Black Mesa Mod for Source Engine

Playing Left 4 Dead made me recall what a great game Half-Life was. I had severe troubles playing Half-Life 2, some of which I blogged about long ago. The posts were lost in my conversion to WordPress, but the gist of the problem was that I could only run HL2 with Windows in Safe Mode, which is a pain. But now that my PC includes a Geforce 8800 and a sound card, those problems have vanished. I played Half-Life 2 again recently, and the experience is superb without the frequent crashes. I can now finally agree that this should have been my favorite game of 2004 or whenever it came out, which is both satisfying and “meh” at the same time. I can only hope that one day Vista works just as well.

My rekindling interest in Half-Life caused me to check out what if anything has been going on in the mod community. Yes, end-users still utilize developer toolkits to create bonus content for PC games. I was surprised too. Then again, Half-Life mods always got a bit more publicity thanks to support from HL developer and publisher VALVe. My research brought me to the recent news regarding the Black Mesa mod. Does anyone remember that VALVe re-released the original Half-Life with Source engine upgrades, such as better textures, effects, and physics? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Half-Life Source was an extremely crappy recomposite, and not worth buying Half-Life over again. But from the info on the Black Mesa mod devblog, it appears as though these guys hope to achieve what VALVe failed to deliver. Black Mesa claims to be a complete remake of Half-Life using the Source engine, HL2 models, physics, and scripting. And if the video below is any indication of what’s in store, I’d say it’s time for everyone to buy a Source engine PC game like Half-Life 2 or L4D.

Tags: Half-Life 2, mods, source, video