Otherworldly. Atmosphere. Kino

forbidden alien sandwich
also this

This. BM Xen was more engagint to play but it felt absolutely worng in the context of HL.
Original Xen was genuinely alien environment. BM Xen is generic "sci-fi jungle" you can find on thousand uncreative concept arts.

>Shephard is still listening to this
youtu.be/vtZZU5y9HMs

You forgot one word. Unfinished.
Valve themselves said Xen wasn't finished and finalised due to deadline.

Black Mesa is so much better, and i wont tolerate backtalk

That's what always gets me about how people complain about OG Xen. I get that first-person platforming isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it was a meaningful part of the experience. When you arrived at Xen, it wasn't just the visuals or level design that changed, but the gameplay as well. It all came together to imprint on you that you had, in fact, arrived at an alien world where your old reasoning might not apply. BM very specifically tried to make Xen feel more in line with the rest of the game, and by doing so took away that alien feeling. I would probably not have cared at all about the visual changes if they had preserved the gameplay, but as it stands I felt like I was just going through regular old caves and fantasy-inspired forests. Nothing about it felt alien to me

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It's hardly unheard of for a creation (whether a video game or a movie or whatever) to be great in spite of its creator. Look at Star Wars: had George Lucas got what he originally wanted, it would have sucked. Xen might be unfinished in Valve's mind, but it still delivered an experience that made HL a better game for having it. Would it still have been as good with a more complete Xen? We'll never know, since we don't live in that timeline

[ungodly noises]

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To be fair the attempt at the vortagaunt uprising and the alien factory was well done but it gets bogged down hard just because of how frustrating it becomes towards the end.

I'll give the team credit for some of the factory bits, sure. But at that point it had already been dragging on for a while, and it kept dragging on both during and after the factory. It's hard to appreciate the good parts when you're starting to become numb to the whole experience

Yeah I know, it's pretty unfortunate either way because even though I don't like the beginning sections of Xen it's clear they put a fuckton of work and effort into it. They had their own vision of what Xen was but it just didn't feel like Xen to me for the most part which is a shame because everything before that is a pretty fucking solid remake of the original game and captures that spirit well. I have a feeling when they got to Xen they just want to be revolutionary and inject their own novel ideas into it rather than trying to recreate the spirit of the original levels.

Most soulful room in the whole game

Big day today, Freeman.