What Even Is This?

Black Mesa - 41 - Nihilanth

Welcome to the second to last Black Mesa commentary chapter! And here we are,

In the final battle against the the Nihilanth! And boy, it's gotten a huge makeover since Half-Life.

The Half-Life Nihilanth battle was fairly simple (once you knew how to actually do damage, anyway.) there were three orange crystals way up high in the cavern that restored the Nihilanth's health. You had to destroy them in order to do damage. Meanwhile, the Nihilanth only had three attacks: he could shoot balls of electricity at you, spawn in controllers or vortigaunts to attack you, and he could shoot a teleport ball at you. If it hit you, you would be teleported to one of three other rooms, each with its own set of enemies, but after you cleared the enemies out the first time, they didn't respawn, so those rooms were safe.

Black Mesa Nihilanth doesn't have any of those attacks, they're all new. The arena is a lot simpler, too- HL's arena had all these jagged spikes sticking out of the ground you could take cover behind, as well as a number of bounce pads you could use to get to higher ledges on the walls of the arena. It also had shallow water for the entire floor, presumably to reduce fall damage, as HL's long jump module didn't do that automatically.

BM's arena is basically just a large, flat open expanse with a handful of rocks and crystals dotted around. It's a lot easier to navigate, but. Well. A little less... alien? And the lack of the bounce pads and ledges actually removes one of the most iconic parts of the battle, I think. But we'll get to that later.

Like I mentioned, the Nihilanth's attacks in BM are all new. He doesn't go all out at first, though, they come in phases.

The first thing he does is this sort of. Falling star type attack? These streaks of light that come down from above and explode. It's pretty easy to avoid.

As for our first plan of attack,