Half Life with better FX

AlphaJohn

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I recently decided to replay the old Half life in anticipation for HL3 "coming soon". You know to refresh the memory, but I must admit playing the originals seemed a bit dated to say the least, so I thought I would hunt down some enhancements or texture packs.

Half Life aka Blackmesa
1st up was Half Life (the original). At 1st I thought the Source version would do, man was I wrong. All that did was add some physix engine and barely noticeable update to the graphics.

Luck the Modding community came to the rescue and redid HL in the form of http://www.blackmesasource.com/ Altough a bit dated to today's standards it was a hell of a lot better than Valves attempt. See bellow: Source vs Black Mesa
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And some more Blackmesa images below: (Click to enlarge)



Half Life 2 aka Cinematic Mod
Next up came Half Life 2 + episodes. After finishing the 1st game the second one needed some updating as well. So I went huning and yet again the comunity came up with some great mods. One that I liked very much was FakeFactory's Cinematic Mod that you can get from here: http://cinematicmod.com/cinematic_mod_2013.php

See bellow:



Warning this does come with heavy downloads but for me it was worth it.
Black mesa = 3 gig also needs the 2007 Source SDK that's about 2 gig (this part you install from within Steam)
Cinematic Mod = 9 gig

Just thought I would share in case someone else feel a bit nostalgic or just wanna brush up on their "lore" as I do believe HL3 is coming soon. Well I know for one that Left 4 Dead 3 is confirmed and in development on the Source 2 engine. SO its just normal to say that Half Life 3 is also in there somewhere.
 
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Sadly, I could never get Black Mesa to run. It simply crashed on the very first level and I couldn't figure out why. Neither could the devs, last time I checked. :(

I also hear you on Half-Life: Source. I bought it expecting to get a revamped Half-Life game, but it basically looked the exact same as the original Half-Life to me.
 
Sadly, I could never get Black Mesa to run. It simply crashed on the very first level and I couldn't figure out why. Neither could the devs, last time I checked. :(

I also hear you on Half-Life: Source. I bought it expecting to get a revamped Half-Life game, but it basically looked the exact same as the original Half-Life to me.

Odd, as I installed it on both me and my son's PC's. Win x64 8.1 for me and Win 7 x 64 for him. Just ran the installer(blackmesa-setup.exe) separate download to the blackmesa.7z file, and relaunched Steam. One thing I did find odd was that my download contained a virus (MSE picked it up and removed it)
 
Black Mesa was awesome. The team behind it are currently working on the next part as well (Xen and the Lambda Core as per the original Half-Life).

Yeah, Cinematic Mod is about 9GB. Please make sure to check out the instructions as well before you download it.
Link here : http://cinematicmod.com/
 
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