If you watch to the end of the video, you may come to hate me. I apologize in advance, I was just really really angry and no amount of footage left in an edited video will ever have people fully understand why. Spoilers below: Xen took 7 hours. 30 minutes of that footage was usable. I hated new version of xen with a blinding passion. I have THREE other channels with exclusive content! Commentary channel ~ www.youtube.com/@ViperRambles Livestream footage channel ~ www.youtube.com/@DarkViperAULivestreams Extras channel ~ www.youtube.com/@DarkViperAUExtras Subscribe if you are interested
@@lonzoformvp5078 it's because he picked the highest difficulty and was getting killed by Gonarch for around an hour. And that frustration pretty much bled to the rest of Xen experience to the point where Matto said that Crowbar Collective ruined original Xen even though he never played it. There are full VODs posted around RUclips somewhere if you're interested
Honestly, I'm not even surprised if the creatures in Half-Life are native to Australia lmao it sounds and looks like it just belongs on the Australian Outbacks
Don't be surprised if: >you don't quicksave >you did not understand game mechanics / did not look into them / ignored >you did not use your head during puzzles >played hard mode first time and last but not least: >brute forced every single fight I did Xen in 3 hours, jokes sometimes write themselves...
Yeah its a legitimate complaint i dont get what you mean, both can be true and in this case is, the puzzles were not only boring but quite unclear on what needs to be done a lot of the time. The pace of them is also bad because they are put inbetween major action sequences, im not in a puzzle solving mood i wanna rambo on some xen invader cucks.
The tram introduction was in that time (on HL1) to show that this game was different of Quake and Arena-shooters. The plan was to show 98's gamers that this game would be more realistic and don't rushe the player to the action without context
It was more about environmental storytelling and in-game scripted events with the optional shooting vs everything that came before it that was mostly a corridor shooter
Except the problem is that Matto didn't interact with shit or even bother looking around, he kinda speedran the first levels which made me angry. Dude, literally, play around.
Funnily enough, the annoying boss fight is actually mostly intact from the original game but slightly *less* annoying. The city section was a new addition and they removed a bunch of bullshit platforming that abused the absence of ground below you to get constant cheap deaths. I'd recommend watching a playthrough of the original Xen or trying it yourself via console commands on the original. The new puzzles and extended belt hell THAT NEEDED A SHORTENING FROM THE ORIGINAL, are annoying as shit though, they launched the game in 2 parts, the pre-xen and xen itself so they added too much to make the update feel bigger.
Almost half-way through, and enjoying the watch, but it is amusing how much frustration and complaints about the game are literally due to Matt not paying attention, like the barrel puzzle in the start of Apprehension. There's a cage, there's bright orange barrels that float on the bottom of the cage, and several bright orange barrels all around the place in a game with physics.
This puzzle is only obvious if you've played half-life 2. These barrels being bright orange would usually suggest they're explosive before that they're buoyant. The level geometry did not have this level of interaction up until this point in the game, where you put physics props somewhere and part of the level shifts. Out of all the ways to look for when looking for a way out of the water, grabbing these specific props to put them in this specific place so that the level slightly shifts and you can walk across is really low on most people's lists of things to try. The puzzle was even worse in the original hl1 at least.
@@Arch-Tau I do agree with this, Black Mesa's level design is quite confusing, and honestly without counting Xen, although it's still quite bad on Black Mesa, the original Half Life 1 and Half Life 2 should be played before Black Mesa, otherwise the experience is quite confusing, so Matt's suffering is partially his audience's fault for suggesting Black Mesa instead of the Original HL1 just because "it looks better"
@@Arch-Tau How is it only obvious if you've played half-like 2? It's a very basic physics puzzle that is really easy to figure out. the game uses red for explosives, and bright orange is a common coloration for floatation devices. Additionally, this is exactly how HL2 also introduces this sort of puzzle, and it is something that takes really little time to figure out for most people. I have literally seen no first time players get stuck on these other than Matt and DSP.
@@TauGuyUT well, yes. The environment of the game gives you directions but if you miss them, then you might get lost. In GTA, the game holds your arm to help you complete the game.
@@thatkerimguy disagree at all, and other pzople have said, if a nowadays gamer plays hl1 he will drop it for the bad graphics and outdated gameplay. Black Mesa its the perfect ways to start being a new half life fan. Idk about the Xen part of it though.
@@chrisakaschulbus4903 The game also should have been far better balanced. Hard mode is meant to be challenging, not blatantly unfair; and he made the fatal mistake of doing hard-mode.
@@ozvoid1245 From what i saw in the video (i wasn't there for the full stream) it didn't look like he was annoyed because of the difficulty of enemies. (ok maybe the boss fight) For the conveyor belts it's just doing the same thing over and over again that can make you sloppy. Combined with high dfficulty i can see why his experience was "le succ"
2:13:08 You have no idea how bad Xen was originally. Even Gabe Newell says it's the worst part of Half-life, I do think the black mesa version isn't perfect and very clunky sometimes but it's such a step up compared to the original, there's literally nothing redeemable about the original because it's the most boring, repetitive and ugly looking segment in video game history
Literally tho, Xen looks like actual mud, plays like shit, and leads you to a completely underwhelming and boring final fight, all in the span of 2 and a half hours
To me, I played the original HL1 because I also planned on playing blue shift and opposing forces. If I played the more advanced Black Mesa, then I feel like it would be jarring to then play the other two games with much older graphics. Same applies for HL2 because I’m able to enjoy and marvel at the technological improvements from the first game to the second. I played Black Mesa after finishing HL2 which I believe is nice because it loops all the way back to the beginning of my journey and it allowed me to enjoy the finer details in the “original” game while knowing future events
@@cpi3267 oh yeah don’t worry I played them. What I meant is that I played the games in release order with Black Mesa being the last. This way I was able to enjoy the advancements in graphics and gameplay the way it was intended
Totally agree with everything you said. Most people should play HL1 instead of Black Mesa simply to see how the series evolved - mechanically, graphically, and all that. Playing Black Mesa first utterly ruins that, and likely will make HL2 (which in many ways feels like it could have released today) feel dated. The exception being, of course, if one can't stand older games, or simply dislikes HL1's controls and stuff. In that case... idk, maybe it'd be best to play HL2 first; it's not like the first game was particularly plot heavy, and those people wouldn't care about seeing the evolution. Best not to ruin to HL2, then, with Black Mesa's few gameplay & graphical improvements.
I started off with Black Mesa and then went back to play the original HL and the gameplay between the two is so different that I cannot recommend this enough for those looking to get into the series - play HL first and Black Mesa second. Seeing how jarring the experience is between the two games actually made me see less of Black Mesa as a remake, and I'm currently in the very small minority of people who believe Black Mesa could be much better.
Eh. I feel like the Black Mesa part was really fun but as soon as he got to Xen and went through, it went to shit and a lot of his criticism were pretty valid. The Gonarch was long and didn't reward the player for killing it as it even died in a really lame way, and I wanted to lose it at the conveyor belts myself because it was just the most boring and was nowhere that long in the original.
@@xor_the_protogen oh lol true. I honestly expected such a dedicated Speedrunner to have a much better sense of everything but he did become oblivious at some mechanics.
@@gravywild2123 this is a problem that a lot of skilled gamer people suffer, they don't play enough different games to "understand" how games work in general, so the moment you throw a different ball curve at then they fall apart, i honestly hate this because some people legit use this excuse to not play different games.
He doesn't even get that Grunts are Vortigaunts on steroids, and Vortigaunts are forced to turn their brethren into mindless beasts at the conveyor belt factory, and that you can even kill tje gonarch with some Canister of gas that has clear instructions on a white board next to it. And the fact Vortigaunts aren't native to Xen.
But truth be told the second half of xen is where the game falls on it's face, especially in the 1998 version where you are staring at the same disgusting cave over and over again, black mesa did it's best with it but there really isn't much to work with there.
It is inconsistent between the two halves of the game though so I can sympathize. The first half the game trains you that there are NPCs who will keep you updated on what your next goal should be. In Xen there is nobody to do this. You do get environmental storytelling but it's much more subtle. You really just have what the last NPCs from Black Mesa said to guide you through to the last goal.
Yeah, you can tell, @@ihatethis103. Just as with the floating Controllers, and even the Nihilanth. Though it's specifically the Grunts we see manufactured, or at least put on assembly lines. The key features are the third stomach arm, the backward facing legs, and the red, cycloptic eyeball, identifying features that Vortigaunts possess.
I like how angry he got at Gonarch and Xen and how horrible he thought it was when someone like Mapocolops beat that first gonarch phase in like 5 minutes and only spent about 3ish hours in total in Xen, and that was while also being a pacifist and trying not to kill Vortigaunts which got him killed a lot, and he's not the...best example of a hardcore gamer or anything. This is why good game devs don't listen to streamers just because they have a following.
The boss fights are good but Xen is a masterclass in absolute trash game design. The egos of the devs to think there stupid puzzles need to go on 3 times each and every time.
@@14_IQ.points Xen is absolutely long as fuck and gets way too drawn out trying too many new things in succession before Nihilanth but to call it "trash game design" is intentionally obtuse
> plays black mesa > completely new experience > "SUCH BAD GAME DESIGN, I HATE THIS ITS THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER" > same exact guy speedruns boring gta v story missions all day, over and over, for hours and hours and hours of his life.
I knew it was going to be a clusterfuck after the first failed boss fight. I was internally saying to myself "ok get a days rest, you're burned out after wasting too much time not figuring out a mechanism". I was absolutely right. You could play a masterpiece afterwards, and you'd be annoyed anyway.
[ 53:24 ] Matt I love you and all but that's a pretty easy puzzle. Here are some hints provided by the game: There's a collapsed bridge which has bright red lights on it, the bridge also has a cage underneath, inside the cage is a completely new type of barrel that is bright orange and you can tell they're floating because they're at the top of the cage, you can find these same orange barrels floating around you and you can clearly see that they do in fact float in case you weren't 100% sure. This is more than enough information for you to understand that you need to collect the barrels and insert them under the bridge so that the bridge floats. It's not hard that hard to connect the dots and it's not really the game's fault. Not only that but Half-Life 2 outside being a FPS was also a physics puzzle game, so it is to be expected that a remake of Half-Life that uses the same engine as Half-Life 2 would take advantage of the new physics system and incorporate a physics puzzle.
Bridge broken. Oh look a cage under the bridge. Oh a super floaty barrel. Oh look more of them. Maybe I should try putting them in the cage. @@tristansandeen891
This game was meant to be played in multiple sessions. Because its goddamn long, and most people have jobs and responsibilities (and sleep), playing it all at once and saying its too boring and long is like deciding to eat 100 Hamburgers, and then complaining how you're going to vomit and blaming the Burgers for it.
wdym? if you HAVE to play a game in multiple sessions then thats just bad, its like you are playing a 3 hour game but you have to take a break every half an hour to regain your sanity, its just bad.
Hey Matto, I really hope you read this. Seeing how you enjoyed the game (Xen being an exception) you really should try Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1 and Half Life 2: Episode 2. Half Life 2 is amazing, EP 1 is short and worse but still good in many aspects, and EP 2 is very action packed and maybe even better than HL 2. Please try them out, if you want to of course. Have a great day.
The tagline on the box of the original game was “Run. Think. Shoot. Live,” and I think that’s evident in the fight with the gonarch. If you pay attention when you enter the outpost, there is reference to plans to kill the gonarch using toxic gas and, if you then pick up the gas and take it with you, you can skip the gonarch fight. Kill it almost immediately, or even just walk past. Almost every encounter in the game can be made better by planning what you’re going to do ahead of time. I think, then, the reason this was such a bad time is because of having to juggle both that kind of gameplay and a stream chat. You can tell this is an issue, trying to do too many things at once, from all the instances of entering a fight with dry weapons or diving into the same hazard immediately off the loading screen.
i'm gonna be honest, the game could have lasted half the time less if you understood how the mechanics (like the laser on the rocket launcher) or (your own rockets damages you if you shoot them close to yourself) or (not run in front of enemies with no ammo) or (mines) (turrets) and if you didn't die on every single enemy at last 1 and on every single object/jumping/puzzle. i'm scared to see how many times did you died that got edited out.
@@ozvoid1245 Sure but doesn't mean you have to touch every single mine, leave weapons not loaded, blow yourself up a couple of times or run in front of an enemy hoping that you will outdamage the enemy with the shotgun. Is not about the difficulty is about how he approached every fight that prolonged the game by a lot. I don't know if he played better in the parts edited out but i don't wanna see 7 hours of streaming to check if he actually played very good and just loaded the most chaotic moments.
@@Castam3r3 He never once complained about the combat difficulty though? His frustration came from elongated puzzle sections that serve little to no purpose using the same mechanics over and over again.
@@dannyvimpany7585 in fact I'm not complaining about him getting beated at the game, I'm just pointing out that if he didn't make so many mistakes the experience in the end could have ended better without the need to insult developers that took the most boring part of half life 1 (xen) and try to improve it without changing the formula too much. And I played half life 1 (original) and the only thing that I remembered is the huge headcrab and the final boss. +(side note) is strange how a speedrunner that have to complete the same mission over and over get so mad about a repetitive puzzle on a 4(7) hour campaign (xen) Im not an hater I just find stupid how a good game get beated down for a small Section. Doing so he will probably not touch hl2 and other chapters.
