I just want to let you all know that, as of typing this, I have finished Black Mesa, and my emotional state can best be described as a series of very long keymashes. The entirety of this game is SO DANG GOOD and I enjoyed it immensely and I'm sad it's over. But the Xen chapters especially are incredible.

But, anyway, let's get on with this- after all, we still have a good four chapters until the end! So we'll start off here, with this dead guy,

Lying in the mouth of a cave, overlooking some sort of nebula, with that island with the spire on it in the distance, glowing ominously. And all things considered? There are worse places to die.

But moving on,

This switch here doesn't look... human. And considering that what it did was raise a big lilypad thing out of the water for me to jump across, I don't think it is human. The first sign of the vorts, perhaps?

Either way, it was an important switch, lifting up that lilypad. It let me get across the lake without being murdered to death by some giant alien murder sharks.

Here's a screenshot I took when I happened to look up while underwater, shortly before I was murdered to death by some giant alien murder sharks.

I just think the sky looks neat is all.

I still think it's ridiculous that these big blue crystals recharge your suit

by shooting a laser at you.

Not much later we come across our first encounter with...

Underwater barnacles. As if the normal ones that hang from the ceiling and try to strangle you weren't bad enough, now I gotta avoid them while swimming! It's a good thing, I guess, that Gordon's got some weapons that work underwater.

(As a side note, the underwater barnacles are also new to BM!)

Well, this pond here looks like it would be a nice place to go for a swim...

If the water weren't full of giant alien murder sharks! There were like, seven of them in there! I mean, I killed them, but sheesh! I think there were like. Two ichthyosaurs in HL's Xen. By which I mean the entirety of it. Not just the first chapter. I might be wrong about that number, but it DEFINITELY wasn't this many.

But anyway.

I know there aren't antlions in HL1/BM, and you don't get to enter the antlion caves until HL2 Ep.2, but this tunnel reminds me of the antlion caves.

Heeeey... a multileveled, star shaped island... that looks familiar!

While most of BM's Xen has been completely new maps up to this point, that island is one from HL's Xen. But, for a little context, if I remember correctly, it takes about ten minutes, if that, to get to it from your spawn point in HL's Xen, whereas here in BM, I was playing for... Oh, an hour or two? Before I even catch a glimpse of the island.

That is a lot of underwater barnacles!

What a scenic view as we approach the star island...

Once there, we find another dead guy on one of the arms of the star...

And I just want to point out, it has been... a challenge to get here so far. So assuming this guy wasn't teleported in near here, assuming he came from the same location as Gordon... he made it far. He has my respect.

And again... there are worse places to die than here.

But moving on...

Hm, that looks an awful lot like a door!

But I'll admit, this is one of the few places where I think it shows that BM is... not exactly canon. You see, in HL2, the Combine uses forcefields that look a lot like this. And while it's implied that the Combine did have some dealings with the Vortigaunts and/or the Nihilanth prior to HL, it's even more heavily implied that they actually got the forcefield technology from Aperture Science (ie, the hard light bridges), not from the vorts. (Other implications of this would be the combine's turrets having a lot of the same behaviors/sounds as Aperture's, their Overwatch Soldiers having similar designs as the turrets, the AR2's alt fire being the energy pellets from Portal 1, and GLaDOS having a line about being the only thing standing between Chell and "them," implying that the Combine has mounted some sort of offensive against Aperture at some point in the past.) So I guess while they could have maybe gotten some stuff from the vortigaunts, I just don't think this is one of them...

Oh well, it's still an excellent game, forcefields aside!

But anyway. Getting by the door,

That is one giant crystal.

And that is most definitely not earth technology!

That is a LOT of really big crystals!

Gordon, you really need to stop pressing buttons that you don't know what they do! You got lucky, this time, all it did is make some crystals fire some lasers to make some sort of portal, but you might not be so fortunate the next time!

Buttons aside, though, Freeman's not so fortunate this time around anyway, because the portal breaks down. But, being the smart science man he is, Gordon decides he can fix some alien tech he knows nothing about.

Or, who knows, maybe he does know about it? After all, all these orange crystals are the same kind of stuff he was studying in the very beginning of the game, that caused the resonance cascade!

Oh, also,

The orange crystals can shoot lasers too.

Buuuuut, long jumping across the laser beam chasm, we find...

An open door! And beyond that door...

This looks suspiciously like an elevator!

Where does it go, though? Find out next time when I inevitably come back to keep talking about one of my most favorite games, even though there are only like! Two people reading this!

Well, I'm having fun writing it, anyway, so I guess that's the important part. :P