In a world of cookie-cutter shooters, "ordinary" has once again become the extraordinary.
(Sorry for the long absence, real life has (sadly) caught up to me recently. Moving sucks. - VR)
This past week saw the long-awaited, totally free, and shockingly well-polished Black Mesa. A mod a full eight years in the making - and technically still not finished - has recreated Half-Life from the ground up using the engine that powered its sequel. Needless to say, the bar was set quite high. Half-Life has long been considered a cornerstone of modern video games, and with good reason. When it released in 1998, Half-Life was considered revolutionary, and many of its design tenets, such as the use of scripted sequences to both advance the plot and create dynamic scenes during gameplay, are still used widely in modern shooters.
Black Mesa, amazingly enough, manages to not only maintain the spirit of Half-Life almost fourteen years after the game's debut, but also improve upon it in several ways. By refining level progression, puzzle solving, and scripted events, the Black Mesa team was able to polish the few rough segments that were present in the original game. It is very much a 90's shooter in the clothes of the modern era. This isn't to say that Black Mesa is without flaws, but it did an utterly fantastic job at hiding them, considering the project was done entirely by volunteers. Black Mesa's greatest achievement, however, may be the complete shift that the game will represent to players new to 90's-style shooters.