This was painful to watch, not because of the deaths but because he clearly isn't sure about playing this game. It was also the first time I've cringed at Matto raging and ranting xdn't
I cannot believe this man can be so unaware of his surroundings to the point he missed pretty much every major event, (jets bombing distant building cliffside, gargantua death etc.) and Hunter's armory in the lambda core lab.
watching this physically hurt, eveytime i try and give a let's player a shot they are brain dead and forget mechanics, or blame the game on their own stupidity because they wanted to say a supid joke over pay attention to what the game is telling you
it's almost like they've never touched a game before. I swear to god this accessibility shit lately is more like disrespecting our intelligence as human beings, its making people dumber, so now they gotta compare stuff to other games. what's also crazy is that he is visibly pissed at the game and yet he keeps playing it, like bro just take a break and come back to it later.
How the hell did you find this guy first over Mapocolops or other people who've played it blind what the hell, this is literally the complete extreme and I know for a fact he's not the first result
>Plays Hard mode on his First Time playing >Ignores Story and Dialogue >Ignores Game Mechanics >Try’s to Brute Force every Combat situation >Doesn’t use his head during puzzles >ignores the clearly labeled Control instructions In bright orange letters >Blames the developers
As a person who plays games very often, half lifes puzzles are very flawed, similar to the witness infamous bird puzzle, there are "hints" throughout the environment but unless you already know what to do or have excellent problem solving skills, you are unlikely to see these hints. Also whats wrong with playing hard mode on a first time playthrough? Theres nothing wrong with wanting a challenge. People look at this game through the "masterpiece" lenses, any flaw someone has with the game there wrong and no one can say otherwise
Honestly, the combination of not paying attention and playing on hard difficulty during the Gonach fight ruined Matt's experience for the rest of the game. No matter what attention to detail the devs/remakers have made to the parts after the Gonach fight, it would just be missed and/or not enjoyed anymore. I feel bad for Matt that he couldn't get a good experience out of this amazing game.
Blame Crowbar Collective for renaming "Easy", "Medium", and "Hard" into something else and making "Easy" the default difficulty at which everything makes sense perfectly. Also blame them for their decision to replace the classic Source engine main menu with those orange bars that actually hide some of the settings (type "-oldgameui" in Steam launch settings and you'll see the difference)
I really hope this game doesn’t discourage Matt from playing any more hl games because that would suck if a poorly made ending to a fan remake could stop Matt from playing any more of this iconic video game series
I feel like if Matt would actually learn how the game’s mechanics worked and generally knew how to play he would’ve liked this game much more. I don’t think he even realised his shotgun had a double shot, his SMG had a grenade launcher, his missile launcher had a laser sight. There is no rhyme or reason for him to just attack the developers (who i’m pretty sure is a small indie team) just because he turned it up to the hardest difficulty and surprise surprise, it’s hard
He didn't miss any of it, there is footage here of him using the laser against the heli, the charged Tau Cannon in Surface Tension, using the granade launcher in Blast Pit, crossbow zoom in Questionable Ethics, the revolver aim down sights in Surface Tension, the only one that he might not have noticed was the pistol's rapid fire.
I genuinely just think most of Xen was blind hated by Matt. -He missed the entire point of the Gonarch chapter being centred around the predator vs prey situation where one second you chase her the other second she chases you -The story of Xen is literally all around him, the beauty of half life is that there are no cutscenes thus you get the story from the area around you, he seems to miss that as well -Interloper was not bad and he ALSO seemed to miss the fact that you were climbing a tower that reached high to the sky -most his claims he tried to make it out to be objective but is literally subjective "waaaa Gonarch sucks because i cant beat her" watching him play it was literally a skill issue considering i was able to beat it first try on the hardest difficulty there are a lot more critiques about him but i think i got most my point across
Every time I think I suck at games, I watch this video and feel relief wash over me that I'm not as stupid as DarkViper. But I also feel a burning hatred because HOLY FUCK THE GLOWING BUTTON THATS FLASHING IS FLASHY ASF HOW DO YOU NOT SEE IT?! And big ego too, like if the game's too hard notch down the difficulty instead of blaming the game. Journalism gaming at its finest.
@@WELSHGAMER99Yes, all of Xen is garbage, that is not an opinion ,it is a fact. Worst experience i ever had, i had a much easier time getting through my day at my summer job than beating Xen. (oh yeah i did it all with the purple hat for the rarest specimen achievement too.)
@@WELSHGAMER99 The first chapter until Gonarch's fight is boring, not much happens, there is some cool visual story telling thoug. The ending (opening the portal to Gonarch) is pretty shit, didn't have fun there at all, just tedious (a sign of things to come.) Its kind of dumb and not cool to have to run around looking for plugs to plug into walls in a game where ALIENS ARE INVADING EARTH. The fight with gonarch is boring and pretty bad, its just shooting rockets at him until he decides to run away, its sloppy and dumb since he visually looks the exact same all the way through. Matt's criticism about the fight is justified. The whole chase sequence is far longer than it needed to be, it would have actually been a good starting point without the first fight with gonarch keeping him as a looming presence until the final fight, it would have hit much harder and wouldn't have been the same exact fight in a lamer location. Interloper is the worst, the puzzles are rtrash, unclear (yes they are unclear since it took me a while to realize that there even is one.) there are so so many puzzles. every part of the chapter is boring, it looks like garbage too, the textures in the factory are ugly af. The whole conveyor bit is repetetive and drags on for WAY too long. Its like the conveyor bit from the overworld (vanilla hl) if it was 10x longer, there is no need for that. The whole chapter is a creative pitfall from an already creativily lacking part of the game that for some reason drags on for HOURS. The final chapter is a lot better, the boss fight is pretty cool and the ending is well done and faithful to the original, it takes up rougly 15% of Xen and its the only non-tedious and actually enjoyable part of the section. Of course all the horrible and shitty parts were the ones from Black Mesa team, their own design, it sucked. They are good at remaking an existing product but not good at adding things of their own. I am not taking carrying the little purple hat into account, just a pure retrospective of the level design.
@@thirdhandlv4231 >The first chapter until Gonarch's fight is boring, not much happens, there is some cool visual story telling thoug. What do you mean not much happens? It supposed to be the build up for the later chapters. Its part of the pacing >The ending (opening the portal to Gonarch) is pretty shit, didn't have fun there at all, just tedious (a sign of things to come.) Its kind of dumb and not cool to have to run around looking for plugs to plug into walls in a game where ALIENS ARE INVADING EARTH. Ok? Again there’s nothing really wrong with the plug puzzles I vastly prefer to the vague nonsense that was in the original Zen starter map. Even if they repeat a bit too much >The fight with gonarch is boring and pretty bad, its just shooting rockets at him until he decides to run away, its sloppy and dumb since he visually looks the exact same all the way through. Matt's criticism about the fight is justified. Nah highly disagree. Matt’s criticisms was not justified cause he was trying to play it like a Dark Souls fight. Not to mention him saying there was no damage indicators (The Gonarch was limping and bleeding towards the end) >The whole chase sequence is far longer than it needed to be, it would have actually been a good starting point without the first fight with gonarch keeping him as a looming presence until the final fight, it would have hit much harder and wouldn't have been the same exact fight in a lamer location. Longer than it needed to be? There were more parts of shooting the gonarch than it is chasing you lol. Most of the section had you solving puzzles to get to the next area as the gonarch is a looming presence. Honestly the design of the chapter is VASTLY superior to the original Gonarch fight as you just chase it down a tunnel with little indication you were doing any sort of damage to it until it died. The Gonarch feels like a threat in Black Mesa. >Interloper is the worst, the puzzles are rtrash, unclear (yes they are unclear since it took me a while to realize that there even is one.) there are so so many puzzles. every part of the chapter is boring, it looks like garbage too, the textures in the factory are ugly af. Shocker Half-Life is also a Puzzle game as well as an action game. Obviously they are going to put a few puzzles as a breather after the Gonarch fight and build tension for the next few areas. Plus you are not even in the factory straight away you end up in the Vort village and the Gargantua caves >The whole conveyor bit is repetetive and drags on for WAY too long. Its like the conveyor bit from the overworld (vanilla hl) if it was 10x longer, there is no need for that. The whole chapter is a creative pitfall from an already creativily lacking part of the game that for some reason drags on for HOURS. The only thing I agree on is the puzzles repeated a ton but compared to the original Interloper I prefer BM’s iteration due to the clearer design goals. The original had you just wondering around clearly rushed maps. >Of course all the horrible and shitty parts were the ones from Black Mesa team, their own design, it sucked. They are good at remaking an existing product but not good at adding things of their own. Have you even played the original Xen? Lmao
I feel sorry for you for Xen to be such a horrible experience, it's not an unpopular opinion to hate it but just to let you know, I had tons of fun watching the entire playthrough live leading up to Xen, it made me really happy! Don't be discouraged by Xen experience and know that Half Life 2 is a much better and consistent game. Other than that, my fav playthrough of yours so far!
It's all a Valve experience, none of the fan meddling. Just don't mod it too much. There some mods that enhance the experience without ruining the core game, considering the game is 18 years old at this point, though.
@@Unknown_Genius orginal half life was better xen from black mesa drags on too long i played black mesa before matt when xen came out and he is right game drags on on on on on and on orginal game's xen was fun and short black mesa literally tried to make player play more idk how you guys even defend this
@@Unknown_Genius It's not like Xen in original HL is good, more like Black Mesa Xen had much more potential but ended up being dragged out for no reason, which hurt the final part of the game, there was no need to force more game time than original Xen since Xen in BM at least has more enjoyable moments, but they should've taken at max 2 hours to complete
@@Smirving bruh, original Xen looks like literal mud and is just filled with the same jumping platform puzzles that you die from hundreds of times for two and a half hours, the original final boss is literal cancer teleporting you to random mud places to try and platform EVEN MORE, original Xen is fucking terrible and black mesa Xen is such an upgrade
When I played this I really enjoyed Xen except for the conveyor ride in the factory. To me it seems like you kept dying to the Gonarch and got angry because of it, then because of how bitter you were it tainted the rest of your experience. I would say 4 hours of Black Mesa’s Xen (that’s how long it took me to complete and that’s the dev team’s estimate) is way better than the original Half-Life version of Xen, which is like this if you removed all of the puzzles and just did 2 hours of platforming
Also I would never recommend trying the game on the hardest difficulty for your first playthrough. Anyone playing Black Mesa for the first time should start on easy mode, and if they find it too easy switch to normal, but hard would be too much even if you feel confident on normal. The game tends to fluctuate in difficulty such that on hard you will feel fine in the regular sections, but then you will reach a choke point in difficulty and it will be much harder than should be expected
it wasnt even 2 hours half life 1 xen is better cause game knows you have nothing to do now no new weapons no new mechanic so they just end it after few chapters i played every hl game i know but i hate people who say black mesa is similar to hl2 hl episodes
To be honest I think it was a mistake for him to complete the game in 1 sitting. Like if he just walked away after Gonarch and finished the game at a later time, his experience would have been 100 times better. But instead, he just kept going, even when he didn’t really want to, which resulted in him actually suffering from the game.
@@itamar20112 Yep that was his biggest mistake. If he had just came back and finished it later i seriously doubt he would've hated it as much as he did. That Gonarch fight made him mad and thus tainted the rest of the game for him.
@@Smirving so just to prove to others that you're a complete liar, Xen wasn't made short because there were no new mechanics. actually, a lot more was planned. It was short because of time restraints.
"I'VE BEEN GOING THROUGH XEN DOING NOTHING WITH NO PURPOSE" matto was literally told before the portal fight that he must kill a giant being in xen that's holding a portal open
Every issue in the rant at the end is the result of a failure to understand what everyone was screaming in the chat to learn. Skill issue. This is the problem when trying to play first time in stream, you miss things in order to speed things up and not appear boring
Since I caught this early I wanted to say how much I enjoy that your rambles are on streaming platforms. I haven’t been in the music mood for a good while and I need something to listen to while I’m at work and the rambles are perfect for that. Thank you!
I watched the whole video, it's great. I hope this experience doesnt overly sour this franchise for you, because I would absolutely love to see a HL2 video sometime from you. I know you aren't super big into VR, but Half Life: Alyx is also incredible and I hope you play it someday.
>le soy streamer is infuriated about the game being hard at the hardest difficulty and not spoonfeeding him information every 5 seconds, while actively ignoring all clues given to him by the game >calls it worst game ever >hivemind adolescent followers who have never played Half Life before start spamming how they agree with him and how hes completely right. lol, lmao even.
