Half-Life Total Conversion ‘Black Mesa’ Released

Need a game to play this weekend? Thanks to the valiant efforts of some serious fans of the original Half-Life, you have one: Black Mesa. As mentioned in a post we made a couple of weeks ago, Black Mesa is a complete recreation of the game that made Valve famous, using a recent version of the Source engine. You can expect much-improved visuals and audio, more realistic physics and some tweaks that the developers felt were necessary to improve the game.

At the moment, the game is only complete up to the Xen level, but the developers have said there’s at least 8 or 10 gameplay hours in the current inception. The download weighs in at 3.29GB and can be downloaded by a variety of hosts or via BitTorrent. Also free as a download is the game’s soundtrack, although there’s an option to support the composer if you should choose to (oddly, there’s no donate option for the dev team itself).

As we discovered earlier this week, Black Mesa has seen success through Steam’s Greenlight program, so it will be hitting the game service soon. Just how soon, we’re not sure, so if you’re dying to play it, you might as well download it via the normal method right now.

If you do give the game a go, please relay your thoughts in the comment thread!