Just in case you missed the comments linked trailer for the Black Mesa Source mod:
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Black Mesa Trailer
Posted by Jim Rossignol on December 1st, 2008 at 8:39 am.
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Judging from the fact that Valve did nothing more than ask them to remove “Source” from the name (hence it’s now monikered just “Black Mesa”), that implies implicit, bordering on explicit, permission.
I mean, the original is now 10 years old, and selling for 98c; I don’t think Valve are worried that Black Mesa will cause sales of HL1 to plummet. If anything, they’ll probably get a few more sales of HL2 out of it. Win win.
P.
High-def houndeyes, hurrah! Pkow pkow pkow.
Ah, the way they’ve polished up the Blast Pit is beautiful. It’s all looking very nice. Can’t wait to play Surface Tension. And Questionable Ethics. And… well, lotsa stuff. I’m intrigued as to how they’ll deal with the problem of Xen hoovering cock like a vacuum cleaner in a chicken coop.
…Sounds like an Aussie on the PA. : P
Sweet fancy Moses.
Valve, give them money!
http://www.moddb.com/mods/black-mesa/downloads/black-mesa-official-trailer
As Colthor says – avatars move sooo much slower these days. They have weight, and walk like they have two legs instead of butter wheels. What little we see in the trailer suggests Freeman is moving slower in this than the original too. If that’s true it would make this much more different than a sexy re-skin. It would change the balance, and change the way it plays. So if he does move slower, and that doesn’t just balls the unchanged gameplay up completely, this could be awesome.
Perhaps it was just me, but I always felt that the gap between HL1 and 2 was so great that it’s rather difficult to link them together.
With the fantabulous new graphics and sound, however, I think it may really feel like the same world.
I wonder if they’d consider remaking Opposing Force? More GMan!
This is an awesome (INB4 Nova) prospect
I just finished playing Half-Life: Source a week ago. This looks a gazillion times nicer… but I hope the gameplay is tweaked a bit too. I had to cheat to finish it. Running into a couple of soldiers usually meant I’d die or be half-dead, even on easy.
Games, and what it means to die in games, have really changed in 10 years…
No, they will not be moving on to Op4.
No, they will not all be snapped up by Valve (some of them, maybe, but not anywhere near all). Some of them are already in the industry, of course, and some of them probably just did it explicitly intending not to go for a job. Nielsen, for instance, is an unlikely one.
Yes, you [were entirely entitled to be concerned over how long this has been in development for]
Making a mod to get hired in the industry is a bad idea anyway. You sould make a mod, because YOU LOVE MAKING MODS, if you don’t love making mods, your time is best consumed doing something else. If you make a mod, and you get hired, good, but is not a good idea to use modding for something else than modding.
/rant
I’m rather more optimistic about this now than I was previously. I’ve been beset by the horrible suspicion that this was becoming yet another zombie mod project that was slowly losing steam far short of completion . . .
But I’ve been reassured! Huzzah, et cetera.
Some other group has a op4 project going. I would find the link, but I am at work.
It looks really great…… except for the weapons and did you hear that SMG?
As towards Tei, making mods is fun, sure, but after a while, it gets tedious, the fan base shrinks and if it takes too long, the game gets abandoned and the mod with it. Modding for the pure sake of modding works for the short term, but almost never in a long timespan. This has been in development for close to three years, and that’s a long time with very little to show for it as you’re doing it.
If time didn’t cost money and people didn’t have jobs, sure, modding for fun long time would be a viable option, but it doesn’t work out that way, so why not mod and try and get a better job at the same time?
It’s incredible that the Black Mesa Team has held together this long and accomplished as much as it has.
As long as they release the mod to the public, for free, given they have the source engine/ a source game installed, I see no problem with them getting benefits out of it, like jobs.
That looks slick. So slick, in fact, that it justifies the use of italics to convey the enthusiasm of my opinion.
oh. my. god.
I had forgot all about this, and now I can’t fecking wait.
@Thirith: The voice acting also sounds pretty damn good.
It should, its the original sound files from Half Life 1.
<3 half-life, this game has a very special place in my hearth, I know this mod has been in development for years, but i think some of the most talented designers in the mod community are working on it, so its definitely worth the wait!
@ Y3k-Bug: I believe they actually are re-recording the dialogue. Compare the Barney at the desk in this trailer to the original and it’s fairly clear that they’re aren’t working with the same audio.
@Y3k: No it’s not. They’re completely different voice actors. They’re very good, but they’re definitely different, and if you check the BM website devblogs you’ll find a fair few entries about the voice acting.
@Y3k-Bug
The voices are all newly recorded by their voice actors including G-Man. Their guy does sound exactly like Shapiro, though – apparently to the extent that some people can’t even tell! =D
Well, undercut by *everyone*
That’s how you make a trailer.
I’m actually a little disappointed by the graphics. It pretty much looks like Half-Life 1 with a few more years of polish. I wanted a HL2-style rendering of the locations and events of HL1.
Not that it’s not a definite improvement over Half-Life: Source.
@Jacques : hopes the mod (total conversion?) is released soon, looks like very interesting. Good luck!
Malkav11: the memory can be a funny thing. It’s worth going to the Black Mesa website and looking at the comparisons in level design. I couldn’t remember the original Half-Life looking so empty but next to the redesign it’s really quite shocking seeing how much they’ve improved upon it.
Thanks for the link to Nielsen’s site, bob. I really like his stuff, although sadly he doesn’t have the track he used for this trailer online. Still, the other music for BM is also well done, but he mostly leaves out the flashiness of the trailer track, probably because creeping through dark corridors does not go well with fast, agressive music.
@Malkav:
Huh?
HOLY SHIT. Black Mesa is going down as one of the greatest mods of all time.
Of all the cool stuff in the vid, I’m still most impressed by the movement and pacing of the scientists and lab techs :)
HOOOOOOOOOOLY GOD
This looks good.
You know, after looking at screenshots, I think the trailer just threw me off somehow. Maybe it’s Youtube’s compression at work.
One leeetle niggle; that freeze frame of Gordon talking to Barney… isn’t that a cutscene?
And aren’t cutscenes the antithesis of Half Life?
I have a feeling the few cutscene-style things shown in the trailer were pure cinematic license.
I can’t imagine the BMS team would do away with the always in first-person-ness.
I think beardy-guy was just a random scientist #345 looking over Barneys shoulder.
Just came around watching this. It’s really amazing! HL2 was the last FPS I bought (Portal is not really a FPS for me..). I was a bit disappointed with the HL:source port they included back then. But this mod sets everything right again. Incredible!
Also, thanks Tei, for that youtube link to the old HL trailer. I remember that I was anticipating HL for what I thought was a small eternity. Quake 2 was sooner released than HL. But, boy, was it worth the wait. I gobbled up every screenshot, every short trailer that was available. Downloading huge trailers was a luxury back then in the stone age of the Internet.
I especially remember that one-eyed panther… thing. So sad that Valve did not incorporate that into the final game. Or… I guess it later evolved into the three-armed slave aliens.
Seeing all those old HL1 scenes with moder. technology sent shivers down my spine…