Recent reviews by Junkman Cicero

Not really much I can say about Black Mesa that hasn't already been said better by others. It's essentially a modernised version of the Half-Life campaign with some cool additions and side things and a heavily reconfigured Xen campaign that took them years to finalise. Perfect for Half-Life fans. Recommended don't play on low-end PCs or laptops lest you get your CPU microwaved from overworking the graphics card.

I had a lot of fun playing this game. Comparing this to GTA is like comparing Johnny Gat to Trevor Phillips - Trev is a sober portrayal of what the kind of life shown in these games can do to a person that's designed to elicit responses of disgust, whereas Johnny is the complete antithesis of that - he revels in the carnage. He's out to enjoy himself, and we should be too.

I haven't had the chance to play SR2 yet (or SR1 for that matter, but since that was an exclusive title I don't think we're likely to see a PC port any time soon) but that didn't really hinder anything, and I think that was probably the point. The plot's done by the numbers - after a meteoric rise to success, you're swiftly beaten back down again by a new adversary and you find yourself (literally) falling from great heights - straight into Steelport, where you and your team must essentially do what you did in the last two games and build yourselves back up to face off the Syndicate. You start off with one crib and slowly take over parts of the city through completing objectives, meeting new characters along the way that unlock more side quests - with more rewards.

When you're not shooting, driving or walking, you'll be using your phone a lot. Homies can be contacted through the phone (though for some reason cheapyd never comes anymore after I called him once, which I read on the wiki is because of a glitch) for support, and you can also use it to access story missions, financing, the map, and side quests such as assassinations and vehicle repo. It's a lot of fun as a game but its existence doesn't really feel justified beyond 'this is popular, now we need a sequel'.

You know, I used to have a very negative opinion of this game. And why not? John Carmack had once again stripped away a core piece of what made those early id games so great and left a perfectly functional game that lacked an element of soul. In this case however, it was rather more drastic - the game had been built entirely around multiplayer and the singleplayer had been tacked on as an afterthought. As someone who mostly plays games for their story, this in and of itself was the ultimate heresy.
And then I actually played the game with a friend. And you know what? It's actually really fun jumping around deathmatch arenas with friends, fragging opponents and not having to worry about pressing buttons or listening through dialogue or how much I'll get set back if I get fragged myself. I really enjoyed playing it and as much as I dislike what Carmack did, I can't bring myself to hate what he created. So I heartily recommend this game to anyone looking for a classic multiplayer experience that's not too fussed about singleplayer campaigns.

As much as I enjoy the game, I feel I cannot in good conscious recommend that anybody purchase this game on principle as the entire game feels like Valve snubbing Turtle Rock Studios. The way Valve has treated Turtle Rock Studios is appalling, and Left 4 Dead 2 is the ultimate slap in the face after the many changes they forced upon the up-and-coming company, not merely content with renaming them "Valve South", they bring out their own sequel to the game just months after the original with little in the way of additions to the game beyond different protagonists essentially making it a DLC in a game's skin, and still worse than that they release the entire original game as a free DLC (Let me repeat that. A free DLC. I can't imagine anything more disrespectful towards a developer than saying "we think so little of your game that we're going to make our own game and give away free copies of your game with our game as an afterthought.") - I don't think I have to explain to you why buying the original should be important to the team, they made it after all and they deserve something back for that and Valve releasing their entire game for free as a DLC to a game they made instead is just utterly disgusting. They took all of the elements that made for great gameplay once they'd found out what they needed to and then threw the studio out to the wolves. But worst of all, when Turtle Rock finally escaped the grasp of these bloodsucking molluscs they didn't even have the decency to give them back the title which they created, forcing them to fall back on a similar but copyright-friendly alternative, the only upside of which is that it could be read as a middle finger back to them. L4D2 is perfect for completionists and people who want more of the same but don't care where they get it from, but if you have any respect for ethical developer values, I implore any fans of the original Left 4 Dead to follow the development of the true successor, Turtle Rock's upcoming Back 4 Blood. But most importantly, if you want to play Left 4 Dead 1, buy that game. Don't play it in Left 4 Dead 2.

Sit down a moment. Let me tell you a story.

Quake 2 was the first nail in the coffin for the demise of classic id (though some would argue that Tom Hall's departure prior to Doom 1 deserves that dubious accolate). Quake 1 was the crowning glory for id Tech's dream team of John Romero and John Carmack, updating the Doom format into a new dimension both literally (Quake was the first genuine "3D" shooter) and in-game, taking place in a series of brown castles with a wonderfully subversive soundtrack from Trent Reznor and a delightfully foreboding atmosphere courtesy of the elements borrowed from the Lovecraft mythos.

