BLλCK MESA - Goodbye Gordon

[tangy]

1 - first day at my new job :)
2 - four minutes in and everything's already a big mess
3 - already getting lost almost seven times
4 - nine scary jumps on hanging crates
5 - nearly eleven delicious flavours
6 - office space season twelve
7 - fourteen ladders later...
8 - sixteen thousand bullets to the face
9 - 19 Gy of delicious bull juice
10 - twenty meter drops. like three of them
11 - doing the work of twenty-three men and women
12 - twenty four tons of angry ghost fire
13 - murdered like twenty seven times in a dark corridor
14 - twenty eight miles of underground rails
15 - thirty one train problems
16 - the thirty two men massacre
17 - lost at sea for thirty five and a half minutes
18 - can't remember anything, shouldn't have had that fourty
19 - clean-up in aisle 39
20 - 40 infernal loops
21 - fourty-five ways you can ensure an alien hates you
22 - how to fire a laser in 48 easy steps
23 - died like fifty-one times by the hand of humans
24 - it's a blazing fifty-two outside today in new mexico, not ideal for a stroll
25 - fifty-five landmines buried in the sand
26 - and so fifty six hours later, black mesa was no more
27 - things are getting even more ridiculous, like fifty-nine times more ridiculous
28 - a brood of fifty-eight and a half immortal flaming bees
29 - breathing in sixty-three and a half different kinds of alien spores
30 - bracing for sixty-five impacts
31 - the atomic weight of gallium is 69.723
32 - seventy-two and a half soldiers not listening to their orders here
33 - battle of the seventy-five shipment containers
34 - the maze of seventy-nine corridors
35 - eighty ways your reactor can fail
36 - the eighty-four portals tower dungeon
37 - eighty-five and a half lightyears away...
38 - 87.62$ horror game now on steam!
39 - eighty-nine kilotons of explosive strapped to this tree
40 - dog running at me barking at 91 dB
41 - 92.9% of the way to my destination
42 - 96 credits worth of courses in theoretical xenoengineering coming to fruition
43 - it takes 98 years for a turkeyboy to grow into a turkeyman
44 - surviving planar aberations 101
45 - one hundred and three feet under the sea
46 - 106.4 IQ poppin' like a big balloon
47 - now 108mg of green in every can! wow!
48 - we got an orange alert 112.4, I repeat, an orange alert, code 112.4
49 - 115 lovely shades of brown
☣ 50 ☣ one hundred and nineteen jars all in a row
51 - how it's made episode 122: heavy duty soldier drone
52 - following 127.6 miles of red thread
53 - long elevator ride to the 127th floor
END of GAME - 54 - there will be a $131,29 service fee. thank you!

-- shoutouts to Camwoodstock

[Grounder]

So, like I may or may not have said last go-around, Black Mesa was everything Aperture Science wished it was. Successful, seemingly hyper-competent, unlikely to have an AI in charge of everything going rouge...

And then Ivy League graduate Gordon Freedom had quite possibly the worst day of his life.

While GLaDOS possibly dealt the final blow to humanity in Portal 2's DLC (it's not really clear) it was Black Mesa's single moment of hubris that doomed the species overall, at least to date.

[EllenHouraisan]

Alright, finally raocow is playing Dark Table.

[Window Squeegee]

Gordon Freedom, after already having been running late to work that day, decides to stand silent in front of the test chamber for 24 hours while his coworkers impatiently look on with bated breath.

[BeckySFairley]

First time seeing this version of the game. It looks good don't know if Barry or G-man is visible anywhere here.

[HatKid]

woooooooooooow not playing the better remake half life source (note: this is a joke)

I was motivated to play the original Half Life after the HL2 LP however long ago that was now. I enjoyed it, but it was kinda rough. FPSs are also something I'm really bad at. I'm eager to see how Black Mesa improves on the original game.

[Catabo]

When i saw the thumbnail and video length, i grinned because i knew the majority of the video was going to be the trolley ride.

Way back in the halcyon days of 2012, i played the first several levels of Half-Life 1 after beating the HL2s and wanting more. I can't remember if i stopped because i got lost or because fighting some of the enemies was a slog. Looking forward to seeing where it goes in remade form!

And mans, this is a wonderful fan game so far. Yes, you can tell the actors for characters like Eli aren't the same, but the fact that they're even remotely similar is incredible. A lot of care went into this preliminary part in general, and that's important for Half-Life because the original was part of a new wave of games that made things real in little ways, like if you find a gun it'll be on a shelf or leaning against a wall rather than spinning a metre above the ground. Yes, extraordinary things still happen in the game, but the fact that Black Mesa is established as a very tangible place in the overture enhances that.

[xnamkcor]

Do as you will, but for (maybe) performance sake, and easier video processing, I suggest the following video settings:

VSynch: On
Chromatic Aberration: Recommend Off
Radioactive Noise Shader: On
Hud Post Processing: Recommend Off
Motion Blur: Off

Anti-Aliasing: Off(or Minimum)
Filtering: Off(or Minimum)

All unmentioned setting should be set as high as you care.

[PSI Ninja]

When I first played the original Half-Life via the Anthology bundle, I found myself quick saving and reloading more often than what felt natural to me. From what I remember, health and ammo refills seemed sparse at times and enemies tended to deal a lot of damage, so it was easy to die. I don't know if the liberal use of quick saves is part of the typical experience people have with HL1, but then again, FPS games aren't really my jam. Wish I could've played the original closer to the LP of Black Mesa, so I can appreciate the differences beyond just visuals.

