1.17.2009

Adventures in City 17

I've been playing Half-Life 2 lately. When the game first came out a few years ago, my computer wasn't up to the task of displaying the graphics, or even loading levels in an un-agrivating amount of time, so I only played probably the first 25% of the game. Now that I've got my brother's pc, which is a few years newer than mine was, I'm able to enjoy the full experience. Lately, though, I've been stuck where I had to defend myself in a static location from waves of bad guys for several minutes, and surviving the whole encounter wasn't going well. I found a walk-through video on YouTube, which suggested a few tweaks to my strategy, and managed to survive by using that knowledge and the technique of frequent saving so I'd have to replay less if/when I died. Luckily you can save anywhere/anytime in HL2. Getting through that, and a similar game mechanic to a really great story scene was really exciting, and in the next level I'm starting squad combat, with several human allies, not just Alex or Dog.

Even though it's been a while since the initial excitement for HL2 died down, I'm really enjoying my play experience; the same way I enjoyed playing and completing Portal, and watching old episoded of Lost online. I may not be with the crowd, but I'm enjoying myself just the same, in my own time.

1 comment:

Deg said...

It's a really great game; I'm glad you're enjoying it. Episode Two has adaptive difficulty, so you probably won't run into those sticking points as much.