Black Mesa - A Second Life For Half-Life

If you played the original Half-Life (which, if you had a PC in 1998, you must have done) then the chances are you loved it and played it through several times. But would you play it now, 10 years on, now that you've been spoilt by the graphics and physics model in Half-Life 2?

Valve made a half-hearted attempt at bringing the original game up-to-date when they released Half-Life: Source, but that was simply a port of the original game into their new Source engine. You got the fancy new physics model but the dated graphics remained.

So how would you feel about revisiting the Black Mesa complex, but this time fully remodeled and powered by the latest Source engine? Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, if you're interested you should go and check out fan mod Black Mesa and you may find your dreams are about to come true.

As described on the Black Mesa website:

"Black Mesa (formerly Black Mesa: Source) is a Half-Life 2 total conversion remaking VALVe Software's award-winning PC game, Half-Life. Utilizing the latest Source engine from Episode 2, Black Mesa will reintroduce the player as Doctor Gordon Freeman, along with the original cast of memorable characters and environments seen in Half-Life. Black Mesa was built and founded on the basis that Half-Life: Source was inadequate as the Source engine port of Half-Life, regardless of the intentions of VALVe Software. As such, Black Mesa was founded to fully reconstruct the Half-Life universe utilizing Source to its fullest potential in terms of art detail, level sizes and code features. This total conversion will not require Half-Life: Source to play - only legitimate copies of Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source on Steam."

The website provides plenty of information, including a developer blog that gives loads of info on the progress of the mod.

There's also a downloads section that gives a sneak preview video of the game, as well as allowing you to download some of the MP3 tracks that will form part of the Black Mesa soundtrack. Head on over and check it out, it's looking extremely good.