August 31st, 2025

A lot more Black Mesa today. I wanna say I'm most of the way through the game now but I honestly don't know if that's true. Surface Tension feels like the penultimate chapter of the mid-game but there's still all of Xen after the Lambda Complex and that's been expanded. The game itself is like, idk 97% of the original in terms of quality so far. The bad parts are mostly just ladders, which are for some reason extremely fucking weird. I don't remember them being this weird when I played HL2 a while ago, and even with the anniversary update I think that's still a much older version of the Source engine. The marines are also surprisingly brutal, there are a lot of set pieces that can just obliterate you, but you can always just save and try again. None of these encounters really feel "unfair," just too hard, if that makes sense. Also the RPG homing sucks. I think this is also the case in HL2, but the difference there is that gunships aren't insanely lethal. Idk maybe it's just because I'm playing on hard but trying to deal with the second helicopter makes me wanna move on to something else, though I'll probably keep playing and muscle on through.