The Video Game Revue

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

Spoiler Free

Initially I wasn't all that hyped about the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 1 because I had never really finished the original Half-Life 2, and release of Episode 1 was stirring up all kinds of well-deserved guilt over that. (Normally "Episode I" refers to "Star Wars: Episode I," but for the scope of this aricle I will "Episode 1" to refer to "Half-Life 2: Episode 1." I hope that makes some kind of sense to you.) Now if you're any kind of gamer at all, right now you're asking yourself what kind of idiot I am that I never finished Half-Life 2--until last night. I can actually explain this in a way that should satisfy you, and in the process I will explain how the fact that I had never really finished Half-Life 2 before was a blessing in disguise.

Flash back to around March 2003 when the first Half-Life 2 footage from E3 hit the net. I saw footage of the gravity gun, car wreckage being thrown around by rocket explosions from helicopters hovering overhead, and those freaky walker things (yes, "Striders," although I didn't know they had such a name at the time), and I kid you not, I was so moved that my eyes welled up. Half-Life 2 was, to me, the single most exciting new game to come out since Super Mario World, or some such thing. I waited on pins and needles for this game for a long while.

Now Half-Life 2 is the kind of game that people such as myself often use as an excuse to buy a new computer. The only problem was that I wasn't really flush for cash and couldn't afford a proper new computer, but I had a pretty decent computer at work, and what I could afford was a Radeon 9600 graphics card for $160. Sure, I would rather have had a Radeon 9800, but the point is that I didn't have much money. So what I ended up doing was sneaking the new video card into my computer at work (I had sort of a Junior Sys Admin type position there in addition to being a programmer, so I could open up a box to work on it without drawing too much attention to myself) and not-so-discreetly installing Half-Life 2 since at the time, at that job, we were allowed to have games on our computers for playing during lunch and after work.

It took a whole lunch hour just to install Half-Life 2 and on the first day that I had it (the Collector's Edition, even), I was at the office playing literally from 6 pm until 9 pm. My girlfriend (soon to be wife), whom I was living with at the time, was surprisingly understanding. So over a series of lunch hours, I continued to work my way through Half-Life 2, eventually making it as far as maybe 80% through the final level, Dark Matter. That's how far I made it on my first play-through.

Now for reasons that I don't clearly recall, I never quite played through the last 15 minutes of the game. Part of it was simply that I didn't realise how close I was to actually finishing Half-Life 2; I didn't consult any walk-throughs, and as far as I knew I still needed another couple of hours to polish it off. Another part of it was that I was playing other games like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Battlefield Vietnam at work with other people on the LAN, so I didn't always make time for Half-Life 2. Shameful I know. The major event that prevented me from properly finishing it, though, was that I finally did scrape together enough money for a cheap gaming PC (oxymoron?) that was better than what I had at work, and I yanked the graphics card out of my work computer to use at home. This was also in preparation for my imminent depature from my job--I was preparing to quit.

If I had been a bit more on the ball, I could have copied my save games over from work, of course. But I had this shiny new PC and that part of me that said "let's just play it again from the start" won out. A big part of this decision, now that I think about it, was that I had been playing through the game on "Easy" difficulty at work which wasn't challenging enough, and I wanted to tackle it on "Normal." I made it to Ravenholm and part-way through that level and got tired of Half-Life 2, since I really don't like the Ravenholm level. And if you follow this blog at all, you know that I go through new games at an alarming rate, so it was bound to happen that I was going to get pulled away from Half-Life 2 sooner than later. It held out really well, all things considered (although that's not surprising when you consider that Half-Life 2 fucking rocks.)

Somewhere between then and this week, I found the time to finish Ravenholm, Highway 17, and a couple of other chapters. So when I realised that Episode 1 was already out and I should finish Half-Life 2 before getting it, I was already on Anti-Citizen One. Several hours of gametime was enough to get me right through to the ending of the game. Fun times.

The reason that I say that this was a blessing in disguise is that the story of Half-Life 2--particularly its epic conclusion--is completely fresh in my mind as I plod through Episode 1, which I'm nearly half-way done already and which I think has been excellently fun so far. I won't say anything about the ending of HL2 or the story of Episode 1 as per my "spoiler free" promise, but it should be safe to say that Episode 1 picks up right where HL2 leaves off, and having just replayed Dark Matter has helped me to make the transition.

I can see how some people wouldn't like Episode 1 because it features some relatively frustrating challenges, and it seems to me to be less action-oriented than the original Half-Life 2. Of course, Half-Life in general features a lot of puzzle solving and certain action-shy or frustrating levels, so I think that any serious Half-Life fan will not find that to be a problem here at all. Personally, I'm loving the new Half-Life 2 stuff, although it hasn't been quite as exciting as the original game.

Now I just need to find the time to replay through the original Half-Life (which I've owned for years), or perhaps (preferably?) Half-Life: Source. Shamefully enough, I've never finished the original Half-Life, but that is a curse that I hope to break. :)

posted by Parappa @ 4:28 PM