Wherein I'm going to superfluously talk about a set of games everyone's already heard about, and probably already played. With the exception of Team Fortress 2, a multi-player game I have essentially zero interest in, I've now played the whole thing, and the short of it is that you should run, not walk (be careful crossing the street), and go get it right now. Because it's supurb. All of it, too, though some parts are better than others.

Half-Life 2 + Episodes 1-2:

The meat of the box, and together about one and a half games worth of shooter goodness. And there's a lot to like here. For one, there's a plot, and, for a shooter, it's quite something. We're not talking Baldur's Gate II here, but there's some excellent stuff in here, especially as you get to the second half of HL2, and in both Episodes.

For two, it's a good blend of gameplay styles that at times transcends genre. There are a lot of enemies to be slaughtered, certainly, but also plenty of puzzles to solve, and done in such a way that is, barring a few exceptions, non-annoying (and here you should remember that I despise Myst quite a lot, even after all these years). While mostly sci-fi, it adds in some horror and some war drama, and does it well enough.

For three, use of environments is more or less excellent (anything having to do with bridges will be awesome), though there could have been a little more variation. Too, the physics engine is well-used, and in much more integral ways than, say, Oblivion, though it does go overboard once or twice. However, the part where you drive the crane more than makes up for any shortcomings. Ever wanted to use a shipping container as a weapon? Half-Life 2 is for you.

All three of these games fall squarely into the "will lose sleep playing" category of games, even if they don't (quite) live up to the hype.

There's not much to say that's bad, but what there is is significant.

- While the gravity gun is awesome, the whole "build pathways out of debris through the water/radioactive sludge/antilion-infested sand" thing got old after about the first time I had to do it. That aside, while I think there was an annoying puzzle, I can't remember it, so.

- Speaking of antlions, enough is way way more than enough, guys. I will grant you that they were awesome in the HL2 driving level (which is possibly one of my favorite levels of all time), but the sand thing, let me state once again, was not fun. From reading various reviews and the like, it seems I am not alone in this opinion, which makes the later appearance of acid-spitting antlions in later episodes puzzling, not to mention one of the most annoying enemies ever, followed shortly thereafter by the arena matches with antlion guardians.

That having been said, that thing you get in Nova Prospekt, and you people who've played know what this is, goes a long way towards making up for that the antlions.

- Considering, for a moment, that Half-Life 2 is, at its core, a shooter, and considering that I am Gordon Freeman, Special Forces Physicist, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the game might have a few modern shooter conventions. Like maybe lean keys. Or zoom on your weapons. Hell, maybe some accuracy on the guns would be nice, too, since they seem to fall into two categories: Stunningly awesome, and "only use if the crowbar runs out of ammo." SMG, I'm talking about you here.

- Environments could've been a little more varied, although both Episodes go a ways towards fixing that (Two moreso than One), and it looks like Three will go very very far. However, there's a disturbing linearity to the games in all but a bare handful of levels that detracts a lot. While this is understandable in many of the building sequences, in the outdoors it's more troubling, though again, Episode Two makes up for this somewhat. Also, considering how awesome the game is in general, this is a smaller flaw than it could've been.

- The final fight in Episode Two was ridiculous for levels of ridiculousness scarcely seen since the bad old days of Icewind Dale II (though not nearly that bad). Yes, the gravity gun is cool. No, the new addition is not. Also, that level where you're waiting for the elevator. And the antlions in the parking garage. Jesus, the antlions.

I never want to see another antlion again, ever. However, more car levels please. And while Hunters are awesome, no more of this Hunter+Strider ridiculousness.

That having been said, Valve, when's Episode Three coming out? DO WANT.

Final judgement, 9/10 aliens.

Portal:

I find myself a little bit perplexed by the uproar caused by this game. Everywhere you go on the internets, people are praising it to the skies. I've seen pictures of Portal on lines directly below pictures of Jesus Christ. Everywhere you go people are talking about how the cake is a lie, or how they want a weighted companion cube, or saying how you'll never want to play another game again.

