Those of you who bet that Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (or Half-Life 3) would come out before the Black Mesa Source mod team finally completed their Source-engine update of the original 1998 Half-Life, get ready to pay up. The Black Mesa Source homepage is now counting down to September 14th (that’s four days before Borderlands 2 and six days before Torchlight 2). But not so fast — you might get off on a technicality.
You see, this isn’t quite all of it. There’s a forum post that accompanies the countdown which I can’t get to because all y’all killed the site, but second-hand sources say that this will be a partial release that includes the first 14 out of 18 chapters, ending just before Gordon (1998 spoiler!) goes to the alien homeworld/dimension Xen. So it’s not yet complete, but it seems like the BMS team is doing us a favor: we could play this and remember the original Half-Life without the annoying first-person platformer parts!
I hope Valve sees fit to host this mod on Steam, or that BMS uses a torrent distribution system, because otherwise very few of us will actually play this on September 14th due to the inevitable crushing rush of people trying to download it from some po-dunk server. I mean, this thing’s practically the Duke Nukem Forever of mods in terms of how long it’s been in the works — hopefully it’ll be received a bit better, though. What say you? Are you ready to revisit Black Mesa, or will you wait for it to be completely finished so you can do it all in one go?