Tetsuo Time

Maybe Black Mesa, that was a joke ha ha fat chance! Is what the lyrics in 2007's Portal said. Well, it turns out not too much of a fat chance because Black Mesa has been finally released! This long in the making total conversion mod of the original Half-Life in the Source engine which debuted with Half-Life 2 and Vampire The Masquerde Bloodlines has been highly anticipated by many people on the internet including myself. Tonight I will talk some about what I liked, what I didn't like and how I feel the game faired as a whole.
( Details Inside... )


Overall even with the few crashes and bugs I've had with the game my impression of it is very high and I look forward to the final chapters being released which are supposed to be improved and expanded upon so I look forward to that. Also, it would be great with the the steam greenlight stuff if the game would be run through QA and compiled for Mac. But at least I got to play it in the meantime and had a good time. 

{   View more screenshots by me of Black Mesa running in WINE on the Mac.   }

I was going to put this in my other post I'm writing but it's so long it needs its own post. I've been dissatisfied with the Bit Torrent Transmission's UI lately. I mean it's 95% OK and there isn't anything that I like better for Bit Torrent on the Mac. But it could stand some improvement on Tiger. I was thinking that if it was a brushed metal window the bottom of the window would look better.

( There's only one problem.... )

There's something that bugs me when it comes to console advocates. Whenever someone mentions mods as a benefit of personal computer gaming they sometimes say that mods are coming to consoles so there goes one reason for there being PC games. Well I hate to break it to you but where do you think those mods are made? Where do you think all the level, graphics, sound, etc. editors and programming environments are? Where do you think games are developed on in the first place? It seems to me like those people think that mods are simply things that magically show up online for you to download. At the very least there needs to be PC versions of games so that those mods can be made and rapidly prototyped. I almost feel like making a voice message to be played on the PC Gamer podcast talking about this!

That's not even mentioning that people like me dislike the idea of being forced to play ALL games with a gamepad. There are certain controls that are best for certain games like mouse and keyboard for first and third person shooters and I refuse to give that up.

A certain person at tuaw said that PC gaming came from a time when people didn't know what personal computers where good for so they wanted for them to do everything. But at the very least if people didn't expect more out of their computers would we have the good video cards with 3D capabilities that we do today or faster CPUs that are both now being put to more than just games? Gaming and entertainment is what drives personal computer innovation past what is needed for web browsing and word processing. If all a person needs a computer for is word processing and web surfing they could get a Pentium PC or a G4 or below Mac. Those companies also put their experience making PC graphics cards towards all the new consoles. All of them feature ATI or nvidia graphics nowadays.

They say the new GPUs in the new iMac are actually a rebranded nvidia GeForce 8800GTS mobile part. People certainly don't need those for word processing right? Those are the best mobile gaming GPUs they have to offer. But people still complain and say that it's not good for gaming.

There's something that bugs me when it comes to console advocates. Whenever someone mentions mods as a benefit of personal computer gaming they sometimes say that mods are coming to consoles so there goes one reason for there being PC games. Well I hate to break it to you but where do you think those mods are made? Where do you think all the level, graphics, sound, etc. editors and programming environments are? Where do you think games are developed on in the first place? It seems to me like those people think that mods are simply things that magically show up online for you to download. At the very least there needs to be PC versions of games so that those mods can be made and rapidly prototyped. I almost feel like making a voice message to be played on the PC Gamer podcast talking about this!

That's not even mentioning that people like me dislike the idea of being forced to play ALL games with a gamepad. There are certain controls that are best for certain games like mouse and keyboard for first and third person shooters and I refuse to give that up.

A certain person at tuaw said that PC gaming came from a time when people didn't know what personal computers where good for so they wanted for them to do everything. But at the very least if people didn't expect more out of their computers would we have the good video cards with 3D capabilities that we do today or faster CPUs that are both now being put to more than just games? Gaming and entertainment is what drives personal computer innovation past what is needed for web browsing and word processing. If all a person needs a computer for is word processing and web surfing they could get a Pentium PC or a G4 or below Mac. Those companies also put their experience making PC graphics cards towards all the new consoles. All of them feature ATI or nvidia graphics nowadays.

They say the new GPUs in the new iMac are actually a rebranded nvidia GeForce 8800GTS mobile part. People certainly don't need those for word processing right? Those are the best mobile gaming GPUs they have to offer. But people still complain and say that it's not good for gaming.

Just a quicky here. I just wanted to point out that the one who made the steampunk keyboard is at it again this time making a matching monitor to go with it. This looks even more matching than the other steampunk monitor that I posted a link to here a while back. I have to admit it looks very shiny. Too bad he is running a plane jane windows classic desktop on it though.

Someone made a type of Mac desktop computer using an TiBook that had a non working screen. I think what they make looks pretty good.. the only thing that I would suggest they change\improve is making it so you can't see how the sides are attached (the screws). Otherwise I think it looks great. I'd like to see how it looks all setup.

The japanese custom Mac maker has done it again this time making a "Mac Pro Nano". Here's my favorite picture of it. The first mod that I heard of from him was the "Power Mac G5 Cube" which was a mod of the G4 cube put into a PowerMac G5 inspired case. The next one that I heard from him was the Mac Pro Mini which combines a standard Mac Mini with a bigger desktop hard drive. I think he does a real good job doing Mac Pro\PowerMac G5 inspired cases. However I don't like how they tend to have indentations on the side. Like on the "PowerMac G5 Cube" case the bottom is flush the way it should be but the top has an indentation which kind of ruins the look for me. The "Mac Pro Nano" has indentations on both top and bottom.

