Half-Life is Great... Don't Play it

half-life one of the most influential games of all time if you're watching this you most likely know the game so i don't need to explain it but with the game being 24 years old things have obviously significantly progressed since then and with the release of half-life 2 and with the source engine it was clear that the graphical fidelity was taken up a notch or two or three or maybe four there is a very clear upgrade between half-life one and two that should be obvious and a few people thought what would the original half-life look like if it was made in the source engine well those people were probably disappointed when valve released half-life source half-life source can be simplified as a copy paste of the original half-life into the source engine now with cool-looking water and so because half-life source was a huge letdown a few people at crowbar collective said to each other you know remember that epic fail when valve tried to make half-life in the source engine yes what if we remade half-life in the source engine properly though well guess what they did the result was black mesa and damn it's amazing [Music] now hang on a minute you're probably thinking right now yo this game came out like two years ago half the planet has probably played it by now so why are you talking about it well yeah you're right but i only just now have played it for the first time after having it sit on my library for a year so it's about time oh and by the way don't take the title too seriously half-life is great and you should play it this video is kind of just me something on blackness bro don't click baby like that again you bit right so black mesa after having played it and i'm sure 99 of you who have also played it will agree with me on this black mesa is leagues above half-life dumpster fire you can't even compare it to half-life source so just throw that idea down the drain it's pointless this is one of the best remix i've ever played i realize i should probably explain the difference between remaster and remake because a lot of people get confused or just don't know what they mean so a remaster by definition is the exact same game just with updated graphics sounds and sometimes engine a good example of this is with halo there's a regular halo and then there's halo anniversary edition anniversary edition is the exact same halo game just with updated textures and models in the master chief collection you can press tab at any time to switch between the two instantly but besides the changed looks everything else about the game is the same that's a remaster a remake is a complete recreation of a game from the ground up usually with significant changes to a lot of things black mesa is a remake because it changed a lot of things from the original half-life many layouts of the maps are different too many puzzles are different the ammo counts for weapons are different and plenty more so that's the difference between remake and remaster for those who don't know also besides being made in source black mesa says it also includes the havoc physics engine not sure why though because a google search tells me that the source engine uses a modified havoc engine already so i don't know maybe i misinterpreted that now you know this was probably coming but the way black mesa looks is just surreal everything in the game is just incredibly detailed there's so much detail that even on potato settings it still brings my computer down to its knees and causes a blue screen and even though the source engine is 18 years old it somehow still manages to rival some of the newer engines like the unreal engine i feel like this game pushes the source engine to its limits kind of in the same way that total chaos pushes the doom engine to its limits like can you believe that this game uses the same engine as this in black mesa places look and feel as if you're almost there yourself after the incident you can see everything fall apart around you and personally i feel like it's presented here better than the original now i know that's kind of asking a lot from a game made in 1998 that looks like the asteroids arcade gaming comparison but you know there are even some partial horror sections that look actually semi-scary as intended the outdoor areas are personally my favorite the sheer scale of the place is super apparent you can see jets fly across along with the alien equivalent the weapon models are some of the most detailed i've ever seen in any game love it just like the original game black mesa does environmental storytelling perfectly and since black mesa is more than two decades newer the ability to present more on the screen just adds to it like i said before right after the incident you can see the whole place slowly dissolving shown through these scripted events and through the sheer amount of fire everywhere one thing i like is that the sky starts out blue and then as you progress through the game it starts getting darker and dustier which shows the passage of time of course but also the current state of the environment slowly as black mesa gets overrun with more aliens and the army is losing the air is getting full of smoke from the fires and dust because this is a normal day in new mexico besides that the same set pieces that were in the original are still here like the introduction to the grunts having devices explode and having poor scientists getting k out the inclusion of physics and half-life 1 because this is the source engine is a nice touch but remember the original wasn't designed with physics in mind so in black mesa plenty has to be changed to accommodate this after the resonance cascade in half-life one you're just walking through the place until you get the crowbar in black mesa the first thing you see are objects in your way making you have to pick them up the original doesn't have that so it's a great way to teach players about physics without breaking immersion also you know how in the original they show you how to get npcs to follow you well in black mesa this is delayed a bit because just a few seconds ago you just learned about physics so they give you some time to fully process that idea and since that was delayed they also delayed getting the crowbar because they use this guard to teach you about this mechanic and in the original you'd already have the crowbar so you wouldn't even look at the guard so they delayed some key aspects of the game to include new ones and i think they did a perfect job of that and because there's physics now you can bet there are puzzles that involve that but they're not too complicated usually it's finding an object that you have to attach to something or