Here's a video of the game: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n54ILGwO68c" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n54ILGwO68c</a><p>Looks fantastic, especially considering that YouTube's compression apparently did some bad things to the visual appearance[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=12124" rel="nofollow">http://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=12124</a>: <i>The compression YouTube applies has blurred and darkened everything, even at 720p settings...I've got the original video at 1080p, and everything looks fine.</i>
Looks like there won't be OSX/Mac support<p><a href="https://twitter.com/BlackMesaDevs/status/242317444880928768" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/BlackMesaDevs/status/242317444880928768</a>
For those that cannot wait:<p>Have (immature) fun with their 404 page:
<a href="http://www.blackmesasource.com/404.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.blackmesasource.com/404.php</a><p>The soundtrack is released ahead of time for your pleasure:
<a href="http://www.blackmesasource.com/soundtrack.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.blackmesasource.com/soundtrack.html</a>
Why the heck do I learn of this from the BBC and not from nofrag (kudos to my french-speaking fellows ;)<p>This is a mod I have been waiting for a loooong time. Can't wait to dust off my fps skills while enjoying the game.<p>A long time in the making, I hope the devs are proud of their work and that their work is going to give them pride.
There was a mod for HL1 which allowed you to play as the alien race, similarly to what blue shift and opposing force did for Barney and corporal Shephard respectively. However, I haven't been able to find it on the web for quite some time now. Does anyone know this mod and where it lives nowadays?
<i>Half-Life creator Valve released an updated version of the game in 2004 that was built around its Source game code or engine. That official update of Half-Life was generally regarded as unsatisfactory and led to the Black Mesa project which aimed to do a better job.</i><p>Citation needed. Load times aside, Half-Life 2 was a spectacular game, and one of the best-reviewed games of all time. Metacritic's score for it was a 96 with 81 positive reviews: <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/half-life-2" rel="nofollow">http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/half-life-2</a><p>edit: OHHHHHHHH. My bad. Thanks for pointing out that they were referring to Half-Life: Source.
The 14th release isn't the complete project but it plays all the way until lambda core chapter:<p><a href="http://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?p=480683#post480683" rel="nofollow">http://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?p=480683#po...</a><p>><i>This will include our re-envisioning of Half-Life all the way up to Lambda Core. We believe this is a great way to provide a complete-feeling 8-10 hour experience with a solid ending, make our fans happy and help us make the best overall game possible.<p>>We are still working hard on Xen and BMDM, but instead of making you wait we are giving you Black Mesa as soon as it's ready!</i>
Looking good.<p>Hopefully I can recommend this to a friend who hasn't played HL at all. He isn't really into games but recently bought a laptop with a decent graphics chip. I told him that if you are only going to try one PC game then it should be HL but the graphics of the original look very dated now and don't work well on 16:9 and jumping straight to HL2 may be a little confusing without understanding the context.
I remember when they promised it would be out by 2009 [1]. I guess it's to be expected when you're working on Valve time. I was starting to wonder if the project would get released before Valve either dumped or completely renovated the Source engine.<p>[1] <a href="http://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=2416" rel="nofollow">http://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=2416</a>