"hivemind adolescent followers who have never played Half Life before start spamming how they agree with him and how hes completely right" as a guy who played half-life 1 more times than i can count, several times on hard difficulty, no, matt is right, also matt played black mesa, not half-life, big difference in gameplay and overall design philosophy, then again bm fans are stupid so what can i expect, bm fans are a hivemind of their own with spewing bullshit with no proof like how "bm xen was the way valve intended"
@@WELSHGAMER99 Honestly, as a half-life fan myself it is quite depressing to see Matt so infuriated by Black Mesa when he should have played the original Half-Life instead, sure it may be rough around the edges, especially when it comes to Xen, but Black Mesa aims to change so much about hl1 that it's not hl1 anymore, nor should it ever replace it imo
Too many unnecessary puzzles in Xen, Interloper is too long, everyone agree on that. But I think the rest is great. I died so many times in Gonarch's Lair boss fight, the only indication he takes damage is by rocket launcher, idk if Gluon gun or Tau gun give the indication of him taking damage or not, I can agree with you at that. But after I really learn how to use the long jump to dodge, I can beat him in one go. Hell, I even died more in Nihilanth chapter in my first try, just because to thinking to figuring out how to defeat him. But after I know how to defeat him, damn it only took less than 4 minutes. Just like how Valve said about HL: Run, Think, Shoot, Live.
0:00:00 -1:56:50 "Hey this is a cool game, I'm enjoying learning the story" 1:56:50 - 2:05:54 The boredom and frustration begin 2:05:54 - 2:34:30 The slow descent in to madness 2:34:30 - 2:36:55 Almost redeemed 2:36:55 - 2:42:20 The (justified) rant
@@loomyair What does the difficulty have to do with being forced to do the same stuff over and over again like what he was actually ranting about the most? Or are the conveyor belts proportional to the difficulty setting?
"justified" lol dont shill. he just really sucks at the game and doesn't pay attention to anything. Doing the same exact thing over and over again thinking it will work.
Half-Life is my all-time favourite series, very glad to see you play this. The only reason I'd suggest the original, would be to experience it as it was, as some things are different from the remake and to appreciate the graphical leap to the sequel. They did an amazing job with the remake, it's a lot more fleshed out with the story, along with the characters, with and without the ones that proceed to the sequel. It's all just preference, if you care for the history of the Game industry, go for original, if you care for the story of Half-Life, go for Black Mesa is my take on it. The only issue is when you have to come to terms with the expansions, as the remakes are not finished yet.
@teebles Very true, there is no shame in lowering the difficulty, the point of playing new games is for a new experience and most importantly, to have fun.
@@norXmal But the thing is you shouldnt quicksave every 5 minutes this is not skyrim hardest difficulty i agree but still i hate that people say quick save quick save he should have in some areas but game encourges you that you have to save after every encounter
@@Smirving Hate it all you want, unless you want to tediously go through the same part every time you die as if you were playing a Dark Souls game, go right ahead. The Quick saves also separates from the autosaves, so if you become softlocked you can always go back to your quicksave.
might be the only vid I watched from him because of that. dude is way too salty and just doesn't care enough about what he plays to play it correctly. overall it was just a slug to watch until the end
@@ElPolloLoco7689 yeah I agree. I came into this hoping he would enjoy it since he was a youtuber I quite liked and I left knowing he doesn't have the ability to play games other than gta v where they hold your hand from beginning to end
Out of all the playthroughs I've watched (saints row 1/2) being my favourite, this one was like watching the psychological breakdown of a man going through the 7 circles of hell lol, the first 2/3rds of the game was going pretty well and then slowly but surely you can see the cracks showing before the flood gates of rage burst through XD
>Plays At the Highest Difficulty on His first time playing >ignores story and Dialogue >ignores game mechanics >Try’s To brute force every single combat situation >Doesn’t use head during puzzles >ignores the clearly labeled Control instructions with Bright orange letters >Blames The Developers Matt dropped the Ball in this one.
Matt, I really hope you will get to play the other Half-Life installments. They are simply amazing and have nothing to do with the things you didn’t like about Black Mesa Xen. Also Half-Life: Alyx is the best VR game in my opinion so you should play it when you get to playing VR again.
@@punk5585 Eh, as Matto found is the case with Black Mesa's Xen, more is not always better, and Boneworks is like that for me. Its ideas are cool in concept but push the player more than the platform and I don't find that anywhere near as fun as Half-Life Alyx's simple pleasures and solutions to current VR's limits. (Intuitive gravity gloves mechanic, easy inventory to manage, fun upgrades for a small but fun arsenal, movement handling however you want it to, etc.)
I love this game with a passion and to see matt get frustrated in gonarch's lair and interloper was sad to watch, I will agree interloper does overstay it's welcome a little bit and isn't the easist chapter for new players but gonarch's lair, at least in my opinion, is a good chapter. An intense game of cat and mouse, as the developers, described it. Also when matt says that crowbar collective made the ending really bad which was also sad to hear because I watched the documentary they made and they are a great team But I get where matt is coming from. People like different things. It's still a great video
@@latts I was younger when I first played it, so I didn't get bored but more frustrated at not knowing what to do or where to go in interloper but everything else in xen is great I think
You can litterly devide this video in 4 parts: 1) Okay, good graphics | 2) This is some nice action | 3) Matto goes bloddy crazy over Xen | 4) FINALLY... the end, Should've played the original one.
As for the 'The game only gives me missiles, so I gotta use missiles!' Part - Half-Life games have a hidden 'director', that decides which powerups/ammo you need the most at any given moment and increases the chances of those spawning in ammo boxes and such. Thus, since Matto exclusively used rockets against the Gonarch, that was the only ammo type he was missing, so that was the only ammo he was getting. If he had used other weapons more frequently, their ammo would spawn, too.
@@Unknown_Genius the gluon gun definitely also damages the gonarch when directed at its sack, I used it a lot during my playthrough. It doesn't give a great indication of landing hits though, apart from the sound becoming more 'crunchy' when it's in contact with an enemy
That's not entirely true. The caches spawns are fixed in black mesa and there is no director at work most of the time. Half life 2 had a system where it had a chance to spawn what you needed in supply boxes. By the time of Ep 2 Valve realised that it was a bit unbalanced and made supply boxes much less common in EP2.
Man sets game to hard difficulty, fails to understand Half Life mechanics, has a hard time on hard difficulty, insults development team Later apologizes for being angry, but continues to spout lies and compares new xen on hard difficulty to a version he never played
Watching Matt pause in Xen every 30 seconds really just made me want to play through it again myself tbh, better to just experience it rather than hear a guy rant about something every 30 seconds
yes i know this comment is two years after the fact, but after the HECU battle in the lobby at the end of Questionable Ethics, there is an easter egg in the dialogue of the third scientist to walk out into the lobby. he says "Look what you did! I can't believe what you just did!". This was a direct like from Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade right after indy kills the Nazis that were trying to get information out of them and Dr Jones Sr sees the dead men he says "Look what you did! I can't believe what you just did!"
@@AidGum Crowbar collective tried their best with what they're given, but you can't polish a turd. The only way to make Xen better is to make it shorter, but I guess Crowbar Collective really doesn't want to cut levels, and I understand that.
- no autosave - straight to hard mode - doesn't use SPACE + CTRL at all - doesn't use alt fire - doesn't pay attention to obvious story events around him (the game has no cutscenes and tutorials for a reason) - not noticing visual guidelines and yet I can see how someone who's not familiar with the genre can fail to notice this things
>Ignores game mechanics, tries (and fails) to brute force every combat encounter like he's speedrunning, and blames devs for every one of his fuckups Damn, stick to GTA
matt does have a point during the Gonarch fight. Since Black Mesa is not developing within goldsrc limitations, they couldve telegraphed that fight well. Like we already know that those plant limbs could push it around, it wouldve been nice if you can actually see its body carapace break bit by bit, and have the last fight leaving it becoming just a mushy creature, and leave those limbs to finish it off through a quick cutscene or whatsoever.
I remember being on the stream near the very end of your playthrough and I have some thoughts. I like playing older games. I completed half life 1 and 2 including the DLCs a few times and had a really fun time. I decided to try this Black Mesa remake and I had some mixed feelings until the late game. The last few chapters felt like such a drag. I know that many players disliked the Xen chapters (I actually enjoyed them in the original) and Black Mesa devs (half life fans) wanted to make them better, improve them. Well, to me it seems they overdid it. A lot. Yeah sure, the visual looked pretty nice, but I'm more of a gameplay kind of guy. It felt incredibly tedious to go through those maps. The chase scenes, the weird liquid puzzles, the CONVEYOR BELTS. It was just too much. Not saying they shouldn't be there at all, but playing those sections, I couldn't wait until they end. Like COME ONE GAME, I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS and the game there is another conveyor belt right around the corner :p Through Interloper I checked like ten times the intended time of playthrough, my progress and time until I face the last boss. I kinda wished they allowed you to take different routes through Xen, one gameplay focused with the puzzles, one with just the main parts from the original, one with just the visuals and the boss (go there to take screenshots for the desktop wallpaper). To some extent I respect the effort they put to make the Xen more alive. And, yeah, it looks very nice. But it felt like such a chore to finish. Watching your stream I finally found someone I could relate with about the game, because I've only heard people praising it. Cheers :)
I've played black mesa a lot and played hl1 quite a bit +the gearbox dlcs, and i do think that yours and matto's criticisms are valid, while matto's ones seem to be coming from not being used to the type of game and playing the game on really long sessions (theese obviously were multiple streams but non that many). 1. The game tends to encourage quick saving pretty much after any encounter wich is much more than the other games so that can drag down the experience. 2. While the xen sections specifically interloper are very long, in some parts do give me more satisfaction in ending them than hl1 xen, xen and gonarch's layer are good imo, xen gets you interested in the world and presents the tower in its background, it is needed for you to get used to the new gameplay change but if you don't. Gonarch's layer is brutal in its start you will suffer during the boss fight, if you got used to it you're gonna be able to enjoy the entire section. 2.5. Interloper is pretty annoying and the lowest point of the game but it feels the devs trying to elaborate on to of valve's indea in the section, if they changed it in design it would not have been liked, this does not excuse the awful drawn out conveyor belts section it legit sucks, the tower gauntlet is another example of them wanting to maintain a part of the og but not knowing how to improve on it. So the choice for xen is a bland relatively short section (which undermines the ending a bit imo) Or the overly long at times really frustrating version which makes you hate the entire game at times. It just depends on what you can stomach more. 3. Nihilat is a strange piece it is the final boss, in the og he was really boring the only thing good it had for it was the teleport attack which ironically took you out of the fight, while remaking it crowbar trying to make it a grandiose final boss fight but went a bit overboard resulting in a bit of a mess. So still depends on taste. 4. A lot of people say that they made the game trying to make it look like cod or any other fps franchise, but going into it especially after playing hl2 that is the game they took as inspiration to make bm with less physics puzzles bet they were really trying not to make a generic fps. The problem is anything they changed was not gonna be taken well. 5. you shouldn't approach bm as hl1 remake but a different game retelling the same plot. But if you want a hl1 total 1:1 remake valve already did it with hl:source which at its release caught a lot of flak before all the engine bugs it really wasn't worth buying a retexture of the same game, so crowbar made something different but it was pitched as a remake so a lot of people took it in a bad way. Sorry for the paragraph but a tip to you if you played bm a long time ago like matto did try replaying it again with the mindset of: this is a completely new not hl1 remake game I've never played, and if you do, approach it like hl2 with a bit more quick saving, of course you don't have to but you might like more. Side note: do not play like matto on hard difficulty you don't play halo 2 on legendaray in your first playtrough as an extreme example.
@@drewtincan Yeah, starting the game I was a bit confused if it was meant to be a modernized, fleshed out substitution for the original or maybe more of a "fanfiction" sort of expansion for the base game. Now I think about it as the latter. I don't consider it as a game you should play instead of hl1, but something you should play after you get into the mechanics and lore of the original. I sort of wanted for it to be the former, because a lot of people are going to play something that look prettier, because they cannot stand the low-poly models etc. :p Something I cannot relate to. Another off putting thing is that the game was made by fans and it FEELS that way. At least it felt like that to me. It wasn't really polished (and I'm polish), also the voice acting rubbed me the wrong way. For me, half life is that crunchy, overly-compressed audio. BM is too clean and, apart from that, I wasn't a fan of the scientists voices. Original G-MAN cannot be replaced, no matter how hard that one guy tried. But here's the thing: It's not meant to replace Half Life 1. It's more of a HALF LIFE 1 REIMAGINED by fans for fans. And I can respect that. I agree with your points. Personally, at the end of the game, I would like to be a little underwhelmed than overly frustrated (2.5) :] Fun fact: During my playthrough, I had Gonarch get stuck in the tunnel. I found it somewhat cute that they ported that classic glitch into the game (jk, I probably fiddled too much with the long jump in the tunnel and got so ahead in front of him that he bugged out - in the original it's unavoidable to get him stuck, it just happens :p) I'm sure with the right attitude you can really enjoy most aspects of Black Mesa, but I guess it can be said about anything. I might give it a try sometime in the future. Cheers :)
@@d-_-b-Phil yeah you're right thank you for the response that is really what i meant say in my paragraph. Also The gonarch bug could be 2 things 1. You hit a trigger from the secret passage making her do the claw animation or, 2. You just bugged the game in that case good job its really hard in the xen maps. Bm is really like any other game anyone can enjoy it with the right mindset, except for raw hl:source that game is reserved for when they run out of syringes for lethal injection
Tô be totally honest, I played this (and the original) multiple times and haven't had the same problems or complaints. I could feel a lack of attention but i think it is a challenge to stream, entertain an audience and play carefully. This is, pragmatically speaking, one of the best games and it's ok you didn't like, maybe it's not for everyone.