plugging something in and believe me there are too many things you have to plug in in this game but i'll get to that later there's also the using barrels that float up in water puzzles but they're quite rare unfortunately oh and you can't forget the usual source physics jank getting stuck on props or not being able to jump for some reason yeah there's plenty of that physics makes the world feel more interactable zombies can fling stuff at you like in half-life 2 and you can pick up flares to set zombies on fire which is something the game encourages before you get the crowbar along with that there's an achievement for giving toilet paper to a scientist it's the little things you know i'll briefly mention the music because there's not much to talk about there's like barely any music in half-life one in black mesa they add quite a bit in many sections they add some epic music usually during memorable parts or during big fights like this section or when you get chased by a gargantua or when you're fighting the gun arc things like that if you haven't played black mesa yet it's important to know that you can't play black mesa like you play half-life i learned that the hard way there's a lot different with the weapons in ai and black mesa to where you have to play it differently the first thing you may notice is that the grunts can move and shoot at the same time which is something they couldn't do in the original it's a small thing but it has a big effect that i can't really explain your movement speed is slightly slower which you might not notice along with that the ammo counts for the weapons are lowered along with some slower reloads now that might seem a bit unfair especially if you're me and you're used to just bunny hopping around the place with 50 rounds but to compensate for this so many areas have more cover spots with ammo littered around or have been enlarged so all this means that black mace has a slower pace than half-life and whether that's a good thing or not entirely depends on the person i think i like it because now that it's a bit slower you have time to look around and take it and appreciate how good each place looks something that i do like is that while you bunny hop at mach 10 bunny hopping still exists in some way when you run jump and then crouch you slide on the floor for quite a bit so if you stay crouched you can continue jumping while sliding essentially bunny hopping if you air strafe as well you can gain speed making it faster than just running it's actually easier than traditional bunny hopping and half-life one because you slide a lot the only limit is that you can't make such sharp turns without losing almost all your speed but it is still useful in a few cases like when running for my gargantua black mesa is also a lot longer than half-life almost double the play time if you've played half-life before then black mesa will take you like 6 hours to finish but if you haven't played half-life first then it can take you up to 10 hours this is because many sections have been stretched with some new ones added that are sometimes good and sometimes not one notable section is this one where you meet a guard and with them you have to sneak around this hanger to not get spotted by a group of grunts and you get an achievement and they don't spot you many people don't like this part but i do it's something extra you know the only gripe i have with it is that just when i'm about to reach the end some grunt with superman vision always manages to see me even if i'm crouched not even crouched i could probably no clip into the ground and he'll still see me i already mentioned how the ai is a bit different but it's not limited to only the grunts and okay i have very few dislikes of this game but this is one of them the assassins now shoot faster because they hold two guns now and maybe it's just me but i feel like they jump a lot more often making them the most annoying enemy in existence and maybe i just suck at the game but i sometimes put a whole magazine in their face and they still just jump away like it was nothing like what the hell at least with the grunts they changed the layout of the maps to compensate but for the assassins they didn't do anything or maybe they did and i'm just not seeing it who knows and it's not just the assassins and the alien controllers now sometimes do this sort of side jump in the air when you shoot them which is annoying imo but also no matter how much you're moving like you can run around the whole planet faster than a plane and their shots will still summary every time i encounter them i leave that encounter with about two health and no ammo okay rant over there are actually new enemies that i haven't seen before you'll see different types of hound eyes there's one that deals more damage and has armor on wonderful and there's also one that blows up when they get near you which are intuitively called the suicide hound eyes you'll also see zombies in hev suits very interesting and because they have hev suits you'll almost have to aim for the head because you know armor and there are also these things in the zen water which work the same way as barnacles do except they pull you down instead and because of that they're called beneath the coals which is probably the most genius name for an enemy okay don't at me but these new enemies i mentioned you'll only see in zen and speaking of zen there's no way i couldn't talk about it i had to let's be honest zen and half-life 1 kind of sucks it feels rushed and that's because i was so it feels kind of bland compared to the maps on earth in black mesa zen is completely redone almost everything is different so everything you knew about zen and half-life 1 just throw it out the window because none of it is saying before i got to play black mesa i saw a few screenshots of the zen levels and i thought they looked amazing so i thought i knew what to expect and wouldn't be as amazed when i actually got to play it but honestly playing the game and seeing zen first hand and not through screenshots is a completely different experience like it hits a different this zen is probably the most beautiful place i've seen in any video game no wonder it took like five years to make like look at this like zen here actually has a diverse ecosystem after all this is supposed to be the home world for many aliens and i doubt they could live in an empty place there's a lot of plant life and annoying animals to accompany that i could honestly spend like an hour just looking at all the different life in zen meanwhile there are no plants in half-life 1. the amount of time you spend in xin has been like quadrupled in black mesa in half-life 1 you