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Am woken up by this morning by the sound of rain thundering on the roof. Look outside - can't see the trees for the rain, which is whipping at severe angles from the wind.
Decide, no, not going to class today, will listen to recording of lecture, would be silly to go out in a storm that bad when I'm just getting over a very nasty cold. Drift in bed a little longer, am tired and have been struggling to cope with life for the last few days, and had seriously horrible nightmares again last night.
Note that, just around the time it's too late for me to make my class, the sun comes out...
Stil, clouds are returning, it's still really windy, and really cold. (Hail last night was the biggest I've ever personally seen.) I think I'm probably stlil better off.
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I just finished Half-Life 2. For bandwidth quota reasons, I can't download/install Episode 1 for three more days, which is probably for the best, given I have an exam on Friday and all.
I originally got Half-Life 2 (well, the Orange Box) because playing Left 4 Dead - initially on Chas's computer/Steam account - had given me a taste for FPS (first person shooter) games. Before, I hadn't ever got into them. But first I was lured by killing zombies, and then I just liked it.
So I bought Left 4 Dead and the Orange Box on Steam. The Orange Box was a fairly easy decision, because, you see, the Orange Box contains Portal, and I love Portal, and I wanted at last to own it. Portal on its own was $20; the Orange Box was $30, and would also give me Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2, and Team Fortress 2 (which I will probably never, ever play, because I don't really want to or care, but the rest of the Orange Box was worth the price - and it being Steam, it's not like there was even wasted media involved, because it's just sitting on my Steam list of undownloaded, uninstalled games).
I also bought Plants Vs Zombies and Crayon Physics Deluxe, but those are for another review.
What I expected of Half-Life 2 was a good FPS that had a plot and a physics engine. Which it is.
What I didn't expect is that it would quite as much fun as it was. See, the thing is, my previous experience with FPSes - L4D included - is that they're reasonably mindless bad-guy-shooting... which can be entertaining, and a good way to burn off stress, but all it is from there is more of that. Different numbers of bad guys, from different places, but... you shoot stuff, that's it.
Whereas Half-Life 2 has puzzles to solve. It was an awesome feeling when I had to look carefully at what was around me to find a solution to an obstacle of some kind. And the combat is incredibly varied - different battles involve different tactical choices, using cover is a genuine necessity, the different weapons have uses rather than just being out-of-ammo backups for your One Good Weapon. In different sections you have different *ways* of fighting available, and what works in some places doesn't work in others... it's just really really cool.
I now intend:
- to buy and play the original Half-Life
- to install and play the episodes
- to play through Half-Life 2 again on a higher difficulty setting, and take the gnome with me
Longer term:
- to find out what the hell is going on and why there are vortigaunts everywhere
But that's all for after my exam. Because I have an exam on Friday, and I want to finish this unit as strongly as I was going before Everything Fell Apart; thereafter I have to keep up with this semester (expected to be easier than last semester, because I'm not doing a 12-point history unit and therefore don't have several hundred pages of reading to do every week), and, uh, finish my essays from last semester. (Hooray for Special Consideration.)Current Mood: tense Current Music: Dean cooking
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