Back to the Mesa
As much as I still love gaming on Xbox and Playstation consoles, once in a while I still wish I had a gaming PC. Like many PC gamers—at least those of us of a certain vintage—the first big narrative FPS I remember playing was Half-Life, which was released in 1998. Of course there were games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom that came before it, but I would hardly call them narrative. The basic premise of those early shooters was “if it moves, kill it.” Half-Life, by contrast, was built as a direct response to Doom and the clones that followed. In Half-Life, you play Dr. Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist who works at an underground lab called Black Mesa Research Facility. When a science experiment goes terribly wrong, a portal to another dimension is opened and you (as Gordon) have to fight through hordes of alien baddies to get to the surface. As a side note, I think Half-Life still has one of the best intro sequences of any game ever. In no uncertain terms, Half-Life changed the way video games were made. In 2004, Valve did it again when they released Half-Life 2, which eclipsed its predecessor in every conceivable way, including the size and scope, as well as the overall narrative. Twenty-years later, many people still regard Half-Life 2 as one of the best video games ever made, myself included.
Last week, Nvidia announced Half-Life 2 RTX which is a community-sourced reimagining of Half-Life 2, using Nvidia’s Omniverse platform and RTX ray tracing render pipeline. The level of visual detail and fidelity they’ve achieved, especially when viewed alongside the original game, is incredible. A few years ago, another team built a remake of the first Half-Life called Black Mesa, which looked terrific, but it’s nowhere near the level of detail of Half-Life 2 RTX. Actually, if you want to watch a terrific documentary on the building of the Black Mesa edition of Half-Life, check out the Noclip film Black Mesa: The 16-Year Project to Remake Half-Life. They also did one on a cancelled Half-Life sequel called Ravenholm as well as another really great film on the legacy of the games in the Half-Life universe and what may still be in the works.
Loved both of these, recently saw the RTX version ad and would love to play it again, maybe. Also, the Portal games were insanely fun