Wasting Time

I'm waiting for the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed demo to download on the Xbox, and in the meantime I've been playing Half-Life 2: Episode 1. This is the third time that I've had to start it from the beginning due to unfortunate circumstances (and poor planning). I began playing it after purchasing The Orange Box when I still lived in NC. I wasn't too pleased with the first hour or two but I thought it was just starting to get interesting, (after the fight with the ant-lion queen), when I had to pack up for my move to Canada.

Once in Canada and without my framerate-destroying desktop, (shipping it up here was a much longer process than it should have been), I found myself hungry for games but without a machine capable of playing them. Fortunately the Half-Life 2 engine scales wonderfully to lower-spec systems so I loaded up Steam on my laptop and installed Episode 1. What the heck, right? It only meant re-playing through an hour or so. I loaded the game, dialed down the graphics and away I went.

Of course, no sooner than I get into playing, my boxes show up from NC. The motherboard in my desktop had been mortally injured en-route so I took a day off from gaming to pick up a new motherboard as well as a new hard drive because I'm a compulsive bastard and dove into my computer's guts. After reinstalling Windows, drivers, etc., my computer was blowing away games faster than ever. I couldn't help myself but in re-installing my games it reignited my interest and I began to re-play through several of them, pushing Episode 1 to the back of my mind.

That's where Half-Life 2: Episode 1 remained until today as I mulled over what I should do while waiting for my download to complete. I sat at my computer, loaded up Steam and proceeded to play Episode 1 again, from the beginning, for the third time. Could I have just played it on the laptop? Yeah, sure, but why play with the graphics turned down when my desktop can handle running it with 5000x antialiasing and anisotrophic filtering?

Let me tell you, the first time I played the first hour or so of that game was boring and repetitive, the second time was downright tedious. This time I should have been getting paid for that shit because it felt like work. I've heard that the rest of Episode 1 and 2 are great... if that's measured comparatively to the beginning, then I'm ready to believe it because that first section in the citadel doesn't exactly set a high mark for the rest of the series to hurdle.

I guess I'll have to find out later, because my demo is done downloading and I'm out.

There's a lot of shooting energy balls into energy collectors.

Surprisingly, grabbing and launching combine soldiers can get old, and it doesn't take long.