Black Mesa: Blue Shift releases its fourth chapter

Half-Life: Blue Shift was a 2001 spin-off developed by Gearbox that put players into the regulation boots of Barney Calhoun, a security guard at the Black Mesa Research Facility and friend of Gordon Freeman. Following the original Half-Life's modder-made remake as Black Mesa, another group of modders set to work remaking Blue Shift using Black Mesa's resources.

The HECU Collective has been releasing Black Mesa: Blue Shift chapter by chapter, and just put out Chapter 4: Captive Freight, which you can see in the profesh-looking trailer above. A whole lot of things go boom. With this complete, there are only four more chapters of Blue Shift left to go.

Captive Freight is the largest chapter of Blue Shift to be remade so far, and its release is accompanied by improvements for the previous chapters including bug fixes, balance tweaks (the crowbar's slower but hits harder, while the vortigaunts' grenade trajectory has been altered), and improvements to performance, AI navigation, audio, visual guidance, models, animations, and textures, among other things.

You can download Black Mesa: Blue Shift from Black Mesa's Steam Workshop, as well as its ModDB page. It's currently in the running for ModDB's Mod of the Year 2022, alongside other popular mods like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, Mental Omega, Unification and Ultimate Apocalypse for Dawn of War: Soulstorm, and Kingdoms of Arda, a Middle-earth total conversion for Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. You can cast your vote at ModDB.

PRODUCTS

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.