Quake would turn out to be the final id game that John Romero would work on. Romero predicted, correctly as it now transpires, that there would come a time when they were no longer in the forefront of the gaming industry and if they were to make any headway they should focus on storytelling and gameplay. Carmack on the other hand, staunch in his view that "story in a game is like a story in a porn movie, it's expected to be there but it's not that important", refused to budge. Romero parted ways with the group, and this is where it becomes incresingly obvious that the two Johns desperately needed each other. Romero, no longer having to compromise his "vision", was free to create whatever game he chose; unfortunately without Carmack's competence in prouction and having to rely on eager but inexperienced fans, Daikatana was the result - an overhyped, underwhelming mess that would destroy his reputation and kill any chance of his working mainstream ever again. Despite this failure, his creation would have unexpected benefits - a side branch of his newly-founded company, Ion Storm, would go on to create two other games that would become memorable for much better reasons - Warren Spector's conspiracy roleplay shooter Deus Ex, and Tom Hall's sadly all-too-often overlooked future noir Anachronox.

Then on the other hand we come to this, the other side of the story. Quake 2 is a perfectly respectable game on its own merits - solid gameplay, decent graphics for its time, my only complaint was how much grief it gave me trying to get the blasted thing to run on my laptop made almost two decades later (so much for futureproofing) - but without Romero's flair for the adventurous it comes across as rather pedestrian in comparison to previous id outings. This is a sequel in name only - the only things carried across from its illustrious predecessor is the gunplay and Trent Reznor's voice clips for the protagonist's gutteral utterances - "Hnn! Ugh! Gah!" Reznor's unique soundtrack here is replaced with a bog-standard heavy rock set. The tense and foreboding Lovecraftian scapes are done away with, and instead our deep-throated player avatar is running and gunning in a series of industrial mazes fighting off the cyborg nemesis the Strogg, the new villains of the piece to replace the eldritch abominations of its illustrious predecessor. All in all the game is bland and with very little unique identity to differentiate from other games of the era. I like to liken Daikatana and Quake 2, John Romero and John Carmack, to two opposing ingredients in a sandwich that compliment each other, Romero's spice and dynamic presence providing the adrenaline rush and Carmack keeping it in check and delivering in a solid experience from it. This game shows its lack of that spice well, like its primary antagonists: well built, but comprised of soulless machinery and clearly dying skin. It's the cucumber to Romero's chili.

It was a trend that would get worse over time; Quake 3: Arena, a very obvious cash-in attempt at the popularity of the multiplayer-based Unreal Tournament, had no singleplayer to speak of aside from a series of deathmatch maps against a number of bots, mostly comprising of previous protagonists (though it does give you a John Carmack skin for you to find creative ways of fragging, which is no bad thing in my books); Rage, whilst generally receiving positive feedback, was criticised for a lack of storytelling; and Doom 3, a feeble imitation of its namesake, relied on dark corridors and game mechanics borrowed from Valve's Half-Life, but would be outdone graphically by the follow-up Half-Life 2, which featured much more realistic character models that didn't look like wet playdough (though it did attempt to rectify the lack of storytelling of previous games, with dubious degrees of success). The final nail in the coffin for Quake, though not directly created by id, was Raven Software's Quake 4, the game that further blurred Quake's identity by essentially being what Quake 1 had strived to be anything but - a Doom clone. John Carmack would ultimately leave id after id's new parent company would try to muscle him to stop working on VR support for existing titles and instead focus on VR support for their new titles.

TL;DR: bland but okay. Graphics are dated but passable. Be sure to have a source port ready if it doesn't load at the first try - and a second source port if that doesn't work either.

Me: I want a refund.
Valve: Now free to play!
Me: Son of a

Good

Can't recommend it yet but stay tuned. It's got potential.

No amount of patching or improving will ever make this anything more than a polished turd that isn't worth the installation space. It is very badly broken and literally all of the assets are ripped from other Source games. There is no intensity to it, I don't feel the drive to do anything within the game beyond try to kill Major Wilson.

Where to even begin? from the outset the HUD is completely broken, no matter what setting I try the crosshair is always off to the side. There's a seemingly inexhaustable supply of objects that you logically should be able to mount yet cannot no matter how hard you try. The drive to Black Mesa is pointless and boring, the interaction with the coworkers even more so.

The Resonance Cascade is over with in less than five seconds and all of a sudden boom everything goes wrong! The creatures, and then the military, appear way too suddenly within the game.

I just didn't feel compelled to finish the game like with so many other mods I've played, even Half-Life: Before. Heck, I prefer Prospekt to this! I don't care about Major Wilson. His story has no relevance, and the team that are telling it clearly don't get how to make it properly.

I freaking love this game! It almost perfectly recaptures the atmosphere of Half-Life 2 in an original setting - specifically, a Combine outpost on an island involved in some underhand business that you, the former Combine soldier nicknamed "Perseus" directed by "Minerva", the mysterious overseer of your onslaught through the base from her secret underground hideout. Personally, I reckon that Minerva is actually LM, the original head of Black Mesa.
Why? Simple.
1) The Greek Gods reference. Oh wait, that's Cave Johnson. Hmm, then again, that could be something else...
2) "I played a large part in mankind's discovery of this, although few would like to admit it."
3) https://hylobatidae.org/minerva/archive_4.shtml
4) "Please don't take it as some residual aspect of my own purported humanity", which indicates some Combine involvement at some point - I could speculate, but I won't.
5) SHE HAS AN UNDERGROUND BASE?
But anyway, it's a fun game with a great storyline and I hope (though I don't expect) Out of Time recieves a swift release.