I bet it is a release date for a demo of the Beta version of Black Mesa.

I will download it.

Well I guess there must be something in all that 2012 apocalypse shit after all.

YAY! :D

Yeahhhhhhhhhh!

Thing it, it's not a remake per se, it's more of a reimagination: It's following the same general story and locations of Half-Life, but with impr... Well certainly a different level design and such.

amazing after years of waiting

That's freaking amazing! I can't believe it. It isn't happening. I hope it's no Duke Nukem Forever. :)

Edit: That's a third game that's now on my to-play list. City of Heroes has priority, because it's going to close. The other is SWTOR, which I want to try not that it's free up to level 15 (with full F2P in the future).

I wonder if they'll pull a Valve and not finish all the episodes either.

To be quite honest, I've lost all my excitement over this project. Too many delays and the fanbois over at the Valve forums were getting increasingly dickish in defending this. And now just being released in "episodes". Who really cares anymore? Valve will probably be releasing a new version of Source soon and this mod will be broken.

Do i need half life 2 or is it a stand alone game?

Agreed. If it is an episode release my guess it won't go anywhere near the xen stuff

Which is true. The announcement says that the first release will go up to the Lambda Core section, which is basically the level that includes the transition to Xen. Based on that, we're getting a pretty sizeable portion of the game.

It's about not taking my gaming PC, not internet access.

But surely you have a laptop that runs Half-Life 2 to some satisfactory degree. Even my 2008 budget laptop manages HL2 at medium settings at 30fps, and I would expect that Black Mesa will exact similar demands on your hardware.
As I understand it, you need a game that provides the Source SDK with it. That's basically any Valve Source Engine game that is not the standalone Half-Life 2 Deathmatch or the Portal demo.

Of course, it's good and possible that Valve will choose to distribute this with a standalone Source licence.

squeeeee!!!!