Damn you freshers and your flu...

..so, while I'm laid up in bed, I may as well tell you what I've been playing inbetween dosing myself up with meds and consuming fruit and water at a rate that would scare a bulimic elephant.

I removed a small amount of dust from my laptop, including one impressively huge dustbunny from my GPU fan. For reasons as yet unexplained by modern science, now my laptop seems to be able to run without stuttering nearly as much but now quiesces at a much higher temperature than normal.

Violations to laws of thermodynamics aside, I immediately seized on the opportunity to replay Halflife 2 and Episode 1. So glad I put the extra gig of RAM in my laptop, now I can run them on high detail at 1024x768. Not to mention with the all-important shaders set to high (as far as I know, not only does this make forcefields in HL2 look very spiffy, this is the setting for Portal that makes your portals all nice and seethroughable, otherwise they're just two very large unsubtle monochrome ellipsoids)

I played Episode 1 first, mainly because it's shorter. Maybe my installation is glitchy, but this time through Alyx didn't seem to be quite as capable of interestingly kicking zombie arse. By this I mean her fighting animations didn't seem to be triggering as much as I thought they should, or maybe I was looking for them too often and the game just can't pull them off that much. That aside, I was rather disappointed to see her just run into zombies while constantly plugging away at them with her machine pistol, rather than pull her amazing CQC stuff that Valve are so proud of.
Despite this, Episode 1 is pretty much in all ways a paragon of all gaming virtues (except length, but hooray more episodes are due to come out). It's a visual feast and is pure entertainment from start to finish. Yes, I know like all Halflife games it seems a bit crudely blocked, this time around having:

Citadel puzzle level -> scary dark underground tunnel zombie fighting -> yet more city 17 fighting -> hospital -> train station -> YET ANOTHER FUCKING CLIFFHANGER

But hey, at least they're giving us what we've always wanted, which is variety. Hell, the variety in just one of these sections is fantastic, and a game which crams all this into 5ish hours of gameplay while maintaining both your attention levels and a capable NPC sidekick throughout is incredible. I'm both excited and scared for Episode 2 to come out, because although I want the next game more than anything I'm always terrified that every new Valve game is going to be the one where they drop the ball / jump the shark / verb the noun.

Halflife 2 itself has still got it, although I have to honest here and say that I find the vehicle sections unnecessarily long. In the original Halflife, "On a Rail" was good but I wouldn't want it to be any longer, or do it twice. I feel the buggy sequence is about the right length and varied enough to make it interesting. Crossing the railway bridge is one of my favourite moments in the game. However the boat sequence feels a lot more repetitive...although it does have that awesome physics moment where an entire chimney falls into the canal and shatters. And Black Mesa East + Gravity Gun are your reward for completing it. Whereas your reward for completing the buggy section is ant lions, gunships and Nova Prospekt. Charming.

OH, SHI-

Either way, any complaints levelled at either of these games are futile. Valve are achieving something truly incredible here - they're making linear gameplay interesting and compelling. Halflife 2 is one of the few games that really sucks me in - the attention to detail, both in the appearance and behaviour, of the game world is unsurpassed. Let's hope they keep it up.