If you look on his site you'll see he has quite a few modded Macs that he has made.
Apple should be taking note with some of them... some of them would make good cases for a mid-range Mac tower. At the very least I can imagine stuffing intel hardware into something similar to those and making an official looking "hackintosh". That may be an interesting project for one to take on.

Speaking of Hackintoshes the update is for the previous entry about the "Open Computer\OpenMac". It seems Gizmodo is trying to find out if "Pystar" is a for real, legit company. They said they tried to go to the address that they had listed and didn't find anything pystar related there. Nor have they been able to get a hold of anyone at Pystar on the phone it seems. Does this mean Pystar is shady? I don't know.. at this point it seems it may be a good idea to hold off buying anything from them until it's confirmed.

Someone made a type of Mac desktop computer using an TiBook that had a non working screen. I think what they make looks pretty good.. the only thing that I would suggest they change\improve is making it so you can't see how the sides are attached (the screws). Otherwise I think it looks great. I'd like to see how it looks all setup.

The japanese custom Mac maker has done it again this time making a "Mac Pro Nano". Here's my favorite picture of it. The first mod that I heard of from him was the "Power Mac G5 Cube" which was a mod of the G4 cube put into a PowerMac G5 inspired case. The next one that I heard from him was the Mac Pro Mini which combines a standard Mac Mini with a bigger desktop hard drive. I think he does a real good job doing Mac Pro\PowerMac G5 inspired cases. However I don't like how they tend to have indentations on the side. Like on the "PowerMac G5 Cube" case the bottom is flush the way it should be but the top has an indentation which kind of ruins the look for me. The "Mac Pro Nano" has indentations on both top and bottom.

If you look on his site you'll see he has quite a few modded Macs that he has made.
Apple should be taking note with some of them... some of them would make good cases for a mid-range Mac tower. At the very least I can imagine stuffing intel hardware into something similar to those and making an official looking "hackintosh". That may be an interesting project for one to take on.

Speaking of Hackintoshes the update is for the previous entry about the "Open Computer\OpenMac". It seems Gizmodo is trying to find out if "Pystar" is a for real, legit company. They said they tried to go to the address that they had listed and didn't find anything pystar related there. Nor have they been able to get a hold of anyone at Pystar on the phone it seems. Does this mean Pystar is shady? I don't know.. at this point it seems it may be a good idea to hold off buying anything from them until it's confirmed.

I just saw this and i like it. It doesn't look exactly like the weapon it's based on but it's still cool and I think they did a good job combining those two toys and making it look good. The toy still shoots nerf ammo to boot. The only thing is you probably wouldn't want to hit your friends with the chainsaw part even if it's a toy chainsaw. Then again it may be so weak that you can stop it with your finger without it even pinching said finger. ;) I would hope so since it's just a toy.

( A couple of pictures inside )

More picture including the construction of it and comments by other people here.

One cool thing about games on the computer is how the community makes mods for them some of those mods called "TC" or total conversions are whole new games (usually free) made using a commercial game as its engine. The only problem is sometimes TCs are more than the average indie developer to chew and a lot of them don't get released but when they do it's pretty cool. There are also now indie games that are standalone games because certain companies have released the source code to their older engines.

Today I was seeing that the MOD DB has a top mods of the year awards for 2007 released and here's but a couple that have caught my eye:

The Real World: This is a mod for one of my favorite games "Max Payne" which makes it into a Matrix game. It's kind of like well there is already Path of Neo but it'd be interesting to see another developers take and unlike that game this game might possibly be able to be played on the Mac because it's a TC for Max Payne which has a Mac version out.

The official site for it is here and you can see a lot of nice screenshots there.

This indie game "Zombie Crisis" is interesting in an old school kind of way. I'm assuming it uses eDuke32 for its engine. I would use texture filtering if that's the case I prefer that over the alternative any day.

I'm not the biggest Stargate fan out there but this looks interesting to me. It reminds me of the episode where Teal'c gets put into a VR game and they had scenes that looks just like a game.

There are plenty of other mods, TCs and indie games there and at other sites too if you take a look. Half-Life 2 is especially getting a lot of good TCs\Mods.

One cool thing about games on the computer is how the community makes mods for them some of those mods called "TC" or total conversions are whole new games (usually free) made using a commercial game as its engine. The only problem is sometimes TCs are more than the average indie developer to chew and a lot of them don't get released but when they do it's pretty cool. There are also now indie games that are standalone games because certain companies have released the source code to their older engines.

Today I was seeing that the MOD DB has a top mods of the year awards for 2007 released and here's but a couple that have caught my eye:

The Real World: This is a mod for one of my favorite games "Max Payne" which makes it into a Matrix game. It's kind of like well there is already Path of Neo but it'd be interesting to see another developers take and unlike that game this game might possibly be able to be played on the Mac because it's a TC for Max Payne which has a Mac version out.

The official site for it is here and you can see a lot of nice screenshots there.

This indie game "Zombie Crisis" is interesting in an old school kind of way. I'm assuming it uses eDuke32 for its engine. I would use texture filtering if that's the case I prefer that over the alternative any day.

I'm not the biggest Stargate fan out there but this looks interesting to me. It reminds me of the episode where Teal'c gets put into a VR game and they had scenes that looks just like a game.

There are plenty of other mods, TCs and indie games there and at other sites too if you take a look. Half-Life 2 is especially getting a lot of good TCs\Mods.