Black Mesa is the perfect way to get into Half-Life before Alyx

Upon its release in 1998, Half-Life instantly became my favorite game of all time. That wasn’t saying much, really, since we’d only just set up our first family computer, and I’d barely started playing video games. But history has proven my hot take to be a pretty solid one — Half-Life’s blend of first-person shooting and narrative storytelling was incredibly influential, and it went on to spawn a series that stokes near-unparalleled hype and reverence to this day. Just witness how Valve still isn’t able to make enough $1,000 headsets to meet demand for Half-Life: Alyx, which is coming out in a couple of weeks.

Half-Life 2, though, I never really got on with. By the time it came out, I was a student with nothing but an Apple iBook to my...

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