It’s to Black Mesa’s immense credit that it (mostly) pulls it off.Īre you familiar with Half Life at all? I certainly am, which is why I was caught a little bit off-guard at how much the team behind Black Mesa have deviated from the holy scripture. That’s eight years of expectations to fulfil and eight years of failing to produce a finished product this game has to make up for, which is a tricky thing to manage any way you look at it. It’s a remake of one of the best games ever (Half-Life) in a brand new engine (Source) that has been in development in one form or another ever since the release of Half-Life 2 back in 2004. This is why Black Mesa had a bigger problem than most games when it finally released a couple of weeks ago. It’s less okay to proclaim it the Second Coming and then release a bad game. It’s okay to release a bad game (well, it’s not okay, but it’s a forgivable sin). They will inevitably be disappointed one way or the other, and that kind of thing can end up being utterly toxic for a game’s prospects Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever would not be remembered as two of the biggest jokes in gaming history if they hadn’t had some rather unfortunate publicity associated with them. The problems only start if you continually fail to hit your release date, at which point your marketing can backfire badly by whipping people up into such a frenzied state of anticipation that not only is every subsequent failure to release the game seen as the worst kind of incompetence, but the final product can never live up to what people have built it up to be in their heads. It’s a sales tactic that clashes badly with my policy of desperately avoiding any and all information about games I’ve already decided I’m going to buy (XCOM is especially bad for this having recently dumped an actual pre-release demo onto the internet three weeks ahead of release), but in general I can’t fault developers and publishers for doing it. Pre-release hype and marketing has always been around and will always be around, and it’s not particularly a bad thing having as many people as possible know that your game exists and is coming out soon. If twenty years playing video games has taught me anything it’s that it’s important to manage your expectations. “From there I became the art lead, a partner in the new ‘Crowbar Collective LLC’, project lead, and eventually owner of the company.Note: I’m aware Black Mesa is a mod made by amateurs and so reviewing it to the same standard as a professionally made game may be a little unfair, but honestly I think that Black Mesa is a good enough product that if you stood it next to 90% of the games that have been released this year it would make *them* look like shit, not the other way around. “In March 2006, two of my college classmates got onto the Black Mesa mod team,” Engels said in the announcement post on Steam. There was clearly plenty of emotion behind the post by Adam Engels, now owner of the Crowbar Collective. Crowbar Collective reimagines them as something quite different than the original. Known as the Xen levels, the segment’s platforming sequences were widely panned by critics and fans alike. It also expands the gameplay, with special attention paid to the final act. That game helped to launch Steam, and jumpstarted the modern era of digital distribution.īlack Mesa takes the original Half-Life experience and moves it over to a heavily modified version of the Source engine, which Half-Life 2 was built on. Players inhabited MIT-trained particle physicist Gordon Freeman, a role that would be reprised with Half-Life 2 in 2004. The game was a smash hit, critically acclaimed for its cohesive narrative, which took players on a journey through the bowels of the high-security research laboratory known as Black Mesa. The original Half-Life was released for PC in 1998. The announcement was made on Steam, where the team at Crowbar Collective is selling the game with the blessings of franchise creators at Valve. The game leaves early access on March 5, fully after 14 years after the team at The Crowbar Collective began the project. Black Mesa, a video game that started out as a fan-made mod of the original Half-Life, finally has a release date.
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