If you're the kind of person who likes to see how the sausage is made - and by sausage I mean stellar Half-Life remake Black Mesa - then there's a bit of a treat in store. Developer Crowbar Collective has just launched the Xen Museum, gathering a host of playable levels and other assorted material from all across Black Mesa's development.

More specifically, Xen Museum is (unsurprisingly) focussed on the Xen portion of Black Mesa, which saw Crowbar Collective designing a whole series of new stages to replace the lacklustre - and oft-criticised - alien planet sequence that closes out Valve's original Half-Life.

Crowbar Collective spent five years completing Black Mesa's version of Xen, generating a mountain of concept art, plans, and work-in-progress levels along the way. Some of that is showcased in Xen Museum, an official mod that feature a total of 56 playable stages.

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Black Mesa, the stellar remake of the original Half-Life, has just plopped its previously teased Definitive Edition update, intended to further improve the Version 1.0 release, into public beta.

Developed by Crowbar Collective, Black Mesa - which started out as a fan project before shifting to a Valve-sanctioned commercial release - finally got its full launch back in February, five years after entering Steam early access and a whopping 16 years after development began.

Writing at the time of Black Mesa's release, Crowbar described Version 1.0 as "the best, most polished, and most fun version of the game yet", but had already announced plans to revisit certain parts of the experience post-launch for polishing and improvement.

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On this day, 20 years ago, Half-Life was released. Makes you feel old, doesn't it? It's because you are old, you wrinkler. November 19th, 1998 - what were you doing then?

Anyway forget that, there's a new Half-Life game in development. No not Half-Life 3, although if Half-Life were 30 years old I could have written "Half-Life 30 today", which for a moment reads as "Half-Life 3", which is really exciting, isn't it?

The new game - or part of a game, really - is Xen, the final piece and pi ce de r sistance of Half-Life remake Black Mesa. But Black Mesa's Xen is much more than a simple remake of Half-Life's Xen.

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