FREEMAN'S MIND: EPISODE 55

(Downloadable copy will be up later)

Here's the latest episode of Freeman's Mind, now in HD! This episode is about average, it has a lot of the hallway wandering Half-Life is known for, but is broken up with the action. I didn't remember which way to go when I played this again, and could have easily broken about 2-3 episode into 5-6 pointless ones if I recorded this the first time through. I would argue the game even steers you towards the wrong objective way too early, leaving you lost. While old school FPSs can have a lot going for them, I've never been a fan of maze-like level design that tries to trap you. Also for the time being, I'm discontinuing releasing new videos on blip.tv, but will continue to leave the old ones up there. The reason being is ever since Maker Studios bought them out (shortly after my joining blip), the performance of the site has kind of gone downhill for me, so for now, future episodes will just be coming out on Youtube.

Thanks again to everyone who donated, you're the direct reason this episode is in HD right now. I actually didn't wait until any of the parts to arrive since I wanted to get it out ASAP and it absolutely was every bit of a pain in the ass to process as I anticipated on my system. The next episodes won't be released until I get the computer parts, but I can keep working on them in low definition and swap it out later. I'm still afraid to go to 1080, though I'm looking into possible options for that in the future.

Also, as of the time of this posting, I THINK I have responded to everyone who has donated money, which has come to roughly ~850 people since the fundraiser started. I still have yet to respond to most other normal emails, but I'll get to them as soon as I can.

More videos coming! In HD!

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Good job Ross. Keep it up

Yay! Another FM episode! I have to leave for work in about 15 minutes so I'm not going to be able to get to subtitles until I get back home from work at least. Subtitles may not be available until tomorrow at least. For those waiting with bated breath for it, I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to wait until after the test.

For now, I have my Freeman's Mind shirt on and I'm going to watch this sucker.

I forgot to normalize the audio to this episode, so it's going to be too quiet. I'm going to nuke the original link soon and replace it, otherwise it will be identical.

Sounds fine to me but I'm not an audiophile.

Great episode, though! I love how you addressed the ammo situation, too. Made the situation feel a bit more real.

Wonder if Freeman will start to notice that the HECU have cleared out (you won't see any more in the game--alive, anyway).

Audio sound fine to me.

Yeah, I can hear it just fine, but it is just a tad quiet...

Good job though, I went 6 hours my first playthrough of that level before I figured out where those pumps were... lol

Good job though, I went 6 hours my first playthrough of that level before I figured out where those pumps were... lol

Really? 6 hours? I mean lambda sector is big, but it's not THAT big. The walls are also colour coded where they lead you to objectives in most areas, throughout Black Mesa, which is introduced in the opening scene.

And I never paid attention to those, especially since they always ended up leading me to enemies, usually when I was running dangerously low on ammo... I went EVERYWHERE else first, then I looked to see if I needed to do other things elsewhere, so I did EVERYTHING elsewhere, then came back. (I also got lost several times)

That was amazing...

I especially loved the little throwback to the early episodes about the aliens spawning inside the building itself... XD

Wow.

I just wanna say thanks for taking the time to send out an email. Good episode. Was a little sad he didn't make a ghostbusters reference and "blue energy is better than green energy" sounded too "unscieney" (no, I don't mean unscientific, my word is much more fun) to me but the transdimensional smoke alarm rant more than made up for it. I'm wondering, have you decided yet whether to include Shepard yelling, "get back here you big orange fuck!" or not?

Now I can see amazing, beautiful, cool, source engine, shader graphics of Half-Life in 720p HD. Great! I can really see every detail of most advanced technologies of a game that came out in 1998 (16 years ago). As Ross pointed out "it doesn't even need a 3D card to run". Don't get me wrong on this, I'm not saying that I hate FM in HD, it looks pretty good actually, but fact is that this game in all of it glory isn't even optimized for HD. I realize it's HL:Source that made it look "a lot better" (ragdoll physics, shading...). Sorry, for this little rant.

I always play Half-Life in original GoldSrc personally.

Was a little sad he didn't make a ghostbusters reference

Haha, same here. I was 100% sure that Ross will make some Ghostbusters reference... For example: something about not crossing the beams. Or that Freeman will think that those aliens are ghosts in reality and Black Mesa is some Ghostbusters Laboratory.

Because Black Mesa could be built on an ancient indian burial grounds. I mean, this IS a New Mexico, right?

Hm...

Episode 37: "One of them got on the intercom and started chanting this crazy ritual. Next thing i know, we get beings from another dimension teleporting in like we're giving away free t-shirts"

This episode: Trans-dimensional? Space is not another dimension.

Intentional twist, or oversight?

In any case, great episode as usual!

Was a little sad he didn't make a ghostbusters reference

Haha, same here. I was 100% sure that Ross will make some Ghostbusters reference... For example: something about not crossing the beams. Or that Freeman will think that those aliens are ghosts in reality and Black Mesa is some Ghostbusters Laboratory.

Because Black Mesa could be built on an ancient indian burial grounds. I mean, this IS a New Mexico, right?

Pfft, that joke was just way too obvious...

Hm...

Episode 37: "One of them got on the intercom and started chanting this crazy ritual. Next thing i know, we get beings from another dimension teleporting in like we're giving away free t-shirts"

 

This episode: Trans-dimensional? Space is not another dimension.

 

Intentional twist, or oversight?

 

In any case, great episode as usual!

Nice catch.

Anyways, I agree. A great episode, as usual. I especially enjoyed the rant about cross-dimensional detectors, because pretty much a moment before he started, I thought how they were even detecting that. Perfect timing .

As to HD: It does look neat, but doesn't seem to add much for me, because I think it runs a little sluggish on my old PC. So I'm probably going to stick to 480p. But otherwise, thanks for taking up with the pain of endless recording just to please us fans . And I certainly hope those SSDs will make it easier for you.

On a side note, apparently YouTube now supports ads on the HTML5 viewer. At least I got one, and I was on HTML5. This was the first video I noticed to have this and it certainly wasn't possible some days ago.

One, wonderful as always, Ross.

Two, while HD is a bit better, I think it's somewhat pointless unless you decide against not doing Black Mesa.

However, I wouldn't mind an official version of Freeman's Mind redone in Black Mesa.

Wow. I'm amazed.

For those of us that resent what Youtube does to your view counter, will you be using another service like Blip?