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Netflix launches new fantasy TV series tomorrow.The TV shows that are still (hopefully) coming out.Jim Butcher surprise-announces that two DRESDEN FI.THE MANDALORIAN adds Michael Biehn and Rosario Daw.This is something that hopefully will be fixed in forthcoming revisions. The second half is much more of a chore, and drags down the game's overall quality. The first part of the Xen section is also breathtakingly impressive and enjoyable to play. I played Halo: Reach, reportedly the best game in that series, a few weeks ago and Black Mesa is superior on every front, from enemy AI and weapons loadout to level design and pacing. I do wonder if they rushed Black Mesa 1.0 out of the door to tie in with the release of Half-Life: Alyx (a VR interquel set between Half-Life 1 and 2), which is due in a few days.Īs it stands, Black Mesa 1.0 (****½, falling to *** for the final section after the Gonarch fight) is the best modern way of experiencing Half-Life, with most of the game now a crisp, fast-paced, action-packed shooter which still stands head and toes above the competition. Crowbar Collective have promised a Black Mesa 1.5 at some point which will bring all the graphics up to a much higher quality and iron out the problems, and I hope they considering making big changes to Xen to make it more worthwhile. In fact, condensing the time between the Gonarch and the Nihilanth (which in the original game were much less than half an hour apart) back to the original and streamlining out some of the more tedious forcefield and power supply puzzles is all that's needed to bring the game to perfection. The sequence is far too overlong and doesn't add much to the game. The addition of Xen makes Black Mesa functionally complete, but it also feels like it could have done with a lot more polishing and cutting. The ferocious combat in this section makes up for the final boss fight, which was perfunctory in the first game and, though better in Black Mesa, still a bit too straightforward. Things rally at the last hurdle: the battle against the Nihilanth is much more involved, with Freeman ascending on a huge lift through different environments home to various aliens that he must fend off before proceeding. The only good point in this section is a sequence where Freeman apparently (it's a bit unclear) frees the vortigaunts from slavery, which much better sets up the events of Half-Life 2. The sumptuous vistas disappear and Freeman instead spends what feels like ages clambering through narrow pipes connecting power cables together and trying to find the path forward, which becomes progressively more laborious (especially when the path forward is sometimes just blindly hurling yourself onto a conveyor belt or standing on the edge of a bit of scenery that looks more like a bug than a clear path forward). The section after the Gonarch is then mind-numbingly tedious. Even worse, the Gonarch is completely indestructible until you finally corner it in its lair, but no information is relayed to the player to confirm this, meaning a lot of ammo is wasted before you can finally kill the damn thing.

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For some reason, the Gonarch boss fight has now been increased in length several times over, with Freeman playing cat-and-mouse with the creature through an underground cave network full of flaming gas traps and not-always-clear paths forward. The infamous pendulous mobile testicle monster was a horrific revelation in the original game, but a bit of a chore to fight. Unfortunately, things get less impressive when the player encounters the Gonarch. There's a few too many power cable puzzles in this part of the game, but nothing too outrageous.

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This part of the game is great fun, with a lot of thought that's clearly gone into how to make Xen better from a gameplay perspective whilst retaining its alien landscape and atmosphere. There's even some new enemies, such as underwater barnacles that pull you down rather than up, and infant houndeyes which now explode rather than erupting sonic blasts at you. The first half of Xen has been improved a lot with pacing and more focus on traversing larger environments through logical puzzles and ferocious combat, with a lot of the detailed platforming from the original release thrown out. Xen is more than twice as long as its 1998 incarnation and maybe closer to three times.