The person who said to Matto that he should start with Black Mesa is definitely crazy, black mesa is only when you are a weird nerd that like HL (Me in that case), he definitely should have played the original on GoldSrc first.
This game is great and Xen is amazing. Unfortunately, and I don't mean to be mean, but Matto just sucks. I think he suffers from tunnel vision from too much speedrunning. The fact he constantly runs into barnacles despite them being obvious shows too much haste. I mean even in GTA he suffers with simple tasks that aren't in speedrunning, like scaring those dudes in the helicopter in the recent chaos video. The game literally told him how to scare them in other ways besides speed and he missed it. I think if he went just a little slower and focused when it comes to things he doesn't yet understand, he'd be so much better at playing games.
I agree, everytime I watch him play other games it makes me just say "Dude, the game told you how to do it", but at the same time I'm not mad or anything it just weirds me out
there was a boss fight where he could have shot crystals with the laser to explode, to help kill the boss, the whole chat was telling him to do it, and he refused and wouldnt do it. He was trying to hard to be annoyed.
Sort of, i'm seeing your point but I think he sees these hints and uses one thing he saw to progress. To use your example he probably saw "Go fast to scare Rocko" and went fast while reading chat thinking it would work
Though I must admit that the Xen Levels could be improved, gameplay wise, it doesn't mean Xen is necessarily bad. I think your idea for how Xen could be fixed works as well, and maybe the Gonarch fight's first phase could've been a little bit shorter. And, though, I perfectly understand how you've come this far, and I know for a fact you drastically improved over the course of the game, oneself must be vigilant and mobile. I know that the original game, Half-Life, was made in 1998 and how it was built around the player taking damage over time, but that doesn't mean you have to stand in front of the enemy whilst she charges at you, the long jump exists there so you can dodge quickly. I, myself, am not a big fan of Xen, but only due to the interloper level and its series of endless puzzles, and I agree with you on how they should either make the puzzles non-existent, or allow you a sense of progress. I also agree that Xen could've been shorter, and there was no worry of having to rush it. I mean, imagine Xen from the original Half Life, but the gameplay, puzzles, and graphics are top tier whilst remaining within that 1 hour mark (maybe, at most, 2 hours.) I don't doubt that the creators behind Black Mesa could've accomplished that without it feeling rushed like the original game. And, though this version of Xen has barely any sense of accomplishment and is honestly frustrating at times, at least it isn't the botched, rushed version presented in the original 1998 release by Valve. The new Xen improves a lot one where the old Xen failed, but fails when it comes to a sense of accomplishment and progression. I am not trying to come across as a blundering idiot telling you, who made quite the accomplishment to "get good", nor am I calling the new Xen the worst thing in the world. But, in my opinion at least which you can interpret as right or wrong in your opinion, your frustrations in Xen were both a mix of poor game design during some areas, such at interloper, and your lack of understanding when it came to the long jump module. I do hope that Xen or Black Mesa hasn't ruined your view on the Half Life franchise, and I pray you'll find yourself able to play the sequels and maybe even the original. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your life, happy travels.
Been watching you for a 2-3 years now I believe, maybe a little more. But I have to say some of my favorite content from you is the 1-4 hour long videos of you trying new games. Last year while my wife and I were in the hospital waiting for her to go into labor I watched your watch dog 1-2 videos. The days following when we had some time to breath and relax I watched your max Payne videos.
man this got so cringe towards the end, i struggle to see how people have this much trouble with Xen in the remake lmao but i guess that's what happens when you play a remake without knowing the original
Bruh honestly idk if he'd even get to Xen in the original before getting incredibly frustrated. The original has all of the bullshit he's complaining about in spades throughout the game. Like, I kinda get where he's coming from on some stuff, but also he's playing like trash. Dude plays like he's only ever played an FPS game once before lmao.
@@non-shockingtopics7563 i feel like part of the frustration would also come from trying to impress an audience via streaming, half life is not a game you get a lot out of by rushing through it and paying little attention
@@BoogieBrando True, the real draw is usually in the environmental details and story for me. If that's not your fancy you probably would be getting frustrated a lot.
I've been really enjoying these long video playthroughs of other games. This and the saints row one are amazing and I've got the two watchdog videos on my list now. I'd love more content like this. I'd like to see you play something from the metro series but am excited in general for more game playthroughs!
Valuable comments, and I totally agree if I forget my unhealthy passion for the Half Life franchise, but you have to remember that this is essentially a remake of Half Life 1, sure they could have done a lot more but in a way I like how they kept true to the original, apart from Xen onwards, thats all 70% new. Now I wanna see you play Half Life 2 please :)
Also Remember that Half Life 2 is an original Valve version and not a Fan remake. It's much better than even the good parts of Black Mesa and never comes close to the levels of pain that New Xen introduced
@@DragonSniperThree11 Matto cannot handle the heat from ALL of those Jolly has played and hardened himself with. That's why Jolly will never play Cruelty Squad, it's too tame for his acquired tastes.
@@vitalsignscritical Jolly is just a boring and basic "Oh I'm so cool because I'm indifferent and calm" meanwhile deadwater are 2 or 3 guys which are star wars nerds that make pure chaos
I'm not even a gamer and I definitely didn't spend 15 minutes shooting rockets on the first part of the Gonarch fight💀💀 wtf?? I was on the "Black Mesa" difficulty
14:22 I didn't expect Half-Life Echoes in here, wow 15:13 He did sound a little bit distraught 2:06:20 "It groaned when I did that so I assume it was a good thing" 2:06:34 "There's no indication that i'm doing damage to it" What about the missiles they're giving you in all those pods, too?
I'm still watching, but I need to say: Firstly, you need to keep in mind that these two games differ in the engine used to make them, and it's not about the age of one but rather the feel. Secondly, Black Mesa is a remake from the scratch, even a huge part from the original game "The Zen Dimension" was entirely redone since it was somewhat of a chore in the original. Point is, both are good, but it depends whether you want to experience the Original game, or try something more modernized.
it doesnt matter which one you play if you are playing it to understand the story since both games do it without any problems but as a personal preference i choose original over black mesa since black mesa done some changes to enemies that make them more annoying/frustrating and remove the thinking element in some fights (half life had text saying Run Think Shoot Live in the back of the cd box) like marines being able to shoot while moving and throwing grenades more frequently forcing you to run around without cover and no breathing space turning the game into something in the lines of doom (doom isnt bad btw dont take me wrong), original game didnt do that and gave you time to think and make decisions behind boxes, walls etc
![[Part 1] A Physicist Plays A Physicist In Black Mesa┃First Blind Playthrough](/img/1.gif)
If you watch to the end of the video, you may come to hate me. I apologize in advance, I was just really really angry and no amount of footage left in an edited video will ever have people fully understand why. Spoilers below:
Xen took 7 hours. 30 minutes of that footage was usable. I hated new version of xen with a blinding passion.
I have THREE other channels with exclusive content!
Commentary channel ~ www.youtube.com/@ViperRambles
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Extras channel ~ www.youtube.com/@DarkViperAUExtras
Subscribe if you are interested
can you tell us why?
It took me a couple of tries to understand the meaning of this.
Also a true viewer will never hate you.
@@lonzoformvp5078 it's because he picked the highest difficulty and was getting killed by Gonarch for around an hour. And that frustration pretty much bled to the rest of Xen experience to the point where Matto said that Crowbar Collective ruined original Xen even though he never played it. There are full VODs posted around RUclips somewhere if you're interested
dont worry, i hate rockstar.
Would like to see saints row 2 heard it was the best saints row keep it up matto
Honestly, I'm not even surprised if the creatures in Half-Life are native to Australia lmao it sounds and looks like it just belongs on the Australian Outbacks
All I can think of now is Australian Vortigaunts.
lol
Valve is an American company .
@@Kernowparadise those are just old people in Australia
@@xrafter resonance cascade was just a portal that opens to australia
Don't be surprised if:
>you don't quicksave
>you did not understand game mechanics / did not look into them / ignored
>you did not use your head during puzzles
>played hard mode first time
and last but not least:
>brute forced every single fight
I did Xen in 3 hours, jokes sometimes write themselves...
I love how he's under a gigantic rotating turbine and he's like "I feel like I've made a tactical error."
Matto Red-Dead Redemption 2: "Overly restrictive and hand-holding"
* Monkey's Paw Activates *
Matto Black-Mesa: "I'M LOST"
Literally blind to hints game give him as well.
Yeah its a legitimate complaint i dont get what you mean, both can be true and in this case is, the puzzles were not only boring but quite unclear on what needs to be done a lot of the time.
The pace of them is also bad because they are put inbetween major action sequences, im not in a puzzle solving mood i wanna rambo on some xen invader cucks.
@@darthgiorgi4990I played it and i can tell you that the puzzles sucked, worst part of the game and there are SO many of them.
@@thirdhandlv4231 If you played the entire game before Xen it literally teaches you how puzzles work lol
Half-Life is also a Puzzle game
@@thirdhandlv4231 Half-Life doesn't sound like your type of game then
The tram introduction was in that time (on HL1) to show that this game was different of Quake and Arena-shooters. The plan was to show 98's gamers that this game would be more realistic and don't rushe the player to the action without context
Like Unreal
It was more about environmental storytelling and in-game scripted events with the optional shooting vs everything that came before it that was mostly a corridor shooter
@@chillhour6155 ..yes, it was to show that it was different and new technology
Except the problem is that Matto didn't interact with shit or even bother looking around, he kinda speedran the first levels which made me angry. Dude, literally, play around.
Funnily enough, the annoying boss fight is actually mostly intact from the original game but slightly *less* annoying. The city section was a new addition and they removed a bunch of bullshit platforming that abused the absence of ground below you to get constant cheap deaths. I'd recommend watching a playthrough of the original Xen or trying it yourself via console commands on the original.
The new puzzles and extended belt hell THAT NEEDED A SHORTENING FROM THE ORIGINAL, are annoying as shit though, they launched the game in 2 parts, the pre-xen and xen itself so they added too much to make the update feel bigger.
Yeah but cheap deaths don't take 7 hours to get through. Instant respawn.
@@hyperteleXii this
@@hyperteleXii Did he play this game non stop? It's a long game on your first playthrough.
As annoying and long as BM's Xen is to complete, it will always be better than the original.
@@nesrovlahsurvivalist8399 I think he played through almost all of Xen in one sitting, which definitely added to the frustration.
Almost half-way through, and enjoying the watch, but it is amusing how much frustration and complaints about the game are literally due to Matt not paying attention, like the barrel puzzle in the start of Apprehension. There's a cage, there's bright orange barrels that float on the bottom of the cage, and several bright orange barrels all around the place in a game with physics.
thats how he is with literally every game he hates lmao, its always his own fault
@@tokeshed i'm pretty sure he just keeps the RDR2 hating thing as a joke, not because he actually hates it, but he *is* quite bad at paying attention
This puzzle is only obvious if you've played half-life 2. These barrels being bright orange would usually suggest they're explosive before that they're buoyant. The level geometry did not have this level of interaction up until this point in the game, where you put physics props somewhere and part of the level shifts. Out of all the ways to look for when looking for a way out of the water, grabbing these specific props to put them in this specific place so that the level slightly shifts and you can walk across is really low on most people's lists of things to try. The puzzle was even worse in the original hl1 at least.
@@Arch-Tau I do agree with this, Black Mesa's level design is quite confusing, and honestly without counting Xen, although it's still quite bad on Black Mesa, the original Half Life 1 and Half Life 2 should be played before Black Mesa, otherwise the experience is quite confusing, so Matt's suffering is partially his audience's fault for suggesting Black Mesa instead of the Original HL1 just because "it looks better"
@@Arch-Tau How is it only obvious if you've played half-like 2? It's a very basic physics puzzle that is really easy to figure out. the game uses red for explosives, and bright orange is a common coloration for floatation devices.
Additionally, this is exactly how HL2 also introduces this sort of puzzle, and it is something that takes really little time to figure out for most people. I have literally seen no first time players get stuck on these other than Matt and DSP.
GTA Players: It doesn't give me directions. It's a bad game design.
pov no yellow paint or big arrow to spoon-feed you gameplay
@@mrindeed247 no map?
The funniest thing is- IT LITTERALLY DOES they're just hidden like they're the part of the world
@@TauGuyUT well, yes. The environment of the game gives you directions but if you miss them, then you might get lost. In GTA, the game holds your arm to help you complete the game.
@@JustCallMeDavid PRESS BUTTON OPEN DOOR, GET FLOATING BARREL PLACE UNDER THE BRIDGE, PRESS SWITCH TURN POWER ON. WHAT THE FUCK IS SO HARD ABOUT IT.
the playtrough would've been twice as short if matt knew that weapons had alt fire
half life 1 is amazing, but the work put into the remake was astonishing as well. They're both great!
Yes
Yeah but sadly matto needed to play the classic, he ruined his experience playing this one.
@@zilet7844 yeah I agree blackmesa is definitely made for the fans
@@jabba_jawz1494 and not for first time players
@@thatkerimguy disagree at all, and other pzople have said, if a nowadays gamer plays hl1 he will drop it for the bad graphics and outdated gameplay. Black Mesa its the perfect ways to start being a new half life fan. Idk about the Xen part of it though.
I've never been so triggered in my life when Matto is not using quicksave. Funny as hell though but damn it!
