Actually Soulless

never saw the resemblance
but it sounds great

Well that's really not the music's fault now is it?

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It sounds generic and, dare I say it, soulless
The music is by far the weakest aspect of the remake

sure

what is truly defined as SOUL or SOULLESS? I keep seeing it used as "thing I like" vs "thing I don't like". what's the proper unbiased qualifications to these two terms?

One has soul
The other doesn't

LOL!

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Calling Black Mesa soulless is basically the ultimate proof that Yas Forums is contrarian as shit.
This board has been clamouring for this mod for years, never anything bad said about it aside from the developers selling out.
Now it's complete and everyone rushes in the shit on it, with soulless being the top meme.

My god, this is picture is Reddit incarnate.

and what is "soul"?

Until you reach Xen maybe

I literally have never played the original Half Life
Last night I finished Black Mesa
AMA

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That's Wallace "Soiboy" Breen for you

>and the OG still has some nice level design in Xen

imagine believing that

>but everyone says!
abloobloo

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sounds like it is lmao

Cant see shit capn

lmao

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Get off mobile or turn up your brightness.

Howd the mod? Where does it end?

With video games, soul is mostly defined by visuals. HL1 has a unique color palette in each area of the game. It adds a uniform personality to each room or hallway that makes those areas and the game on the whole more memorable.
In essence, it's not about what random props they filled the rooms with, it's how they actually look visually and how they fit the overall artistic direction the devs had in mind when developing the game. Many remasters fail to consider this and instead try to retexture and remodel each individual prop or item as if it were its own piece of art itself and not part of a larger picture. This leads to everything looking utterly random, as if all the things in the game were pulled from a dumpster and cobbled together, even if they're higher texture, and have better lighting, etc.
With all of that said, I've played HL1 twice in 20 years and I say with conviction that the game is total garbage and isn't worth playing, and that Black Mesa is probably far better. HL1 has aged very poorly from a technical and mechanical perspective that is only extremely noticeable today.
As stated the graphics and sounds are also very dated, but are much more charming, and it's the game engine that holds back HL1, making it an unpolished, glitchy shitshow with very one-dimensional gunplay when compared to more modern FPS, many of which of course took inspiration from HL1 itself. The ideas are very much there, but their technical limitations become increasingly obvious by the day.

The music is kind of "soulless" if you ask me. Which is pretty ironic since it's all entirely original, while HL1's OST was mostly sampled stock music.

how thief, deus ex and ss2 fags will ever recover?

Bros wtf why isn't this working?

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And somehow kelly bailey made it work. And the non sampled stuff is fantastic

maybe I need to find another eyball

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Overall thoughts on Xen now that the game is 1.0? Besides the huge improvement in overall presentation, the new setting and the factories in Interloper being combine inspired was a genius idea. I just don't appreciate the Nihilanth's voice where he sounds more like a villian than a trifled slave. His subtitle captions literally say "[Mocking Laughter]", it gives off the wrong impression like he wanted all this shit to happen and not the fact that he just wants to hide and defend his test tube baby ass from the big bad. At least you can do this with snarks in Xen.

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I agree that we should have gotten a ride on a xentaray.

Xen was pretty good, it just wasn't as good as the levels before it.
People rag on Xen but everyone who played Half Life remembers the weird gravity, the floating platforms, the Gonarch fight, the Vort factory and Nihilanth.
Xen was memorable.

reuploading at higher res for your eye enjoyment

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Black Mesa felt like a real place in an era where most videogame levels were a series of connected corridors and rooms with crates in them.
There was a flow to how one level led to the next.

Retinal scanners scan the blood vessels in the back of the eyeball.
I'm going to say that your eyeball there doesn't have enough blood left in it for the scanner to recognize it.

Nihilanth was hiding from the Combine in a crappy borderworld when he detected the resonance cascade on Earth.
Seeing an entire planet full of resources, no resistance to speak of and completely undetected by the Combine was the perfect gift and he mind forced the portal to stay open.
Finally some good luck coming his way. And that army he was building to give him five more minutes of defense against the Combine would be perfect for taking the planet over.
He expected some kind of token resistance but all that came through was a single sciencey boi with a crowbar and some guns.
He is less that impressed with Freeman and does not take him seriously up until he kills the Gonarch.

Cute.

The music was hit and miss for me, some of the changes to level desing are great but sometimes there is too much cluter. im playing on hard ATM and i dont remember soldier being this much of a pain to fight but so far its been great

>not taking care of the chopper before you go for a dip at the dam

SHIGGY

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yeah but did you gas gonarch?

wrong

Yeah I noticed that about the soldiers as well. The new AI really makes them be very hidey when on low health and they have really good aim. They also try to rush you and flank you if you're hiding. Surface Tension has been pretty hard on hard as well.

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also fuck these turrets

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Game is great. The fast movement really shows how shitty modern fps games are.

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Just throw a grenade up there.

hehehe

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Anyone able to tell me how Half-Life 2 connects to 1? The combine and City 17 seem to have 0 relevance to normal Earth in HL1

I always just sprint out of there. PS, did you guys notice the new cave/mineshaft area they added on Surface Tension in the 1.0 update? It's pretty cool.

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I think the gist of it is that either the Nihilanth was a prisoner for the combine or he was directly working with them. Towards the end of Interloper you end up in some alien labs with test tubes full of humans and various Earth artifacts so it's implied they're studying Earth and this knowledge will help for an invasion.

Either that or killing the Nihilanth opened a rift in the dimensions which allowed the Combine to slip through and take control.

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Imagine you have lots of valuables (water) in your house (earth) and there's thieves going around in your immediate neighbourhood (the combine) who know about it and you forget to lock your doors (extradimensional fissures) at night (xen crystal experiment) and they manage to break in, overpower you and steal all your shit (portal storms/7 hour war)

That's basically what happened with the black mesa incident/resonance cascade

I just played thru that area and it was cool but also just seemed like a more dangerous alternate path to a place you could get to by just walking thru a door. I guess there were some grenades i didnt notice though judging from your screen shot.

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I think it's been there before

Did they really change the interloper factories from pre-1.0? I think the metal textures they used are supposed to represent the vort version of computer machinery/vort tech in general