Hey, look, it's the final chapter of my Black Mesa commentary! And it's ending on the 42nd chapter, my favorite number. What a coincidence!
Anyway, this parr's relatively short, just 'cuz there's not a whole lot left in the game.
With the Nihilanth defeated, it starts spinning midair faster and faster, and we get... sucked up, I guess? Or we lose gravity, or something. We just start going up.
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And then, as we rise, one more teleportation...
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This death sequence is a little different from Half-Life, where the Nihilanth just sort of. Started shooting out a ton of those green teleporter balls, and one of them hits you. But it's not really a big difference, so I guess it doesn't matter.
The next part, the chapter "Endgame," is... kinda hard to describe through screenshots, just because of all the moving? The original version Was a bit different, but... well. Here, here's a video, with both endings. First is the noncanon "declining" ending, and then the canon "accepting" ending.
And, well, just because, here's the original version, too. (The Nihilanth battle ends at about 2:35, if you wanted to skip it.)
I have to say, I really, really like how close Black Mesa kept it to the original, while still making it feel a lot more like how the G-Man does things in the later games, with the fixed/moving camera angle and... idk, semitransparent projection of himself? And weird walking around in defiance of the laws of space? Like, I feel like BM's is what Half-Life's would have been, just at the time of development, HL's devs weren't entirely sure what they were doing with the G-Man, or how exactly to do it.
The only thing I really have to say that's funny about his dialogue is the whole line, "as for the suit, I think you've earned it," when, in fact, at the start of HL2, you don't have the suit, and he's a big fat liar.
Otherwise, I just want to acknowledge that 1) the G-Man is a stalker who has been watching us the entire time we've been in Black Mesa (I think I even pointed him out a few times), and 2) he is SUCH a Deus Ex Machina, and he's like that MULTIPLE TIMES, but I think he's proof that trope-y things, when done right, can be really good. He's such a cool plot element later on.
At any rate, here we are,
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The end of Black Mesa, with Gordon Freeman hired and awaiting his assignment of Half-Life 2!
Speaking of which, I have a question for those of you who are actually reading this: does anyone, you know, want me to continue this with HL2? Because I've had a lot of fun writing this, so if anyone would actually read my rambling about HL2, I'd be more than happy to do more of it.
But anyway, here we are at the end, and I don't really have anything else to say. So, I guess, uh, I'll see you around? Maybe? Next time I get around to posting something? I dunno man, my schedule is wild.
