Ren - Moved to chitter.xyz @Nine@computerfairi.es

Despite some visual glitches and the fact that the latter half (Interloper onwards) is brutally hard even on easy mode (seriously yikes!!), plus some occasional crashes and hitches in performance, it runs really well and looks incredible!

The Nihilanth boss fight is... WAY more goddamn epic, way more thematic too! It was actually FUN as opposed to an exercise in abject frustration and lack of feedback.

Welp, that's Black Mesa completed! Holy crap. That was... genuinely good.

Xen is entirely unrecognisable from its original incarnation in Half Life 1.

For a start it's actually goddamn fun. and MUCH easier to navigate and know what you're doing.

The gonarch battle is ... not just a boss fight. There's like, an entire CHAPTER dedicated to being hunted by, Hunting in return, and trying to fight it/escape it, before you finally get to its climactic battle.

i got a snorlax in pokemon btw

i called it Benadryl

shake shake

Dang that's a pretty slick trailer. Wonder if that's still in Unity or they moved to Unreal or something because dang those lighting effects are rad.

8 whole weapons apparently, and they're going to simulate even MORE of the mechanics of the guns. That's... I worry about that last bit a little to be honest.

But honestly if you'd have asked me about Receiver before I tried it out, I would have said "eeh, I don't think that'll be very fun at all, probably too complex..."

aaand yet...

aw whaaaat

receiver 2 is coming!?

Okay if I have one complaint it's that... some of the structures and archetecture are just... way too human in Xen, as in stuff NOT constructed by humans.

like, there's a few obviously human bits of tech in Xen from previous expeditions, but like in areas where there's clearly no human influence, there's... very human looking windows y'know??

oh. ... oh dear you directly HAVE to do something that causes an alarm to be raised and ... oh wow that explains why they fight you at first sight earlier. they're being controlled. Wow... poor things. ;; also no matter what at least one Vort dies during the attack where the Controllers turn up and mind control them all to kill you. Each Controller you take out though saves all the vorts they were controlling at least!..

I'm just... walking through their village now and just... watching and listening to them chatter to each other and seeing them go about their lives, they were teleporting a bunch of themselves somewhere, dunno where, but I'm gonan guess not for war, for escape I think

there's like four of them and they're being yelled at I guess by two of the big grunt guys with the hivehand weapons? and if you drop into the area or get seen, the vorts just run away immediately and the grunts attack you. Even after the grunts are dead the four vorts just hide from you and cower, poor things. so obv. I didn't kill them or harm them at all.

I think that if you did, the vort village might be hostile to you? Maybe? idk. but they let me through!

oh my god i just

okay this is really, really good, damn, Crowbar Collective did an AMAZING job with the Xen part of this game, no wonder it took so long, it's like they took the general concept of Xen ,and then just... said... "fuck it let's make our OWN Xen, just... toss out all the OG Half Life xen shit."

It's amazing. You actually find a village of Vortigaunts and you don't have to kill any of them. I mean you meet some earlier that if you don't kill just run away

thinkin bout

them bunny ear antennae things robots sometimes have

love them

playing through Xen on the new Black Mesa beta finally. and...WWWOWW it is SO different!! for a start, it's absolutely beautiful to look at, properly alien looking environments, wonderfully detailed, a real feeling of wandering an alien ecology and landscape, an ACTUAL RESEARCH FACILITY MADE WITH TEMPORARY PORTABLE BUILDINGS LIKE THERE WOULD BE FOR A RESEARCH EXPEDITION, interesting new enemies and environmental hazards...

and actually FUN to traverse!!