I could have done without those last four chapters back then, and I’m happy to do without them now. I enjoyed the experience some percentage more for it having lost that extra bit at the end, the crazy segments that relied too much on jumping and too little on logic. I mentioned that this is 13/17ths of the original, but the remainder is the part that everyone added as the “ But…” when they were talking on and on about what a great game it was. If you haven’t played Half-Life, then you should, and this is the version you should play.

Which is to say, this is how Half-Life looked to my middle-school self. It isn’t so spot-on that you won’t recognize some differences, at least if you played the original as many times as I did, but in a way the graphics are as I remembered them, though of course old screenshots have confirmed that as time passes and visuals improve and my initial fears of the Black Mesa Research Facility remain constant, I’ve been sanding down the sharp edges and filling in the gaps. If you’ve played Half-Life, then this is an upgraded version of your memories. So here we have something peculiar: a remake of one of gaming’s most hallowed (sometimes too hallowed?) artifacts. They… they have faces! Faces of their own!

Black mesa source hecu