There's still a lot of value in playing the original, but what the Black Mesa team achieved with what is effectively a fan project is incredible. And in a world where Take Two goes after people doing cool stuff with 20 year old GTA games, it's great that it got the official blessing from Valve.
Other people have already given great answers: it plays faster, the levels are different, etc.
But to me the main problem of "remake replaces the original" approach is that it's a a very "content-consuming"-way to look at media. Videogames are art in their own way, old games can still be enjoyed for what they are and for what they were - same thing with movies. Silent Hill 2 (2024) doesn't replace the original Silent Hill 2. RoboCop (2014) doesn't make RoboCop (1987) obsolete.
That's my take on re_makes_, at least. With re_masters_ I'd be much more willing to recommend them over the originals (although the preservationist in me would still like the originals to be available in some way)
Just a quick bullet point list of differences from the top of my head:
- Half Life has much faster run and gun gameplay (stemming from it's quake roots no doubt), while in Black Mesa it's much slower paced
- The AI in the game is completely different, Black Mesa's soldiers feel way more aggressive, again encouraging a slower pace of play compared to the original
- Lots of levels have small changes - some are cool, others kinda feel like they're just different for the sake of being different
- Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
Black Mesa is a great game, one thing I have nothing but praise for is it's presentation - it's really nice to look at and they did a bang up job with the graphics and animations. But which is better is a matter of opinion, and personally I much prefer how HL1 actually feels to play.
A couple to add, with my own biases included because I love Black Mesa
- Joel Nielsen's great sound track / sound design work in Black Mesa ... I believe he admitted in an interview that some of the "squelching" sounds are recorded by slapping someone's arse O_o
- The reworked Gonarch fight is, hands down, one of the most entertaining and intense boss fights for me in recent memory. It's way better than the original for sure, which I remember just being frustrating (lack of ammo).
> Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
I see both takes. Like, in the original game I actually liked Xen (except Gonarch). It felt otherwordly and empty, as if one of the reasons for earth being invaded was because there was nothing left. But BM Xen is literally another world. I prefer BM Xen, but I did enjoy the original at the time.
For a deeper look into Black Mesa / Half-Life and some of the changes, Soup Emporium did a great video here, where he only stole some of the points he raises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8KAq78gco
The game mechanics and how the story is told is worth experiencing by itself in it’s original form before seeing the modern interpretation in Black Mesa
Overall I think Xen was much better in Black Mesa than HL1, but why they felt the need to make it so long is a mystery to me. Half to two-thirds of the play time could have been cut and it would have only improved things.
It is so long, and I did not enjoy my time there. "Alright, here is the third or fourth energy door unlocking puzzle to slog through". It was so much slower paced you lose the thread from the human world of what you are even doing anymore.
This reminded me of a Romanian joke from the communist era.
A son corresponds with his elderly father, who writes that he'd like to dig up the garden and plant potatoes, but the ground is hard and he's old, and can't the son come and help?
The son writes back that under no circumstances should he dig up the garden, that's where the money is hidden. The very next day, the Securitate (Romanian Secret Police) comes and digs up the entire garden looking for money.
A few days later, the son sends another letter: "I believe the garden should have been dug up by now, so you can go ahead and plant the potatoes."
This is great news, thank you, I was just thinking how much I'd like some affiliate links in my browser. Also many thanks for all the telemetry improvements listed in the changelog, those are also something I've been looking forward to for a long time. If this doesn't solve Firefox's abysmal market share, I don't know what will!
The important thing is that this allows them to avoid making a paid version of Firefox available to those that want to support it, or even taking donations that go to Firefox development. Because...I'm sure they have reasons.
> Also many thanks for all the telemetry improvements listed in the changelog, those are also something I've been looking forward to for a long time. If this doesn't solve Firefox's abysmal market share, I don't know what will!
Telemetry is how they figure out popular or blocked addons, failing pages, browser crashes, etc. Part of a managing popular software is indeed getting information like that. Because general public isn't keen on filling out forms by hand.
People on HN don't object to telemetry because they don't know what it might be used for. It's patronizing and useless to just respond with a naive psuedo-explanation.
