A modder has restored Half-Life's "Surface Tension" chapter in the game's remake mod Black Mesa, ostensibly creating a mod-within-a-mod.
Surface Tension Uncut, which is demonstrated in the 53 minute-long video above, expands on the gameplay of Black Mesa. According to the modder, whose online username is the unfortunate TextFAMGUY1, his intention in creating this uncut version was to fix the "rushed and hurried" sense of the section in Black Mesa.
"They basically dropped the entire penultimate map of Surface Tension, HASTILY," he writes on the Black Mesa Source forums. "The Garg scene was sloppy and poorly done, and the transition between C2A5F and C2A5G was jarring and didn't provide the war with its satisfying conclusion. It has been said many times (though unconfirmed as far as I know), that the mapper left during the creation of this chapter, leaving the dev team to quickly pick up the pieces, and to me, the evidence for this premise is the maps themselves."
He will now continue on in his project by attacking the "On A Rail" sequence. In Black Mesa the scene is shortened from the original version in Half-Life; However, he writes, "...it was too short. The original 'OaR' was...10 maps in length, and in Black Mesa it is three maps in length. If we take into account, however, the Black Mesa's maps are generally about roughly twice as long as HL's maps were, you still have four maps worth of cut content, and that's with a fairly generous estimate."
Check out Surface Tension Uncut here.
