lpetrich
Contributor
Half a year ago, the Crowbar Collective finished its remake of Valve's late-1990's video game Half-Life. Or one might say, reimagining.
Black Mesa: Re-visit the world that started the Half-Life continuum — Crowbar Collective
Here is a complete playthrough video:
BLACK MESA - Full Game Walkthrough【1440p | 60fps | Max Detail】 - YouTube
One can find playthrough videos for numerous other video games.
The Earthbound parts follow the originals fairly closely, but the Xen parts are a total rework. Those alien-world parts are my favorite parts of the original, and the new version is absolutely great. Very beautiful, and much bigger levels. Seems almost like a full-scale world.
Xen is still a world with floating islands and mountains, and it still has some familiar elements, like the Gonarch (a Mama Headcrab), the Nihilanth (looks like a big baby), and the soldier canisters on conveyor belts in the alien factory. The first Xen level, however, is expanded into a big swamp, and we see some facilities that were set up by visiting scientists.
Half-Life is a first-person shooter that was released in 1998 by a company named Valve. In its solo scenario, one is Gordon Freeman, a physicist and lab worker at a huge, cartoonish, underground gov't lab called Black Mesa. One day, GF was helping to analyze a sample of some odd material when the process of doing so opened up a portal to a parallel universe, something more usually called another dimension.
A horde of nasty ET's comes through and you have to fight them. Nasties like headcrabs, about the size of cats, but with roundish bare bodies and four legs and a mouth at the base of those legs. They jump on you and attack you. You also end up fighting some soldiers that were sent in to take control of the lab, though the lab guards stay on your side. You have to fight your way to another part of the lab, where some scientists have created another portal to this parallel universe. Then you go through this portal and end up in a world called Xen. You fight your way through that one also, and you end up fighting the mastermind of that invasion, the aforementioned Nihilanth.
A company called Gearbox made some add-on scenarios a few years later, Opposing Force, where you play as a soldier, and Blue Shift, where you play as a lab guard. Valve itself made another add-on, a multiplayer team game called Counter-Strike. Valve later made Half-Life 2, where one fights some more invaders, the "Combine". But it stays totally Earthbound.
I was disappointed when Valve canceled its MacOS port that it was working on, and I remember once buying a Playstation 2 so I could play the game. That's all that I ever got for that PS2, however. I ended up playing it on a PeeCee that I once used as a Wintendo machine, inside of the VMWare PeeCee emulator, and native to MacOS when Valve finally released it in that form. Likely running with a Windows-to-MacOS emulator library.
I don't have this new version, and I'm not likely to anytime soon. So that's why I posted the video playthrough.
Black Mesa: Re-visit the world that started the Half-Life continuum — Crowbar Collective
Here is a complete playthrough video:
BLACK MESA - Full Game Walkthrough【1440p | 60fps | Max Detail】 - YouTube
One can find playthrough videos for numerous other video games.
The Earthbound parts follow the originals fairly closely, but the Xen parts are a total rework. Those alien-world parts are my favorite parts of the original, and the new version is absolutely great. Very beautiful, and much bigger levels. Seems almost like a full-scale world.
Xen is still a world with floating islands and mountains, and it still has some familiar elements, like the Gonarch (a Mama Headcrab), the Nihilanth (looks like a big baby), and the soldier canisters on conveyor belts in the alien factory. The first Xen level, however, is expanded into a big swamp, and we see some facilities that were set up by visiting scientists.
Half-Life is a first-person shooter that was released in 1998 by a company named Valve. In its solo scenario, one is Gordon Freeman, a physicist and lab worker at a huge, cartoonish, underground gov't lab called Black Mesa. One day, GF was helping to analyze a sample of some odd material when the process of doing so opened up a portal to a parallel universe, something more usually called another dimension.
A horde of nasty ET's comes through and you have to fight them. Nasties like headcrabs, about the size of cats, but with roundish bare bodies and four legs and a mouth at the base of those legs. They jump on you and attack you. You also end up fighting some soldiers that were sent in to take control of the lab, though the lab guards stay on your side. You have to fight your way to another part of the lab, where some scientists have created another portal to this parallel universe. Then you go through this portal and end up in a world called Xen. You fight your way through that one also, and you end up fighting the mastermind of that invasion, the aforementioned Nihilanth.
A company called Gearbox made some add-on scenarios a few years later, Opposing Force, where you play as a soldier, and Blue Shift, where you play as a lab guard. Valve itself made another add-on, a multiplayer team game called Counter-Strike. Valve later made Half-Life 2, where one fights some more invaders, the "Combine". But it stays totally Earthbound.
I was disappointed when Valve canceled its MacOS port that it was working on, and I remember once buying a Playstation 2 so I could play the game. That's all that I ever got for that PS2, however. I ended up playing it on a PeeCee that I once used as a Wintendo machine, inside of the VMWare PeeCee emulator, and native to MacOS when Valve finally released it in that form. Likely running with a Windows-to-MacOS emulator library.
I don't have this new version, and I'm not likely to anytime soon. So that's why I posted the video playthrough.