You shouldn't need to quicksave to beat a game without losing your though. And i understand why he didn't do it, because it's very easy to abuse.
@@chrisakaschulbus4903 The game also should have been far better balanced. Hard mode is meant to be challenging, not blatantly unfair; and he made the fatal mistake of doing hard-mode.
@@ozvoid1245 From what i saw in the video (i wasn't there for the full stream) it didn't look like he was annoyed because of the difficulty of enemies. (ok maybe the boss fight)
For the conveyor belts it's just doing the same thing over and over again that can make you sloppy. Combined with high dfficulty i can see why his experience was "le succ"
@@ozvoid1245 Black Mesa isn't that hard, it's honestly easier than Half Life 1 at times.
@@peppermillers8361 not really, half life on hard is piss easy compared black mesa on hard
It's a shame that matto didn't cosplay as gordon for this epic journey.
Omfg the late great Heisenberg 😲
Would actually look good with Matto's glasses & beard
Like professional cosplays like the character
To be fair he said he didn't know much about Half life. But I mean there's plenty of time to do it in the future.
@@AlienFan25 I don't think Matt is the type of guy to do cosplay tho
A speedrunner's worst nightmare: a long game.
ironic considering how short and optimized the actual half life speedruns are
@@spo0nofficial only if he know the bhop
2:13:08 You have no idea how bad Xen was originally. Even Gabe Newell says it's the worst part of Half-life, I do think the black mesa version isn't perfect and very clunky sometimes but it's such a step up compared to the original, there's literally nothing redeemable about the original because it's the most boring, repetitive and ugly looking segment in video game history
Literally tho, Xen looks like actual mud, plays like shit, and leads you to a completely underwhelming and boring final fight, all in the span of 2 and a half hours
At least it wasn’t 5 fucking hours, in oh half life it’s like 45 minutes long
@@Axolotl720 lmao bro, he would shit on og xen more so only good thing you would expect for him to say was it's short
yeah but atleast you can get past xen under an hour. xen took 7 hours for darkviper cause he was dumb and didn't know what to do or where to go
I don't think it was THAT bad until interloper
To me, I played the original HL1 because I also planned on playing blue shift and opposing forces. If I played the more advanced Black Mesa, then I feel like it would be jarring to then play the other two games with much older graphics. Same applies for HL2 because I’m able to enjoy and marvel at the technological improvements from the first game to the second. I played Black Mesa after finishing HL2 which I believe is nice because it loops all the way back to the beginning of my journey and it allowed me to enjoy the finer details in the “original” game while knowing future events
nah, the gameplay in hl1 works better than black mesa, you should still play the DLCs
@@cpi3267 oh yeah don’t worry I played them. What I meant is that I played the games in release order with Black Mesa being the last. This way I was able to enjoy the advancements in graphics and gameplay the way it was intended
Totally agree with everything you said. Most people should play HL1 instead of Black Mesa simply to see how the series evolved - mechanically, graphically, and all that. Playing Black Mesa first utterly ruins that, and likely will make HL2 (which in many ways feels like it could have released today) feel dated. The exception being, of course, if one can't stand older games, or simply dislikes HL1's controls and stuff. In that case... idk, maybe it'd be best to play HL2 first; it's not like the first game was particularly plot heavy, and those people wouldn't care about seeing the evolution. Best not to ruin to HL2, then, with Black Mesa's few gameplay & graphical improvements.
I started off with Black Mesa and then went back to play the original HL and the gameplay between the two is so different that I cannot recommend this enough for those looking to get into the series - play HL first and Black Mesa second. Seeing how jarring the experience is between the two games actually made me see less of Black Mesa as a remake, and I'm currently in the very small minority of people who believe Black Mesa could be much better.
BM was my first and I'd still say that I prefer the original hl, mostly for gameplay reasons
I really like both tho. They both have their great sides
You can lead a gamer to a game, but you can't make him learn.
True
I don't wanna be rude, but Matt played like a game journalist
Eh. I feel like the Black Mesa part was really fun but as soon as he got to Xen and went through, it went to shit and a lot of his criticism were pretty valid. The Gonarch was long and didn't reward the player for killing it as it even died in a really lame way, and I wanted to lose it at the conveyor belts myself because it was just the most boring and was nowhere that long in the original.
@@gravywild2123 I agree 100%
I just meant the beginning where every shot looked like it was delayed by half a second lol
@@xor_the_protogen oh lol true. I honestly expected such a dedicated Speedrunner to have a much better sense of everything but he did become oblivious at some mechanics.
@@gravywild2123 this is a problem that a lot of skilled gamer people suffer, they don't play enough different games to "understand" how games work in general, so the moment you throw a different ball curve at then they fall apart, i honestly hate this because some people legit use this excuse to not play different games.
I never made it to xen on black mesa, but played through half life 1 on hard more times then I can count. Is it really that bad?
I love how matto gets mad about there being no story in xen even though there is story and it just isn’t spoon fed to him
He doesn't even get that Grunts are Vortigaunts on steroids, and Vortigaunts are forced to turn their brethren into mindless beasts at the conveyor belt factory, and that you can even kill tje gonarch with some Canister of gas that has clear instructions on a white board next to it. And the fact Vortigaunts aren't native to Xen.
But truth be told the second half of xen is where the game falls on it's face, especially in the 1998 version where you are staring at the same disgusting cave over and over again, black mesa did it's best with it but there really isn't much to work with there.
@@RabdoInternetGuy wait they are? i always though they were a completely different species
It is inconsistent between the two halves of the game though so I can sympathize.
The first half the game trains you that there are NPCs who will keep you updated on what your next goal should be.
In Xen there is nobody to do this. You do get environmental storytelling but it's much more subtle. You really just have what the last NPCs from Black Mesa said to guide you through to the last goal.
Yeah, you can tell, @@ihatethis103. Just as with the floating Controllers, and even the Nihilanth. Though it's specifically the Grunts we see manufactured, or at least put on assembly lines.
The key features are the third stomach arm, the backward facing legs, and the red, cycloptic eyeball, identifying features that Vortigaunts possess.
I like how angry he got at Gonarch and Xen and how horrible he thought it was when someone like Mapocolops beat that first gonarch phase in like 5 minutes and only spent about 3ish hours in total in Xen, and that was while also being a pacifist and trying not to kill Vortigaunts which got him killed a lot, and he's not the...best example of a hardcore gamer or anything.
This is why good game devs don't listen to streamers just because they have a following.
Mapo has good spirit overall, Gonarch definitely left Matto sour his Xen experience.
The boss fights are good but Xen is a masterclass in absolute trash game design. The egos of the devs to think there stupid puzzles need to go on 3 times each and every time.
Matto spent too much time hyper-focusing on GTA5. His muscle memory will likely never be the same in any other game.
Couldn’t find enjoyment in Xen, it was pretty but I had too look up guides to find my way around.
@@14_IQ.points Xen is absolutely long as fuck and gets way too drawn out trying too many new things in succession before Nihilanth but to call it "trash game design" is intentionally obtuse
> plays black mesa
> completely new experience
> "SUCH BAD GAME DESIGN, I HATE THIS ITS THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER"
> same exact guy speedruns boring gta v story missions all day, over and over, for hours and hours and hours of his life.
The last one is so true. Like complaining that there is some s**t over and over again, but do exact this somewhere else? Like, BRUH!
I knew it was going to be a clusterfuck after the first failed boss fight. I was internally saying to myself "ok get a days rest, you're burned out after wasting too much time not figuring out a mechanism".
I was absolutely right. You could play a masterpiece afterwards, and you'd be annoyed anyway.
[ 53:24 ] Matt I love you and all but that's a pretty easy puzzle. Here are some hints provided by the game: There's a collapsed bridge which has bright red lights on it, the bridge also has a cage underneath, inside the cage is a completely new type of barrel that is bright orange and you can tell they're floating because they're at the top of the cage, you can find these same orange barrels floating around you and you can clearly see that they do in fact float in case you weren't 100% sure. This is more than enough information for you to understand that you need to collect the barrels and insert them under the bridge so that the bridge floats. It's not hard that hard to connect the dots and it's not really the game's fault.
Not only that but Half-Life 2 outside being a FPS was also a physics puzzle game, so it is to be expected that a remake of Half-Life that uses the same engine as Half-Life 2 would take advantage of the new physics system and incorporate a physics puzzle.
He's terrible at any game where he doesn't have 8 thousand hours of experience
When you need to write a paragraph to explain a puzzle, somethings a little off
@@tristansandeen891 ? I mean the puzzle is super obvious tho lol
Bridge broken. Oh look a cage under the bridge. Oh a super floaty barrel. Oh look more of them. Maybe I should try putting them in the cage. @@tristansandeen891
This game was meant to be played in multiple sessions. Because its goddamn long, and most people have jobs and responsibilities (and sleep), playing it all at once and saying its too boring and long is like deciding to eat 100 Hamburgers, and then complaining how you're going to vomit and blaming the Burgers for it.
Did he actually complain about the length lmao?
@@neonmenace1592yeah because he kept died to gonwrch for like an hour lol
wdym? if you HAVE to play a game in multiple sessions then thats just bad, its like you are playing a 3 hour game but you have to take a break every half an hour to regain your sanity, its just bad.
@@thirdhandlv4231 bro has never heard of 11 hour games 💀
@@neonmenace1592Who?
Hey Matto, I really hope you read this. Seeing how you enjoyed the game (Xen being an exception) you really should try Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1 and Half Life 2: Episode 2. Half Life 2 is amazing, EP 1 is short and worse but still good in many aspects, and EP 2 is very action packed and maybe even better than HL 2. Please try them out, if you want to of course. Have a great day.
hl1 expansions are good too
he said in a community post that he tried 2 and got bored
@@sydssolanumsamsys when?
@@JJMDthelilypod when you're mother
@@sydssolanumsamsys is gay
The tagline on the box of the original game was “Run. Think. Shoot. Live,” and I think that’s evident in the fight with the gonarch. If you pay attention when you enter the outpost, there is reference to plans to kill the gonarch using toxic gas and, if you then pick up the gas and take it with you, you can skip the gonarch fight. Kill it almost immediately, or even just walk past. Almost every encounter in the game can be made better by planning what you’re going to do ahead of time.
I think, then, the reason this was such a bad time is because of having to juggle both that kind of gameplay and a stream chat. You can tell this is an issue, trying to do too many things at once, from all the instances of entering a fight with dry weapons or diving into the same hazard immediately off the loading screen.
he's used to the game spoon feeding instructions to him like gta 5. this game is too challenging for him.
1:00:46 That was really funny! Your editor deserves a raise
:)
@@BobTheMartin Hi editor
i'm gonna be honest, the game could have lasted half the time less if you understood how the mechanics (like the laser on the rocket launcher) or (your own rockets damages you if you shoot them close to yourself) or (not run in front of enemies with no ammo) or (mines) (turrets) and if you didn't die on every single enemy at last 1 and on every single object/jumping/puzzle. i'm scared to see how many times did you died that got edited out.
Didn't he play on hard mode? Black Mesa on hard mode is legitimately bullshit.
@@ozvoid1245 Sure but doesn't mean you have to touch every single mine, leave weapons not loaded, blow yourself up a couple of times or run in front of an enemy hoping that you will outdamage the enemy with the shotgun. Is not about the difficulty is about how he approached every fight that prolonged the game by a lot. I don't know if he played better in the parts edited out but i don't wanna see 7 hours of streaming to check if he actually played very good and just loaded the most chaotic moments.
@@Castam3r3 He never once complained about the combat difficulty though? His frustration came from elongated puzzle sections that serve little to no purpose using the same mechanics over and over again.
@@dannyvimpany7585 in fact I'm not complaining about him getting beated at the game, I'm just pointing out that if he didn't make so many mistakes the experience in the end could have ended better without the need to insult developers that took the most boring part of half life 1 (xen) and try to improve it without changing the formula too much. And I played half life 1 (original) and the only thing that I remembered is the huge headcrab and the final boss.
+(side note) is strange how a speedrunner that have to complete the same mission over and over get so mad about a repetitive puzzle on a 4(7) hour campaign (xen)
Im not an hater I just find stupid how a good game get beated down for a small Section. Doing so he will probably not touch hl2 and other chapters.
The only way you can really play black mesa is if you know how to play the original
This was painful to watch, not because of the deaths but because he clearly isn't sure about playing this game. It was also the first time I've cringed at Matto raging and ranting xdn't
To each their own. But I really felt this to be a subpar play of the game. I wouldve loved better
But it fell flat unfortunately.
The rants towards the end of the game are serious cringe.
He's trying to sound like someone who spent the last 10 years working as a level designer when in reality he's just a gta v speedrunner
He's trying to sound like someone who spent the last 10 years working as a level designer when in reality he's just a gta v speedrunner
@@monkigaming8335 And what makes you think you actually know about level design or speedrunning for you to talk about it?
I cannot believe this man can be so unaware of his surroundings to the point he missed pretty much every major event, (jets bombing distant building cliffside, gargantua death etc.) and Hunter's armory in the lambda core lab.
watching this physically hurt, eveytime i try and give a let's player a shot they are brain dead and forget mechanics, or blame the game on their own stupidity because they wanted to say a supid joke over pay attention to what the game is telling you
it's almost like they've never touched a game before. I swear to god this accessibility shit lately is more like disrespecting our intelligence as human beings, its making people dumber, so now they gotta compare stuff to other games. what's also crazy is that he is visibly pissed at the game and yet he keeps playing it, like bro just take a break and come back to it later.