And I seriously just don't get it. Sure, Portal was moderately entertaining, for the, oh, two hours I spent playing it (yes, it's very, very short), of which the weighted companion cube was around for maybe five minutes and did nothing to endear itself to me. Yes, GlaDOS was amusing, but not THAT amusing. Honestly, I had the most fun with the whole cake thing. And the portals. I will admit that the portals are cool, and for a puzzle game, which Portal most emphatically is, it's a really good one (if not a very hard one), and I only had one real moment of "I have no idea how to solve this," which is pretty good.

On the downside, I'm not sure what the deal was, but boy was that game crash-happy. Autosaves were to be feared.

So, yknow. It's a good bite-sized addition to what's already a jam-packed set of games, but don't (don't don't don't) believe the hype. 6/10 aliens.

Steam:

In which I vent a lot at content delivery services, such as Steam, which are about the only downside of the whole Half-Life 2 experience for me. Mine has not been as bad as some, but ok. I bought a single-player game. On DVDs. Now, the fact that I don't need to have my DVD in the drive is minorly nice, but why does my single-player game need to phone home when I play it? Why does it feel the need to run all the time, even at startup, from my system tray (granted this is easy to disable), and why does it feel the need to spam me on game exit? I'm fairly sure it's caused me at least one crash.

That aside, however, The Orange Box is clearly something that, if you call yourself a gamer, or even if you don't, you should feel the burning need to own. 9.5/10 aliens.

A few random ponderances on Valentine's Day, now that I'm celebrating it with somebody, rather than spending it thinking about how I'm not doing that.

1. In the store buying flowers and chocolate yesterday, I observed that the age gap between me and the rest of the guys doing the same thing was on order of 15 or 20 years. Coupled with Sarah's observation that there didn't seem to be a lot going on at Yale, and I'm left somewhat confused. Certainly OSU was pretty rampant with people doing Valentine's stuff, which is part of the reason why it was so annoying.

2. Thursday is a really retarded day for a holiday.

3. As a holiday, I'm fairly certain the whole thing is kind of a wash, especially considering the whole "makes single people feel downtrodden" thing. As an excuse to, you know, hang out with my girlfriend and get her nice stuff, not to mention having a nice dinner (which is her being nice to ME), it works out fairly well. But since I don't need a whole lot of excuse for this stuff, well.

4. Speaking of which, some of you know that part of the evening's festivities will be watching a debate between Ron Jeremy and some anti-porn Christian guy, which should be entertaining. It would appear that the whole thing will be televised on ABC's Nightline, tonight, so you can all tune in if you like. I'm also told that we're watching You've Got Mail at some other point during the night, which is an...interesting contrast.

5. In another of those problems that I never had when I was single, I've discovered that I really lack suitable outer shirts in the range between "flannel" and "nice suit jacket" which provides me with a problem as I dress up in slacks and a nice shirt for tonight - I need a dark jacket, and I don't have one. This has never before been a problem for me. When you couple that with that out of the last four times I've gotten flowers, I've A) been involved in a car accident; B) gone on a multi-city, multi-hour trek, I suppose you've got to start wondering about women.

Well, maybe not.

In which I shall now review some games and a movie, because I have points to make about them.

Also, for those of you accustomed to slightly more...timely blog updates, rest assured that I am indeed thinking along those same lines. It's just that, having spent the last few weeks recovering from messed up sleep cycles brought on by my flight home, combined with transcendently ludicrous happenings with school, I frankly haven't had the energy. And when I DID have energy, well, you all don't need to hear about exciting times with the girlfriend.

However, this has changed. As part of my gaming haul over Christmas, I recieved both Medal of Honor: Airborne and Call of Duty 4. Now, I'm a fan of randomly shooting evil villains with high-powered weaponry in simulated environments, so this can be nothing but good, right? Yes, it turns out, but with caveats. Allow me to explain.

Medal of Honor: Airborne:

It's World War II, Europe is under Nazi oppression, this is bad, etc, etc. Can we PLEASE reprise Pacific Assault with another goddamn Pacific Theater game? I love bombed out European towns too, but aeeyah. Enough. Enough.