+1, very patronizing and misleading. I dare say harmful, not useless. Plants seeds for the same tired arguments. Again. Helpful, not required.
edit: My 'argument' against it: when is enough? At what point does it become bike-shedding? Tricky to answer; isn't one. Transparency is paramount.
I'm for Telemetry, generally, but enjoy the universal ability to opt out. Either through your mechanisms or mine. At a point it becomes a matter of trust and need. More feedback loops, if you will.
Trust isn't necessarily regarding privacy, either. What about simple efficacy? For all of the Telemetry today, I don't see substantially more-effective software than what we had in the 1980s. More profit, sure - but not necessarily effective or reliable. It's possible - and reasonable - one may not trust Telemetry is going to good (read: effective) use.
The requirements/standards between a mobile game powered by endorphins and say, a web browser, are considerably different. Sorry, they were patronizing first.
No one on HN has any objection to explicit opt-in usage statistics. Telemetry is not the problem. Lack of consent is the problem. Software developers sliding themselves into end users' local machines without invitation is the problem—devs who feel entitled to take things, simply because they have the technical access to take them. And devs who don't even understand the difference.
I don't understand your comment? To clarify my own: it's my observation that I've never seen anyone on HN utter a word against opt-in telemetry models, like the one Debian uses.
Of all the diverse viewpoints, FOSS extremists and privacy fundamentalists, the core facet of "you can submit statistics to our popularity survey if you want" is not something I've ever seen anyone object to. The objections are always to some other facet of telemetry.
First, fingerprinting & correlation is real, and it's easier than ever because of the identifiers tools collect, and correlating is cheap because we have tons of GPUs for cheap now.
On the other hand, I personally don't like a pair of eyes looking over my shoulder, physical or digital.
People don't understand or don't want to understand that digital telemetry is not different from somebody looking over your shoulder, taking notes, and making "Mhm..." sounds.
When done without consent, both are equally invading personal space, and I don't want my personal space to be invaded like that, as a person on HN, who understands what telemetry is.
Part social contract, part the knowledge of what I can do with that data.
You know, somebody coming to your cubicle and taking something without asking is rude, in some cases unethical, even damaging. It's the same thing with computers. No application/website ever should be able to collect information about me without my consent. It's called a "personal computer".
If the application needs telemetry from me, they can ask (not tell we're doing this, but ask), and start the moment I consent. The moment I withdraw my consent all telemetry and data collection should stop. Moreover, I shall be able to see all the telemetry data in its full glory to make my own assessment of what's collected and how.
If you don't know, Go tried this, even with an arguable provable way of anonymization, people roared back, and the decision is changed to "opt-in".
For some applications, I explicitly consent to telemetry because a) They ask, b) They show what they collect and do with it, and c) I do respect and trust them because of the previous encounters I had with them.
The moment they break this social contract, they lose telemetry, and in most cases me as a user.
I mean, non-consensual telemetry is just recording what you do via your camera all day long, but with light off, without telling you. Replace the camera with any app you use.
Are you comfortable and happy now?
Of course it can be useful & good, but letting people know about what you are doing and asking before doing it is even better, no?
Do the telemetry collectors have something to hide, so they do it covertly or without consent?
> The moment I withdraw my consent all telemetry and data collection should stop.
You can do that by simply going into about:preferences#privacy and unchecking "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla"
> I shall be able to see all the telemetry data in its full glory to make my own assessment of what's collected and how.
That's all available in about:telemetry
Firefox is open source and so is the set of telemetry it collects, the schemas are published openly on the web. Every request to add new telemetry is reviewed in a public bugzilla ticket. It's not a mass of dark surveillance capturing unknown information, it's all done in the open in public.
Then the same people shouldn't make fun of telemetry as unrelated to the success of a product. Also, yes, I had this exchange with many people who don't understand what telemetry is used for, here on HN. HN is big enough that generalising the audience just doesn't work anymore.
Recently Firefox has been especially unreliable loading pages, sometimes pages load extremely slowly while everything is fine on other browsers, sometimes they just don’t load until the browser is restarted, sometimes it happens again right away after doing so.