How the hell did you find this guy first over Mapocolops or other people who've played it blind what the hell, this is literally the complete extreme and I know for a fact he's not the first result
@@アイギス-e4s idk i didn't look for this youtube recommendation is fucked
>Plays Hard mode on his First Time playing
>Ignores Story and Dialogue
>Ignores Game Mechanics
>Try’s to Brute Force every Combat situation
>Doesn’t use his head during puzzles
>ignores the clearly labeled Control instructions In bright orange letters
>Blames the developers
As a person who plays games very often, half lifes puzzles are very flawed, similar to the witness infamous bird puzzle, there are "hints" throughout the environment but unless you already know what to do or have excellent problem solving skills, you are unlikely to see these hints. Also whats wrong with playing hard mode on a first time playthrough? Theres nothing wrong with wanting a challenge. People look at this game through the "masterpiece" lenses, any flaw someone has with the game there wrong and no one can say otherwise
"I'm not going anywhere"
Proceeds to run into a room full of mines, guns blazing.
Honestly, the combination of not paying attention and playing on hard difficulty during the Gonach fight ruined Matt's experience for the rest of the game. No matter what attention to detail the devs/remakers have made to the parts after the Gonach fight, it would just be missed and/or not enjoyed anymore.
I feel bad for Matt that he couldn't get a good experience out of this amazing game.
Agreed, Just finished the game and the only complaint I have is that the puzzles later in Xen are repetetive.
Blame Crowbar Collective for renaming "Easy", "Medium", and "Hard" into something else and making "Easy" the default difficulty at which everything makes sense perfectly. Also blame them for their decision to replace the classic Source engine main menu with those orange bars that actually hide some of the settings (type "-oldgameui" in Steam launch settings and you'll see the difference)
TBH I'm glad I skipped interloper. It was so boring. The final boss fight redeemed the game for me
nah@@rishavganguly92
@@kriper-ly3uu emphasis on "for me".
Accurate title: man slowly turns into a game jornalist throughout a black mesa playthrough.
I really hope this game doesn’t discourage Matt from playing any more hl games because that would suck if a poorly made ending to a fan remake could stop Matt from playing any more of this iconic video game series
@@BlackMoonHowls is that the mod that lets you eat the gibs?
If I remember it correctly, unfortunately he already stated in a community post to have lost interest in playing HL2.
@@sedatefobia That sucks, HL2 fixed a lot of the frustrations that HL1 had.
It’s one of those games that everyone should play at least once.
This is not poorly made it's literally just Matt being bad at any game he plays except gta 5
@@Volvotryggve it's really hilarious how little critical thinking he has in these games
I feel like if Matt would actually learn how the game’s mechanics worked and generally knew how to play he would’ve liked this game much more. I don’t think he even realised his shotgun had a double shot, his SMG had a grenade launcher, his missile launcher had a laser sight.
There is no rhyme or reason for him to just attack the developers (who i’m pretty sure is a small indie team) just because he turned it up to the hardest difficulty and surprise surprise, it’s hard
true, i was enjoying the video up until he started getting frustrated with xen becasue he never paid too much attention to the game's mechaincs.
@@Leo_8753 it’s more so like he ignored them, i don’t get why he just threw a hissy fit because he ignored everything
@@loafofbeans8291 this is why games have overbearing tutorials.
@@sacb0y exactly, cause some people miss the easiest things to figure out somehow
He didn't miss any of it, there is footage here of him using the laser against the heli, the charged Tau Cannon in Surface Tension, using the granade launcher in Blast Pit, crossbow zoom in Questionable Ethics, the revolver aim down sights in Surface Tension, the only one that he might not have noticed was the pistol's rapid fire.
"I'll just stick to autosaves" first mistake
I genuinely just think most of Xen was blind hated by Matt.
-He missed the entire point of the Gonarch chapter being centred around the predator vs prey situation where one second you chase her the other second she chases you
-The story of Xen is literally all around him, the beauty of half life is that there are no cutscenes thus you get the story from the area around you, he seems to miss that as well
-Interloper was not bad and he ALSO seemed to miss the fact that you were climbing a tower that reached high to the sky
-most his claims he tried to make it out to be objective but is literally subjective "waaaa Gonarch sucks because i cant beat her" watching him play it was literally a skill issue considering i was able to beat it first try on the hardest difficulty
there are a lot more critiques about him but i think i got most my point across
Every time I think I suck at games, I watch this video and feel relief wash over me that I'm not as stupid as DarkViper. But I also feel a burning hatred because HOLY FUCK THE GLOWING BUTTON THATS FLASHING IS FLASHY ASF HOW DO YOU NOT SEE IT?!
And big ego too, like if the game's too hard notch down the difficulty instead of blaming the game. Journalism gaming at its finest.
His view on Xen had me literally screaming.
If you think you're bad at games, you should enter me.
Rewatching this a year later, it’s still funny to see what started as a fun gameplay end off as an angry rant about conveyor belts
>plays Black Mesa
>starts off on the highest difficulty despite his unfamilairity of the Half-Life mechanics
>dies alot
>blames developers
@@WELSHGAMER99Yes, all of Xen is garbage, that is not an opinion ,it is a fact. Worst experience i ever had, i had a much easier time getting through my day at my summer job than beating Xen. (oh yeah i did it all with the purple hat for the rarest specimen achievement too.)
@@thirdhandlv4231 elaborate then if its a "objectivce fact"
@@WELSHGAMER99 The first chapter until Gonarch's fight is boring, not much happens, there is some cool visual story telling thoug. The ending (opening the portal to Gonarch) is pretty shit, didn't have fun there at all, just tedious (a sign of things to come.) Its kind of dumb and not cool to have to run around looking for plugs to plug into walls in a game where ALIENS ARE INVADING EARTH.
The fight with gonarch is boring and pretty bad, its just shooting rockets at him until he decides to run away, its sloppy and dumb since he visually looks the exact same all the way through. Matt's criticism about the fight is justified.
The whole chase sequence is far longer than it needed to be, it would have actually been a good starting point without the first fight with gonarch keeping him as a looming presence until the final fight, it would have hit much harder and wouldn't have been the same exact fight in a lamer location.
Interloper is the worst, the puzzles are rtrash, unclear (yes they are unclear since it took me a while to realize that there even is one.) there are so so many puzzles. every part of the chapter is boring, it looks like garbage too, the textures in the factory are ugly af.
The whole conveyor bit is repetetive and drags on for WAY too long. Its like the conveyor bit from the overworld (vanilla hl) if it was 10x longer, there is no need for that. The whole chapter is a creative pitfall from an already creativily lacking part of the game that for some reason drags on for HOURS.
The final chapter is a lot better, the boss fight is pretty cool and the ending is well done and faithful to the original, it takes up rougly 15% of Xen and its the only non-tedious and actually enjoyable part of the section.
Of course all the horrible and shitty parts were the ones from Black Mesa team, their own design, it sucked. They are good at remaking an existing product but not good at adding things of their own.
I am not taking carrying the little purple hat into account, just a pure retrospective of the level design.
@@thirdhandlv4231
>The first chapter until Gonarch's fight is boring, not much happens, there is some cool visual story telling thoug.
What do you mean not much happens? It supposed to be the build up for the later chapters. Its part of the pacing
>The ending (opening the portal to Gonarch) is pretty shit, didn't have fun there at all, just tedious (a sign of things to come.) Its kind of dumb and not cool to have to run around looking for plugs to plug into walls in a game where ALIENS ARE INVADING EARTH.
Ok? Again there’s nothing really wrong with the plug puzzles I vastly prefer to the vague nonsense that was in the original Zen starter map. Even if they repeat a bit too much
>The fight with gonarch is boring and pretty bad, its just shooting rockets at him until he decides to run away, its sloppy and dumb since he visually looks the exact same all the way through. Matt's criticism about the fight is justified.
Nah highly disagree. Matt’s criticisms was not justified cause he was trying to play it like a Dark Souls fight. Not to mention him saying there was no damage indicators (The Gonarch was limping and bleeding towards the end)
>The whole chase sequence is far longer than it needed to be, it would have actually been a good starting point without the first fight with gonarch keeping him as a looming presence until the final fight, it would have hit much harder and wouldn't have been the same exact fight in a lamer location.
Longer than it needed to be? There were more parts of shooting the gonarch than it is chasing you lol. Most of the section had you solving puzzles to get to the next area as the gonarch is a looming presence.
Honestly the design of the chapter is VASTLY superior to the original Gonarch fight as you just chase it down a tunnel with little indication you were doing any sort of damage to it until it died. The Gonarch feels like a threat in Black Mesa.
>Interloper is the worst, the puzzles are rtrash, unclear (yes they are unclear since it took me a while to realize that there even is one.) there are so so many puzzles. every part of the chapter is boring, it looks like garbage too, the textures in the factory are ugly af.
Shocker Half-Life is also a Puzzle game as well as an action game. Obviously they are going to put a few puzzles as a breather after the Gonarch fight and build tension for the next few areas.
Plus you are not even in the factory straight away you end up in the Vort village and the Gargantua caves
>The whole conveyor bit is repetetive and drags on for WAY too long. Its like the conveyor bit from the overworld (vanilla hl) if it was 10x longer, there is no need for that. The whole chapter is a creative pitfall from an already creativily lacking part of the game that for some reason drags on for HOURS.
The only thing I agree on is the puzzles repeated a ton but compared to the original Interloper I prefer BM’s iteration due to the clearer design goals. The original had you just wondering around clearly rushed maps.
>Of course all the horrible and shitty parts were the ones from Black Mesa team, their own design, it sucked. They are good at remaking an existing product but not good at adding things of their own.
Have you even played the original Xen? Lmao
I feel sorry for you for Xen to be such a horrible experience, it's not an unpopular opinion to hate it but just to let you know, I had tons of fun watching the entire playthrough live leading up to Xen, it made me really happy!
Don't be discouraged by Xen experience and know that Half Life 2 is a much better and consistent game. Other than that, my fav playthrough of yours so far!
It's all a Valve experience, none of the fan meddling. Just don't mod it too much. There some mods that enhance the experience without ruining the core game, considering the game is 18 years old at this point, though.
@@Unknown_Genius orginal half life was better xen from black mesa drags on too long i played black mesa before matt when xen came out and he is right game drags on on on on on and on orginal game's xen was fun and short black mesa literally tried to make player play more idk how you guys even defend this
@@Unknown_Genius It's not like Xen in original HL is good, more like Black Mesa Xen had much more potential but ended up being dragged out for no reason, which hurt the final part of the game, there was no need to force more game time than original Xen since Xen in BM at least has more enjoyable moments, but they should've taken at max 2 hours to complete
He was discouraged.
@@Smirving bruh, original Xen looks like literal mud and is just filled with the same jumping platform puzzles that you die from hundreds of times for two and a half hours, the original final boss is literal cancer teleporting you to random mud places to try and platform EVEN MORE, original Xen is fucking terrible and black mesa Xen is such an upgrade
When I played this I really enjoyed Xen except for the conveyor ride in the factory. To me it seems like you kept dying to the Gonarch and got angry because of it, then because of how bitter you were it tainted the rest of your experience. I would say 4 hours of Black Mesa’s Xen (that’s how long it took me to complete and that’s the dev team’s estimate) is way better than the original Half-Life version of Xen, which is like this if you removed all of the puzzles and just did 2 hours of platforming
Also I would never recommend trying the game on the hardest difficulty for your first playthrough. Anyone playing Black Mesa for the first time should start on easy mode, and if they find it too easy switch to normal, but hard would be too much even if you feel confident on normal. The game tends to fluctuate in difficulty such that on hard you will feel fine in the regular sections, but then you will reach a choke point in difficulty and it will be much harder than should be expected
it wasnt even 2 hours half life 1 xen is better cause game knows you have nothing to do now no new weapons no new mechanic so they just end it after few chapters i played every hl game i know but i hate people who say black mesa is similar to hl2 hl episodes
To be honest I think it was a mistake for him to complete the game in 1 sitting. Like if he just walked away after Gonarch and finished the game at a later time, his experience would have been 100 times better. But instead, he just kept going, even when he didn’t really want to, which resulted in him actually suffering from the game.
@@itamar20112 Yep that was his biggest mistake. If he had just came back and finished it later i seriously doubt he would've hated it as much as he did. That Gonarch fight made him mad and thus tainted the rest of the game for him.
@@Smirving so just to prove to others that you're a complete liar, Xen wasn't made short because there were no new mechanics. actually, a lot more was planned. It was short because of time restraints.
"I'VE BEEN GOING THROUGH XEN DOING NOTHING WITH NO PURPOSE" matto was literally told before the portal fight that he must kill a giant being in xen that's holding a portal open
he never pays attention
The Office edit at 1:00:47 was absolutely god-tier.
Every issue in the rant at the end is the result of a failure to understand what everyone was screaming in the chat to learn.
Skill issue.
This is the problem when trying to play first time in stream, you miss things in order to speed things up and not appear boring
Since I caught this early I wanted to say how much I enjoy that your rambles are on streaming platforms. I haven’t been in the music mood for a good while and I need something to listen to while I’m at work and the rambles are perfect for that. Thank you!
