Tag Archives: halflife

Half-Life 2 Episode 1: One Paragraph Review

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Half-Life 2 Episode 2

I was going to write a review, but instead I’m going to quote from an email Miles sent me, because he puts it better than I ever could:

“It cracks me up how schizophrenic it is between apocalyptic horror and tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment. On the one hand: Alien slavers colonize the earth! They’re sterilizing humanity, draining the ocean for minerals, and infesting our ecosystem with hostile alien species. On the other hand: everyone of any significance to the story is a Physics PhD! SUPEREMPOWERED NERDS DUKE IT OUT FOR THE FATE OF HUMANITY! You spend the entire game running around with a 22-year-old babe who’s a self-taught physicist, roboticist, electrical engineer, sniper, and alien-technology hacker; she’s a crack shot with rifle, pistol, and shotgun alike; she climbs walls like a parkour master, and high-kicks zombies so hard that their heads come off!”

And a bonus paragraph from a letter that Miles is “mentally composing to Gabe Newell about ep2,” complaining about the death of CENSORED.

“I mean, I know that you’re Valve and hl2 is a Dark Catalogue of Human Nightmares like war, zombies, Orwellian fascism, environmental collapse, and extinction, but get real: The player has spent nearly the entire game tear-assing around the Bavarian forest in a chopped muscle-car with his electrical-engineer / commando / babe sidekick crawling across the hood to ride shotgun, with a literal keg of whup-ass hooked to the back bumper, earning the raucous cheers of the men when he uses said keg to dispatch looming alien tanks (with great dispatch, even.) It’s the height of insensitivity to cap this all off with, ‘and then two monsters came out of nowhere and killed CENSORED.’”

Portal: One Paragraph Review

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Portal

Portal is absolutely good. The only criticism I have is that it’s really short. That said, in the commentary track, the developers mention that they’re just starting to explore this type of game, so it seems likely that we’ll see more in the future. The gameplay is nice and simple. You wake up in a research facility and are put through a series of test chambers, which gradually introduce you to tougher puzzles involving the portal gun, which fires a hole in space-time that lets you instantly step from Point A to Point B. At first your puzzles involve things like dropping boxes on switches, but by the higher levels you are routinely challenged with timing and jumping puzzles. It’s difficult, but not frustratingly so, and beating the game feels like a real accomplishment. Of course, the real draw is the sense of style that Valve brings to all their games. The AI who guides you through the facility is a genius parody of corporate legalese, and she gets more twisted as the game progresses until you find yourself attempting odd things just to hear what her reaction will be. The conclusion is great, and ends with a hilarious song played over the credits by Jonathan Coulton which will be running through your head for days. This game would be worth buying on its own, and coming bundled with four other games in the Orange Box makes it practically a crime not to pick it up.

Snow and Gaming

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Well, it was snowing the morning, which was cool right up until the point where I had to bike to work. In addition to being cold and wet, I had snow blowing in my eyes, so that I couldn’t see. However, the end result of this is that I bought some cool sunglasses at Bi-Mart. They’re yellow! Now I will be able to see in the snow! Hooray!

I’m all angsty about the election. I won’t get into it, since I’m sick of hearing everyone’s opinions about it.

Tonight is the first weekly Geek Gaming Night! Excellent! Urn emailed all his geeks and we’re all meeting at an unnamed location, where we will proceed to beat the tar out of one another and then go home and consider joining secret terrorist organizations… oh wait, that’s Fight Club… We’ll be playing Quake (and Half Life and Tribes and others).

Portfolio

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I got my portfolio all updated today. The itch to redesign all my personal sites has been hitting me again lately. I found a good design online and pretty much stole it wholesale for my portfolio site. I would feel bad about it on any other site, but since all the content on that site is designs that I’ve done, I don’t mind that the framework is based on another site. It’s funny how much of design is outright copying. You put your own twist on it, and call it an homage, and you’re good to go! Anyway, check it out when you get a chance. I also reworked this site a little. Nothing major, I just put all the entries from 1999 in a subdirectory to keep things cleaner.

Portfolio v1

We’ve been watching a lot of movies lately. I saw American Pie, which was really funny, but also really hard to watch. Some of the scenes just make you cringe. I rented Iron Giant and ended up keeping it an extra night so I could watch it with Annie. It’s amazing. What a great movie. It’s really not a kid’s movie, and besides, nothing tops a 100-foot-tall robot pretending to be Superman. I’m also going to see Supernova this weekend with my brother Sean. We both think it’ll be fun, but just in case it sucks we want to go with someone we can taunt the movie with.

I’m broke again. I think it’s my own fault, and not the bank’s, but after new year’s, I’m not sure. Either way, it means no buying a new coat or visiting Fry’s until payday. sigh.

Before I went broke, though, I thought I had lots of money and bought the expansion pack for Half-Life, and it’s great! It’s almost as good a game as the original. I’m totally into it right now, and it’s going to be hard to not neglect my schoolwork in favor of playing it.