spend like 40 minutes in zen maybe an hour at most in black me so you spend like three hours probably and i don't mind because it looks amazing there's some amazing world building here too you can see many black mesa facilities built here showing that you're not the first one here at all the original also shows this but only through hev suits scattered around the place and that's it kind of boring the fight with the gun arc has been overhauled to the extreme in half-life 1 the fight was like only about 10 minutes and lame like the rest is in in black mesa the arenas are much larger partly because the engine can support it but also because you need to use the long jump module to dodge when the gun arc charges at you when you finish in the first arena she runs away just like in the original but now you have a section where you have to navigate around these small tunnels while she's hunting you down and there's also a long chase right before you get to the final arena conveniently shown through a line of fire i just really like it what's interesting is that you can also kill it with cyanogen or just avoid the whole fight completely and run away there are achievements for that zen and the gun arc i think are just polished perfectly i'll also briefly mention the music in zen here the music in zen is more melodical and calm which feels fitting with the overall look of zen while wandering around you'll just get drawn by the music but it's not all calm during the fight with the gun arc the music picks up in heaviness again as you get to the end of the fight the combination is just perfect so zen is amazing but there's only one problem with it and that has to do with the interloper chapter i'm really not sure how to feel about this chapter because there's a lot of good but also some things that are just no it's still infinitely better than the original though like that's just facts the first no for me was that after recording it my computer died which corrupted the footage thanks a lot for one thing interloper and black mesa is long as [ __ ] it's an hour and 30 minutes so it takes up a good portion of your time in zen not that it's a bad thing i don't really mind because it still looks bosun it's just something noteworthy one thing i do like is that it shows the labs of the vortigaunts through more environmental storytelling the game shows how they're being enslaved and the work that they're being forced to do one good change is that it's now made obvious when a vortigaunt is friendly or not and originally it was impossible to tell unless they started shooting you in black mesa the shackles that they wear will glow when they're being controlled by an alien controller and they'll be in a more attack-ready position as opposed to just standing another cool thing is that halfway through the game will stop giving you normal ammo and instead add these green crystals that give you infinite energy ammo for the gaussian and gluon gun which i personally think is pretty interesting and unique but that's all the good stuff about this chapter there are a few things that i don't like remember when i said that a lot of the physics puzzles are just plugging stuff in well they took that and cranked it to 11 here there are so many plug puzzles that they start to get stale after some time like it would be fine if there were only a few but there's a bit too many of them it's enough to where you'll be happy when you first see them but by the end you can feel that you've had enough of them alongside the infinite supply of plug puzzles sometimes when you complete them you get sworn by alien controllers and i already said how i feel about those there's also this specific part on the conveyor belts where there's just so much happening that you just can't keep up like there's 50 alien controllers attacking there's a bunch of vodagons that are aggressive the showing the boxes will awaken the alien grunts inside making them attack you and you have to destroy these little vessels that power the barriers so you can go through all while all those enemies i mentioned are going after you like just chill but yeah despite all the bad about interloper i still ended up enjoying it because i feel like the pros outweigh the cons of course you can't forget about the neoliberal i've always felt neutral about the knee length at half-life 1 but the way it's changed in black mesa i think makes it better than the original first of all he actually looks and sounds menacing and terrifying when you first see him the arena is a lot larger and for a reason there are no more of these pads that launch you in the air so they give you more room to dodge attacks in the original the knee length will often teleport you to chambers which are first of all a bit annoying but also disrupt the pacing of the whole fight in black mesa there are no more teleports yay instead the neolith has new attacks this includes lasers coming out of its hands and these shots from the heavens above these waves of fire and sometimes bringing in vehicles from earth and flinging them at you and now with the large arena you have room to dodge these attacks the fight now consists of destroying these three energy things i don't know what they're called after that destroy the puzzle piece that is his shield then destroy these three crystals that he pulls from the ground to heal from and after that just dealing of damage to him the final result is an amazing view of his entire island exploding just in time for you to meet the g-man j-man is voiced by someone different from the original but he still does a pretty good impression g-man's speech is the same except that he's sort of translucent in the background while he shows you ruined areas similar to the beginning of half-life 2. i approve but in the end black mesa is just an awesome remake it's my favorite remake not that i've played others anyway i feel like it's the perfect combination of remaking half-life and changing certain aspects that make this possibly better than the original of course your opinion on that may vary and i do think that you should still play the original half-life is a big nostalgia hitter the old graphics have a certain charm that some people prefer and also it's a big historical landmark but for the two of you that are looking for something half-life related that's new then i think black mesa is the thing for you but anyways bye [Music] you

Channel: LamWarp

Views: 544,324

Keywords: Half Life, Black Mesa, Half, Life, Black, Mesa, comparison, analysis, comedy, funny, subtitles, Kevin MacLeod, Opposing Force, Planet, Sneaky Adventure, commentary, Valve

Id: upMfmgMOEJ4

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022