You should play all of them in order.
I literally just finished HLA and I cannot believe how good the timing was lol.
I think he played this game a year ago and has lost all interest in the Half-Life series
@@tpd1864blake um weak ass ausie 😒
@@tpd1864blake damn i enjoyed him playing black mesa and suffering alot
this pisses me off :(
2:16:12 "there's no loot?" this isn't a fucking rpg why would there be loot? No other enemy except for the hecu have ever dropped any "loot"
I watched the whole video, it's great. I hope this experience doesnt overly sour this franchise for you, because I would absolutely love to see a HL2 video sometime from you. I know you aren't super big into VR, but Half Life: Alyx is also incredible and I hope you play it someday.
Love the guy in chat at 1:40:08 who called the crash
Really needed something to cheer me up today thanks for the awesome content matto
Wish you happier times mate
@@DarkViperAU Please dont give up on playing HL2 because of the poorly made utterly fucking garbage ending of this fan remaster
@@parknich081 Not the Devs fault that He's ass at the game
>le soy streamer is infuriated about the game being hard at the hardest difficulty and not spoonfeeding him information every 5 seconds, while actively ignoring all clues given to him by the game
>calls it worst game ever
>hivemind adolescent followers who have never played Half Life before start spamming how they agree with him and how hes completely right.
lol, lmao even.
"hivemind adolescent followers who have never played Half Life before start spamming how they agree with him and how hes completely right" as a guy who played half-life 1 more times than i can count, several times on hard difficulty, no, matt is right, also matt played black mesa, not half-life, big difference in gameplay and overall design philosophy, then again bm fans are stupid so what can i expect, bm fans are a hivemind of their own with spewing bullshit with no proof like how "bm xen was the way valve intended"
@@unoriginality1413 If you played HL1 alot you should knoe Valve themaelves said Xen sucked lmao
@@WELSHGAMER99 proof that they said that bm one is better?
@@unoriginality1413 Never said that. I said quite clearly that Valve was not satisfied with their version of Xen
@@WELSHGAMER99 Honestly, as a half-life fan myself it is quite depressing to see Matt so infuriated by Black Mesa when he should have played the original Half-Life instead, sure it may be rough around the edges, especially when it comes to Xen, but Black Mesa aims to change so much about hl1 that it's not hl1 anymore, nor should it ever replace it imo
Too many unnecessary puzzles in Xen, Interloper is too long, everyone agree on that. But I think the rest is great. I died so many times in Gonarch's Lair boss fight, the only indication he takes damage is by rocket launcher, idk if Gluon gun or Tau gun give the indication of him taking damage or not, I can agree with you at that. But after I really learn how to use the long jump to dodge, I can beat him in one go. Hell, I even died more in Nihilanth chapter in my first try, just because to thinking to figuring out how to defeat him. But after I know how to defeat him, damn it only took less than 4 minutes. Just like how Valve said about HL: Run, Think, Shoot, Live.
0:00:00 -1:56:50 "Hey this is a cool game, I'm enjoying learning the story"
1:56:50 - 2:05:54 The boredom and frustration begin
2:05:54 - 2:34:30 The slow descent in to madness
2:34:30 - 2:36:55 Almost redeemed
2:36:55 - 2:42:20 The (justified) rant
I think he got angry from fighting gonarch on the maximum difficulty level and it ruined his experience for the rest of the game
@@tpd1864blake yea he picks the highest difficulty then gets angry that he dies he might be a bit of a clown for this one
@@loomyair What does the difficulty have to do with being forced to do the same stuff over and over again like what he was actually ranting about the most?
Or are the conveyor belts proportional to the difficulty setting?
"justified" lol dont shill. he just really sucks at the game and doesn't pay attention to anything. Doing the same exact thing over and over again thinking it will work.
@@chrisakaschulbus4903 refer to @wood's comment above this
Full gameplay on twitch was amazing to watch, despite the amount of rage and frustration. Do more of these! Also more Mario Party :D
We definitely need more Mario party. The first video was great
Half-Life is my all-time favourite series, very glad to see you play this.
The only reason I'd suggest the original, would be to experience it as it was, as some things are different from the remake and to appreciate the graphical leap to the sequel.
They did an amazing job with the remake, it's a lot more fleshed out with the story, along with the characters, with and without the ones that proceed to the sequel.
It's all just preference, if you care for the history of the Game industry, go for original, if you care for the story of Half-Life, go for Black Mesa is my take on it.
The only issue is when you have to come to terms with the expansions, as the remakes are not finished yet.
@teebles Yeah, I definitely agree there, I also do think he'd enjoy the game more if he'd just use quicksaves.
@teebles Very true, there is no shame in lowering the difficulty, the point of playing new games is for a new experience and most importantly, to have fun.
@@norXmal But the thing is you shouldnt quicksave every 5 minutes this is not skyrim hardest difficulty i agree but still i hate that people say quick save quick save he should have in some areas but game encourges you that you have to save after every encounter
@@Smirving Hate it all you want, unless you want to tediously go through the same part every time you die as if you were playing a Dark Souls game, go right ahead.
The Quick saves also separates from the autosaves, so if you become softlocked you can always go back to your quicksave.
@@norXmal so i should quick save every 5 minutes hl 1 is definitly better
Love how Matt's cursing the game Devs because he can't make a simple jump
He is like DarkSydePhil in this regard, even failing at the simplest things, blaming his own tunnelvision and mistakes on the developers
skill issue
might be the only vid I watched from him because of that. dude is way too salty and just doesn't care enough about what he plays to play it correctly. overall it was just a slug to watch until the end
@@ElPolloLoco7689 yeah I agree. I came into this hoping he would enjoy it since he was a youtuber I quite liked and I left knowing he doesn't have the ability to play games other than gta v where they hold your hand from beginning to end
@@veorangejuice733 skissue
Out of all the playthroughs I've watched (saints row 1/2) being my favourite, this one was like watching the psychological breakdown of a man going through the 7 circles of hell lol, the first 2/3rds of the game was going pretty well and then slowly but surely you can see the cracks showing before the flood gates of rage burst through XD
Man, Matto seems to have lost most of his IQ trying to play this game lol.
Especially at that jump on a cliff.
>Plays At the Highest Difficulty on His first time playing
>ignores story and Dialogue
>ignores game mechanics
>Try’s To brute force every single combat situation
>Doesn’t use head during puzzles
>ignores the clearly labeled Control instructions with Bright orange letters
>Blames The Developers
Matt dropped the Ball in this one.
@@dylanmoore3201 -doesnt use quicksaves as it "is bullshit and easy with them", insults devs
-gta 5 average no life speedruner
@@dylanmoore3201So he should just follow the rules of playing a game. He's playing it in his own way.
Yeah it happens when you contiunously go through garbage.
Matt, I really hope you will get to play the other Half-Life installments. They are simply amazing and have nothing to do with the things you didn’t like about Black Mesa Xen. Also Half-Life: Alyx is the best VR game in my opinion so you should play it when you get to playing VR again.
Boneworks is definitely a better half life type VR game it's less limited
@@punk5585 Eh, as Matto found is the case with Black Mesa's Xen, more is not always better, and Boneworks is like that for me. Its ideas are cool in concept but push the player more than the platform and I don't find that anywhere near as fun as Half-Life Alyx's simple pleasures and solutions to current VR's limits. (Intuitive gravity gloves mechanic, easy inventory to manage, fun upgrades for a small but fun arsenal, movement handling however you want it to, etc.)
@@andrewnebz alyx just felt to linear for me personally
I love this game with a passion and to see matt get frustrated in gonarch's lair and interloper was sad to watch, I will agree interloper does overstay it's welcome a little bit and isn't the easist chapter for new players but gonarch's lair, at least in my opinion, is a good chapter. An intense game of cat and mouse, as the developers, described it. Also when matt says that crowbar collective made the ending really bad which was also sad to hear because I watched the documentary they made and they are a great team
But I get where matt is coming from. People like different things. It's still a great video
it’s just actual horrible game design towards the end undeniably
@@latts I don't play many other games so I guess I just can't see it
@@Generic_Scientist you honestly didnt get bored doing the same thing over and over?
@@latts I was younger when I first played it, so I didn't get bored but more frustrated at not knowing what to do or where to go in interloper but everything else in xen is great I think
@@Generic_Scientist fair enough
You can litterly devide this video in 4 parts: 1) Okay, good graphics | 2) This is some nice action | 3) Matto goes bloddy crazy over Xen | 4) FINALLY... the end, Should've played the original one.
• Literally
• Divide
• Bloody
As for the 'The game only gives me missiles, so I gotta use missiles!' Part - Half-Life games have a hidden 'director', that decides which powerups/ammo you need the most at any given moment and increases the chances of those spawning in ammo boxes and such.
Thus, since Matto exclusively used rockets against the Gonarch, that was the only ammo type he was missing, so that was the only ammo he was getting. If he had used other weapons more frequently, their ammo would spawn, too.
@@Unknown_Genius the gluon gun definitely also damages the gonarch when directed at its sack, I used it a lot during my playthrough. It doesn't give a great indication of landing hits though, apart from the sound becoming more 'crunchy' when it's in contact with an enemy
That's not entirely true. The caches spawns are fixed in black mesa and there is no director at work most of the time.
Half life 2 had a system where it had a chance to spawn what you needed in supply boxes. By the time of Ep 2 Valve realised that it was a bit unbalanced and made supply boxes much less common in EP2.
Even though the entire premise of this comment is invalidated by the reply above me.
It is still pretty ironic considering the events.
Man sets game to hard difficulty, fails to understand Half Life mechanics, has a hard time on hard difficulty, insults development team
Later apologizes for being angry, but continues to spout lies and compares new xen on hard difficulty to a version he never played
This is why we shouldn't take critique from gta v speedrunmers
Kind of fustrating ngl
Its clear that Half-Life is not his type of game
@@WELSHGAMER99 any FPS game is not his type of game
@@Shockloadany game that isn’t gta V isn’t his type of game
The chat is backseating so much, you'd think it's the subtitles
-ThE WoRsT gaMe I PlaYeD!!! 🤓🤓🤓
-some gta 5 nolife speedrunner
Watching Matt pause in Xen every 30 seconds really just made me want to play through it again myself tbh, better to just experience it rather than hear a guy rant about something every 30 seconds
Watching somebody playing a source game for the first time is so much painful
was looking for this comment - this is not call of duty, the combat is not separate from the puzzles, it's a puzzle on it's own
yes i know this comment is two years after the fact, but after the HECU battle in the lobby at the end of Questionable Ethics, there is an easter egg in the dialogue of the third scientist to walk out into the lobby. he says "Look what you did! I can't believe what you just did!". This was a direct like from Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade right after indy kills the Nazis that were trying to get information out of them and Dr Jones Sr sees the dead men he says "Look what you did! I can't believe what you just did!"
I never played any Halflife but I am just and hour into the video and damn - that games' mechanics are amazing. Pros to whoever made it
I made it
@@mooncalf_4534 no
@@sydssolanumsamsys yes
11:37
''This is now become a box destroying sim''
If only matto knew about the too many crates mod !
Oh no Matt, OG Xen was MUCH worse than Black Mesa's.
I said they're both bad
It’s better and worse. But Black Mesa Xen is overall better.
@@AidGum Crowbar collective tried their best with what they're given, but you can't polish a turd. The only way to make Xen better is to make it shorter, but I guess Crowbar Collective really doesn't want to cut levels, and I understand that.
Black mesa team did good, ur just bad lmfao
- no autosave
- straight to hard mode
- doesn't use SPACE + CTRL at all
- doesn't use alt fire
- doesn't pay attention to obvious story events around him (the game has no cutscenes and tutorials for a reason)
- not noticing visual guidelines
and yet I can see how someone who's not familiar with the genre can fail to notice this things
>Ignores game mechanics, tries (and fails) to brute force every combat encounter like he's speedrunning, and blames devs for every one of his fuckups
Damn, stick to GTA
matt does have a point during the Gonarch fight. Since Black Mesa is not developing within goldsrc limitations, they couldve telegraphed that fight well.
Like we already know that those plant limbs could push it around, it wouldve been nice if you can actually see its body carapace break bit by bit, and have the last fight leaving it becoming just a mushy creature, and leave those limbs to finish it off through a quick cutscene or whatsoever.
I remember being on the stream near the very end of your playthrough and I have some thoughts.
I like playing older games. I completed half life 1 and 2 including the DLCs a few times and had a really fun time. I decided to try this Black Mesa remake and I had some mixed feelings until the late game. The last few chapters felt like such a drag. I know that many players disliked the Xen chapters (I actually enjoyed them in the original) and Black Mesa devs (half life fans) wanted to make them better, improve them. Well, to me it seems they overdid it. A lot. Yeah sure, the visual looked pretty nice, but I'm more of a gameplay kind of guy. It felt incredibly tedious to go through those maps. The chase scenes, the weird liquid puzzles, the CONVEYOR BELTS. It was just too much. Not saying they shouldn't be there at all, but playing those sections, I couldn't wait until they end. Like COME ONE GAME, I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS and the game there is another conveyor belt right around the corner :p
Through Interloper I checked like ten times the intended time of playthrough, my progress and time until I face the last boss. I kinda wished they allowed you to take different routes through Xen, one gameplay focused with the puzzles, one with just the main parts from the original, one with just the visuals and the boss (go there to take screenshots for the desktop wallpaper). To some extent I respect the effort they put to make the Xen more alive. And, yeah, it looks very nice. But it felt like such a chore to finish. Watching your stream I finally found someone I could relate with about the game, because I've only heard people praising it. Cheers :)
Your dad is proud of you. Always remember that, son, and get home soon - mom misses you.