Also, it's cool to see a historically accurate(?) periodic table. Not to open a can of worms regarding the timeline, but if we take this to be the latest revision of the chart, then that would suggest that the events of this game took place no earlier than November 2004.

[Grounder]

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[Reecer7]

i think it's immensely funny you find your first medkit at 70 health lying next to a guy who is clearly on the brink of death. sorry man i need that more than you, i'm dr. freedom and i have a bruise on my elbow

[Donut]

To be perfectly fair, if this is anything like the original,

if you stick around the scientist actually does succeed in resuscitating the guard and he's perfectly okay when you leave them.

[Le Neveu de Rameau]

I had a dream in which is was stated that Gordon Freeman's favourite beverage is canonically dirty pond water.

That is all.

[Grounder]

real dora the explorer moment with health today

[helucard]

Okay. I'm gonna respect that rao wishes to let the game guide him, and as an "entry level game", he wants to be unguided by anything else. If he's curious about a missed first aid station, and how the hell he managed to miss that, a screenshot and my thoughts are in the spoiler.

So you know that first aid station you spot at 9:05? Well there was, as you guessed, more health way earlier too!

There was one immediately at 0:34... Hiding behind a door that you had entered from in the previous episode, so you weren't gonna go back that way anyway, and noticing that it wasn't just "a weird sciencey block" in a room full of server racks and control panels isn't easy when there's opaque steel in the way.



Then there was more at 2:09, you saw the headcrab on a guy, picked up a gun, noticed the guy dying on the ground, turned to the wider open part of the room, fixed the scanner and left.



I cannot fault that at all. The way I see it, we entered a room where the brightly lit thing in the direction where sounds were coming from was a headcrab on a guy's face, and blood on the wall. Directly between you and it was the gun, and a dying security guard. The natural thing here would be to see the headcrab thing sitting under the light, and even if you don't see the gun, you're prooobably gonna walk over with your crowbar to smack it just in case... picking up the gun as you walk. This is nicely designed. It works. The other half of this room, not so much.

If you pick up on the fact that the dying guy is crawling, you might be inclined to look back to him. MIGHT. Unfortunately, the game has so far given you button tutorials, so naturally, anything important will be explicitly told to you - why would you think anything other than "Oh, a gun, neat. How do I open this door?". The first aid station only briefly entered your peripheral vision as you passed it, and was never directly focussed in sight. I cannot reasonably fault a person for committing the crime of not turning back to the wall behind you in a room where you were never incentivised to do so.

Perhaps if the guy had been propped up against the wall, beneath the first aid station, with a blood tail leading to him to catch your eye, that would've been good signposting. Unfortunately, in this game, we have to constantly be turning around to make sure we don't miss anything.

[raocow]

what an interesting analysis

[strongbadman]

Icm excited for the eventual HL1 classic lp, where the thread titles will be Freeman's Mind quotes

[Catabo]

"SLSLLSSPLSLSRUSLURUURRLSLURRRP" —jonh freedom

I associate the emergency broadcast tones as heard on the radio in today's video with tornadoes. Never expected to be hearing them in a game.

Shout-out to the Del Monte-looking "Bel Phoney" logo on the foodstuff crates. That actually had my mind fooled to the point i thought "wait, wouldn't that be copyright something?" until i paused the video and looked closer. They really had fun with the fake brand, info poster, etc textures.

Double post-preventing edit: did you know? The cafeteria menu being cheap is actually realistic. I worked at a job last year at a place that had an in-house cafeteria because the facility was in the middle of nowhere. Since the customer base was almost entirely people who already worked there, you only had to pay like $3 for one of two meals/sides cooked by the on-site chef. Food wasn't the company's actual business, so they didn't have to worry about profiting off of it, only making enough to cover the cost of maintaining the cafeteria in the first place. I still miss the chicken gyro and the fish sandwich. But even a guarantied daily meal that was basically free wasn't enough to make me want to continue working in their call centre.

[Grounder]

[QuiEstFaba]

more and more, this is turning into Freeman's Mind, and I'm all for it

[Donut]

This must be incredibly frustrating to watch for a certain subset of viewers

Frustrating is the wrong word because this is a very enjoyable playthrough, but it does make me ponder the universe where Dusk was chosen from the pool of royal options instead...

[xnamkcor]

Now that you have an rifle, try the suit zoom. I honestly forget which guns you can shoot while zoomed.

[Catabo]

So yeah, shortly after the military mans started being a thing was where i quit HL1. I was fine fighting the Combine in HL2, but for some reason in HL1 fighting humans felt uniquely like a slog and an interruption to the real adventure of finding a way through the facility and dealing with all the weird aliens.

[strongbadman]

Now that you have an rifle, try the suit zoom. I honestly forget which guns you can shoot while zoomed.

I think it's actually zero guns. Zoom is purely to line up a shot or get a better look.

this game has the crossbow like 2 has but it has a built in zoom).

[Catabo]

"imagine hearing this on the radio, 'you might just be getting radiation poisoning; see someone about it'; what the hell?

Fact check me if i'm wrong, but i'm pretty sure that happened with real life nuclear tests minus the part where people heard about it on the radio.