NEWS:
Some of you might know that years ago, I was briefly part of the MOD team that worked on the just released Black Mesa MOD. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s essentially a remake of the original Half-Life, but completely updated with Source Engine quality visuals, new music, new dialogues, updated graphics and designs for everything (characters, levels, enemies, etc).
Originally, I wanted to compose the score for Black Mesa, but that position was already filled (by the very capable Joel Nielsen). They needed concept art, and although I was already trying to transition into doing music and wasn’t particularly interested in doing concept art anymore, I agreed to help out with concept art because Half-Life was the game that turned me into a hardcore gamer, and as a fan I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
I was only on the Black Mesa team briefly as concept artist. At the time, I was working full-time as the studio art director at iWin, and I was also composing the score for Galactic Melee in my free time. Later I moved from California to China and had to focus on designing and constructing our new home, as well as my new music production studio. I just couldn’t devote any time to Black Mesa, so I had to quit.
Anyway, it was just released today, and I immediately downloaded it as soon as I woke up, and I’ve now played up to the point where one of the scientists told Gordon the soldiers are coming to rescue them (those of you who understand what that means, are snickering right now). So far, it’s been an interesting mix of nostalgia and new discoveries. I can’t really think of an apt analogy, because this isn’t like watching the remake of a movie, a screen adaptation of a book, listening to a cover song, or reading a book based on a movie or game franchise. I’m really enjoying all the additional dialogues and the updated levels, as well as the drastically improved visuals. I currently busy as hell (teaching the current run of Becoming A Better Artist workshop, as well as dealing with our upcoming move back to California, not to mention a bunch of backed up blog posts, photography to edit, and the novels I’m writing), but I’ll try to make time to finish Black Mesa.
I doubt anyone besides fans of the original Half-Life really cares, which is fine, because the reason Black Mesa was created in the first place was to pay tribute to the original game, while contributing something new to it by upgrading it to the standard that the Source engine is capable of. I do hope some of the younger/newer gamers who’s never played the original Half-Life will try it though; after all, it is one of the best games ever created, and Black Mesa improves upon it in every way, except for the voice acting. The soldiers are especially bad; they sound like silly cartoon versions of what uninformed people think special forces operators sound like, and the dialogues for the soldiers are some of the worst I’ve ever heard in gaming in a long time. But to be fair, so many big commercial releases get this wrong too–the NPC enemies say some of the dumbest things to you when you fight them in battles. What is it with bad writing and fight scenes?
Originally, Black Mesa started because people were disappointed by Valve’s release of Half-Life Source, which was nothing like what the name suggests (it used the Source engine, but almost everything about it was pretty much identical to the original–nothing was really updated except for some physics that Source allowed). That was how the seed was planted, and now, seven years later, Black Mesa fulfills the promise of what Half-Life Source should have been.