I've played black mesa a lot and played hl1 quite a bit +the gearbox dlcs, and i do think that yours and matto's criticisms are valid, while matto's ones seem to be coming from not being used to the type of game and playing the game on really long sessions (theese obviously were multiple streams but non that many).
1. The game tends to encourage quick saving pretty much after any encounter wich is much more than the other games so that can drag down the experience.
2. While the xen sections specifically interloper are very long, in some parts do give me more satisfaction in ending them than hl1 xen, xen and gonarch's layer are good imo, xen gets you interested in the world and presents the tower in its background, it is needed for you to get used to the new gameplay change but if you don't.
Gonarch's layer is brutal in its start you will suffer during the boss fight, if you got used to it you're gonna be able to enjoy the entire section.
2.5. Interloper is pretty annoying and the lowest point of the game but it feels the devs trying to elaborate on to of valve's indea in the section, if they changed it in design it would not have been liked, this does not excuse the awful drawn out conveyor belts section it legit sucks, the tower gauntlet is another example of them wanting to maintain a part of the og but not knowing how to improve on it.
So the choice for xen is a bland relatively short section (which undermines the ending a bit imo)
Or the overly long at times really frustrating version which makes you hate the entire game at times. It just depends on what you can stomach more.
3. Nihilat is a strange piece it is the final boss, in the og he was really boring the only thing good it had for it was the teleport attack which ironically took you out of the fight, while remaking it crowbar trying to make it a grandiose final boss fight but went a bit overboard resulting in a bit of a mess. So still depends on taste.
4. A lot of people say that they made the game trying to make it look like cod or any other fps franchise, but going into it especially after playing hl2 that is the game they took as inspiration to make bm with less physics puzzles bet they were really trying not to make a generic fps. The problem is anything they changed was not gonna be taken well.
5. you shouldn't approach bm as hl1 remake but a different game retelling the same plot.
But if you want a hl1 total 1:1 remake valve already did it with hl:source which at its release caught a lot of flak before all the engine bugs it really wasn't worth buying a retexture of the same game, so crowbar made something different but it was pitched as a remake so a lot of people took it in a bad way.
Sorry for the paragraph but a tip to you if you played bm a long time ago like matto did try replaying it again with the mindset of: this is a completely new not hl1 remake game I've never played, and if you do, approach it like hl2 with a bit more quick saving, of course you don't have to but you might like more.
Side note: do not play like matto on hard difficulty you don't play halo 2 on legendaray in your first playtrough as an extreme example.
@@drewtincan Thank you for your advices to my son.
Phil's Proud Dad
@@drewtincan Yeah, starting the game I was a bit confused if it was meant to be a modernized, fleshed out substitution for the original or maybe more of a "fanfiction" sort of expansion for the base game. Now I think about it as the latter. I don't consider it as a game you should play instead of hl1, but something you should play after you get into the mechanics and lore of the original. I sort of wanted for it to be the former, because a lot of people are going to play something that look prettier, because they cannot stand the low-poly models etc. :p Something I cannot relate to.
Another off putting thing is that the game was made by fans and it FEELS that way. At least it felt like that to me. It wasn't really polished (and I'm polish), also the voice acting rubbed me the wrong way. For me, half life is that crunchy, overly-compressed audio. BM is too clean and, apart from that, I wasn't a fan of the scientists voices. Original G-MAN cannot be replaced, no matter how hard that one guy tried. But here's the thing: It's not meant to replace Half Life 1. It's more of a HALF LIFE 1 REIMAGINED by fans for fans. And I can respect that.
I agree with your points. Personally, at the end of the game, I would like to be a little underwhelmed than overly frustrated (2.5) :]
Fun fact: During my playthrough, I had Gonarch get stuck in the tunnel. I found it somewhat cute that they ported that classic glitch into the game (jk, I probably fiddled too much with the long jump in the tunnel and got so ahead in front of him that he bugged out - in the original it's unavoidable to get him stuck, it just happens :p)
I'm sure with the right attitude you can really enjoy most aspects of Black Mesa, but I guess it can be said about anything. I might give it a try sometime in the future. Cheers :)
@@d-_-b-Phil yeah you're right thank you for the response that is really what i meant say in my paragraph.
Also The gonarch bug could be 2 things 1. You hit a trigger from the secret passage making her do the claw animation or, 2. You just bugged the game in that case good job its really hard in the xen maps.
Bm is really like any other game anyone can enjoy it with the right mindset, except for raw hl:source that game is reserved for when they run out of syringes for lethal injection
Tô be totally honest, I played this (and the original) multiple times and haven't had the same problems or complaints.
I could feel a lack of attention but i think it is a challenge to stream, entertain an audience and play carefully.
This is, pragmatically speaking, one of the best games and it's ok you didn't like, maybe it's not for everyone.
The original xen sucks
most understanding hl meat rider
@@THEDOYLER ??
God, Matt sucks at this! And that’s why I watched all 2 hours of it and I’ll do it again!!
The person who said to Matto that he should start with Black Mesa is definitely crazy, black mesa is only when you are a weird nerd that like HL (Me in that case), he definitely should have played the original on GoldSrc first.
This game is great and Xen is amazing. Unfortunately, and I don't mean to be mean, but Matto just sucks. I think he suffers from tunnel vision from too much speedrunning. The fact he constantly runs into barnacles despite them being obvious shows too much haste. I mean even in GTA he suffers with simple tasks that aren't in speedrunning, like scaring those dudes in the helicopter in the recent chaos video. The game literally told him how to scare them in other ways besides speed and he missed it. I think if he went just a little slower and focused when it comes to things he doesn't yet understand, he'd be so much better at playing games.
I agree, everytime I watch him play other games it makes me just say "Dude, the game told you how to do it", but at the same time I'm not mad or anything it just weirds me out
there was a boss fight where he could have shot crystals with the laser to explode, to help kill the boss, the whole chat was telling him to do it, and he refused and wouldnt do it. He was trying to hard to be annoyed.
Sort of, i'm seeing your point but I think he sees these hints and uses one thing he saw to progress. To use your example he probably saw "Go fast to scare Rocko" and went fast while reading chat thinking it would work
Matto is going to hate the future when they replace all the side walks with conveyor belts
That thumbnail is E P I C! I love seeing you having fun in the beginning, just like I did when I first played Black Mesa. :)
Though I must admit that the Xen Levels could be improved, gameplay wise, it doesn't mean Xen is necessarily bad. I think your idea for how Xen could be fixed works as well, and maybe the Gonarch fight's first phase could've been a little bit shorter. And, though, I perfectly understand how you've come this far, and I know for a fact you drastically improved over the course of the game, oneself must be vigilant and mobile. I know that the original game, Half-Life, was made in 1998 and how it was built around the player taking damage over time, but that doesn't mean you have to stand in front of the enemy whilst she charges at you, the long jump exists there so you can dodge quickly. I, myself, am not a big fan of Xen, but only due to the interloper level and its series of endless puzzles, and I agree with you on how they should either make the puzzles non-existent, or allow you a sense of progress. I also agree that Xen could've been shorter, and there was no worry of having to rush it. I mean, imagine Xen from the original Half Life, but the gameplay, puzzles, and graphics are top tier whilst remaining within that 1 hour mark (maybe, at most, 2 hours.) I don't doubt that the creators behind Black Mesa could've accomplished that without it feeling rushed like the original game. And, though this version of Xen has barely any sense of accomplishment and is honestly frustrating at times, at least it isn't the botched, rushed version presented in the original 1998 release by Valve. The new Xen improves a lot one where the old Xen failed, but fails when it comes to a sense of accomplishment and progression. I am not trying to come across as a blundering idiot telling you, who made quite the accomplishment to "get good", nor am I calling the new Xen the worst thing in the world. But, in my opinion at least which you can interpret as right or wrong in your opinion, your frustrations in Xen were both a mix of poor game design during some areas, such at interloper, and your lack of understanding when it came to the long jump module. I do hope that Xen or Black Mesa hasn't ruined your view on the Half Life franchise, and I pray you'll find yourself able to play the sequels and maybe even the original. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your life, happy travels.
One of my favourite games of all time, glad to see you experiencing it.
I love how every time Matto dies to a tough enemy or has trouble with an enemy, As soon as he kills them he just says “bitch.” then keeps going
Been watching you for a 2-3 years now I believe, maybe a little more. But I have to say some of my favorite content from you is the 1-4 hour long videos of you trying new games. Last year while my wife and I were in the hospital waiting for her to go into labor I watched your watch dog 1-2 videos. The days following when we had some time to breath and relax I watched your max Payne videos.
Oh wow, never thought that footage would see the light of day.
man this got so cringe towards the end, i struggle to see how people have this much trouble with Xen in the remake lmao
but i guess that's what happens when you play a remake without knowing the original
Bruh honestly idk if he'd even get to Xen in the original before getting incredibly frustrated. The original has all of the bullshit he's complaining about in spades throughout the game. Like, I kinda get where he's coming from on some stuff, but also he's playing like trash. Dude plays like he's only ever played an FPS game once before lmao.
@@non-shockingtopics7563 i feel like part of the frustration would also come from trying to impress an audience via streaming, half life is not a game you get a lot out of by rushing through it and paying little attention
@@BoogieBrando True, the real draw is usually in the environmental details and story for me. If that's not your fancy you probably would be getting frustrated a lot.
Your comments about puzzle games are absolutely correct too ! Portal and Portal 2 are amazing puzzle games because of that
I've been really enjoying these long video playthroughs of other games. This and the saints row one are amazing and I've got the two watchdog videos on my list now. I'd love more content like this. I'd like to see you play something from the metro series but am excited in general for more game playthroughs!
Valuable comments, and I totally agree if I forget my unhealthy passion for the Half Life franchise, but you have to remember that this is essentially a remake of Half Life 1, sure they could have done a lot more but in a way I like how they kept true to the original, apart from Xen onwards, thats all 70% new. Now I wanna see you play Half Life 2 please :)
Also Remember that Half Life 2 is an original Valve version and not a Fan remake. It's much better than even the good parts of Black Mesa and never comes close to the levels of pain that New Xen introduced
Hopefully he’ll do some Chaos Half-Life. Getting into somewhat jolly territory 🔥🔥🔥
Not the content I personally want from matto but those videos were great
@@DragonSniperThree11 Matto cannot handle the heat from ALL of those Jolly has played and hardened himself with. That's why Jolly will never play Cruelty Squad, it's too tame for his acquired tastes.
Deadwater > Jolly
@@MRMOON-jk1cs Deadwater < Jolly
@@vitalsignscritical Jolly is just a boring and basic "Oh I'm so cool because I'm indifferent and calm" meanwhile deadwater are 2 or 3 guys which are star wars nerds that make pure chaos
34:30 the magic Ferris wheel takes no prisoners
I'm not even a gamer and I definitely didn't spend 15 minutes shooting rockets on the first part of the Gonarch fight💀💀 wtf?? I was on the "Black Mesa" difficulty
Hes just bad lmao
@@de_dan fr🤣🤣
04:12 - "42! That's a significant number."
I feel like honored right now.
Thank You Matto!
Will your first Fan Gadget be a coffee mug now? Make sure it has the 42 on front of it! 😄💚
It seems so! 🤭
have you ever heard of douglas adams?
Always fun to watch Matt play something that isnt GTA
14:22 I didn't expect Half-Life Echoes in here, wow
15:13 He did sound a little bit distraught
2:06:20 "It groaned when I did that so I assume it was a good thing" 2:06:34 "There's no indication that i'm doing damage to it" What about the missiles they're giving you in all those pods, too?
btw the first clip with the among us dude, thats from a big project thats being worked on called half life 2: 21st century edition
yes !
hey ur that dude who wanted turbo to make dragostea din tei eurobeat
I'm still watching, but I need to say:
Firstly, you need to keep in mind that these two games differ in the engine used to make them, and it's not about the age of one but rather the feel.
Secondly, Black Mesa is a remake from the scratch, even a huge part from the original game "The Zen Dimension" was entirely redone since it was somewhat of a chore in the original.
Point is, both are good, but it depends whether you want to experience the Original game, or try something more modernized.
it doesnt matter which one you play if you are playing it to understand the story since both games do it without any problems but as a personal preference i choose original over black mesa since black mesa done some changes to enemies that make them more annoying/frustrating and remove the thinking element in some fights (half life had text saying Run Think Shoot Live in the back of the cd box) like marines being able to shoot while moving and throwing grenades more frequently forcing you to run around without cover and no breathing space turning the game into something in the lines of doom (doom isnt bad btw dont take me wrong), original game didnt do that and gave you time to think and make decisions behind boxes, walls etc
still they are both great
Matt seems to think that Black Mesa is the worst game ever
@@lobaandrade7172 Wow, I didn't know Matt was THIS based