It happens across devices and profiles, so I assume more people will be experiencing it.
Instead of improving, it has gotten worse over the last couple of years.
Thing is: You have to use the telemetry, you have to actually care. And how much Mozilla care is illustrated well by the plenty 20+ years old open tickets for problems that exist to this day.
They can tell what's popular by what's downloaded from addons.mozilla.org, they don't need telemetry for that. I'm not sure how to read "blocked", but the menu item to report an extension is immediately next to the item to remove it, so I also don't think you need anything more for that.
> failing pages,
I certainly hope they're not sending Mozilla a list of pages I'm visiting, failed or otherwise.
> browser crashes,
Does a restart not still pop up a dialog to ask the user if they want to report the crash? You don't need "telemetry" for that.
Nightly allows uMatrix where Fennec does not. But Nightly has default HSTS which is annoying to users that monitor own traffic on own networks. The number of Mozilla-initiated phone home domains one has to filter when using Firefox is nuts. It should be zero. Option to disable all these unsolicited remote connections quickly and easily should exist.
> Even though they were working on it for the past few years it's still slow, buggy, and super unpolished, it doesn't matter, because they shipped.
> Their mobile app is terrible and it needs 10 seconds to sync. It doesn't matter, they shipped. And I'm looking forward to every single update they release.
> Their backlog of things to do is huge, but it doesn't matter, they ship every single week, and the app is growing along with the community.
Sigh. I agree, and I can empathize, but as a user I am so sick and tired of half-finished crap being shoved out the door just to beat the competition to the starting line. Every day the software we use becomes slower, more bloated, and less stable, and part of it is exactly this attitude of throwing crap at the wall and hoping it sticks. And the sad part is, since everyone is doing it, you can't really not do it, otherwise--as the author discovered--you get left in the dust.
I've always thought that hanging a "beta" on a logo isn't an excuse to ship junk, but as you allude to, sometimes product and service quality isn't the priority.
I'm also reminded of Dave McClure's talk [0]: "Don't do your viral marketing campaign until your product doesn't suck! Because what will happen is people will tell other people that your product sucks! ...So don't do that!"
Yeah I so agree.
Specially post the AI boom, there's just this intrinsic itch I see of taking a product that queries chatGPT and slaps an AI label on it to make it a product.
(I'm look at you Rabbit R1).
I do understand that it does foster some air of competition and hence there's a the capitalistic push of doing better than the other person. But then, a lot of sub standard software leaks through which shifts the whole benchmark for acceptable user experience.
I was thinking the same, but it’s easy to do so when it’s not your life’s work— especially something that took so much time and dedication. The quote about the Lolita film was pretty damning, and imagine the shame of accepting that you had botched the adaptation of such a prolofic novel.
So what, everyone is supposed to pretend that everything Kubrick touched was completely perfect?
That would be a hagiography, not a serious artistic critique.
It seems more than fair to point out that Kubrick was touchy and thin-skinned. You could argue that it's an inseparable part of his overall genius -- but only if you're allowed to criticise him in the first place!
Interesting point of view, thank you! For me maintenance and repair have enhanced riding rather than diminish it. I find it's similar to how cooking enhances eating, or yard work enhances laying around the yard. Of course I hate having a malfunction while riding as much as the next guy, but I also ride with more confidence because I know I can handle pretty much anything that can go wrong, even on the go.
I'm strongly with GP on this. I wonder if this isn't some kind of broader difference between people, because I also disagree with the excellent examples you used. Cooking and yard work don't enhance my subsequent enjoyment of a good meal or relaxation - rather, I experience both to be annoying bullshit chores (ABC!) that, more often than not, I can't get myself to engage in, which means they deny the experience altogether instead of enhancing it.
Makes me think of the old, well-known saying, that you should focus on the journey rather than destination. In my mind, it does not compute. I often wonder if I'm broken somehow.
> The blog comes very close to quoting ‘zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’ -I wonder if the author read that…
I did! But I did so long before I started with bike repair, so at that time I couldn't really connect with it. Thank you for reminding me that I should give it a second read!
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