there were something running in the background like adware/spyware whatever,anyway that was a long time ago and it don't matter anymore does it.

Just did not like the post from some newbie who obviously got bored in the Talk Talk forums and decided to visit the gaming forums for the first time since he joined and give out some of his wise advice about gaming.

Dreamer

These thing happens

Anyhoo, you save you the trouble of having to endure playing the game, I've got a video of the ending : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itoW-F6N4z4&feature=y...