But here we are anyway, jumping out of planes over Europe. Which, as far as a single-player level design experience goes, is pretty fun, although making skill drops is beyond me somehow. It's wonderfully refreshing to be able to go all over a level and do whatever, although this really only comes into play fully in the last couple of levels, and honestly Call of Duty 2 did it better, but whatever.

The actual levels are all pretty fun, too. There are a couple of highly annoying blow up the tank objectives, and Operation Varsity has some parts that are pretty rough, but nothing quite so horrific as the AA gun levels in MOH:PA or Call of Duty 1. Capping the whole game is an assault on a giant flak tower, which is confusing to navigate, yet very fun.

Also, for once, we get a game where, before leaving on a mission, you get to pick what guns you want to carry. I cannot tell you how awesome this is. Combined with the system Airborne has of giving out unique weapon upgrades, there's a lot going here that's good. It's a uniquely customizable singleplayer experience that other shooters should attempt to replicate.

Too bad the game's too short to really get any use out of any of it. Let's be conservative, and say that my first time through took me about 7 hours, a good half of which was due to playing on Mom's laptop with a wireless mouse and keyboard, which were crap for gaming, and kept getting me killed. Later, on my own machine, I cut this down to something like 5 hours, and that's only because I kept getting killed in Paestum, because that level's fucking hard and wants me dead. In any case, that's pathetic. I'll have more to say on this later, but for the moment? Pathetic.

Also, what is it with Medal of Honor games running like crap? Airborne is a lot better than Pacific Assault, but it's still pretty clunky, and I don't really know why. We're not dealing with destructable environments, great graphics, or any of that.

Finally, I was previously unaware that, in World War II, there were super-stormtroopers wearing bulletproof armor, carrying crew-served machine guns by themselves, taking entire clips of assault rifle ammunition to bring down. I was also unaware of the 82nd Airborne Division's heroic assault on a flak tower that existed, I think, only in Vienna. Which was apparently crawling with the previously mentioned super-stormtroopers. I was also unaware of the judicious use of anti-tank panzerschreks against infantry late in the war. Am I poorly read, or did the designers take some liberties with history? Evidence suggests the later, though I'm always open to the former, and Der Flakturm is a pretty awesome level in any case.

Final review? 6 of 10 aliens, which would have been much higher had there been an actual, you know, game attached.

Call of Duty 4

I can summarily review CoD4 by saying that basically, it totally fucking rocks, and you need to go play it right now. However, as I am the guy who invented the word Tolstoyesqueness as a measure of desireable length, I'm going to elaborate a bit.

On the good side? Many things. Unlike many other shooters, there's a plot, and it's a very good cinematic one that, while it has a few issues, is on the whole quite good. It felt as if I was playing a movie oft times, and I mean that in a very complimentary sense.

Also, it's not Another World War II Shooter. Granted that it's this close to trying to be Battlefield 2, but that's ok. We haven't done modern weapons to death, and we mostly haven't done them quite as good as CoD4, either, although I must say that, having just played Airborne, I missed that game's ability to customize weapons loads and weapons themselves. On the other hand, good weapons aren't hard to find in levels - the nice thing about automatic weapons is that you'll never find yourself in the position you could find yourself in in World War II, fighting hordes of Nazis with a bolt-action rifle with 5 shots.

Level design is supurb, and basically all the time. I have complaints, but they're on the level of "Man, I wish the cargo ship level was longer" as opposed to "Man, that AA gun level is crap!" (and yes, I have a serious hate for AA gun levels, why do you ask?). There's a nice mix of urban and wilderness, and plenty of variety. Yes, sneaking into abandoned cities as a sniper is fun. Yes, being an AC-130 gunner is about the most fun thing ever in shooter history. There is no annoying tank level. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Unlike Airborne, CoD4 runs quite well, and looks good doing it. It's slick, well-designed, looks great, and runs smoothly. In it, I can do such things as shoot through drywall and kill terrorists on the other side (which happens a lot more than you might think), use night vision goggles, and blow up cars, obstacles, and even a building here and there.

Oh, and thank you, guys, for making machine guns kick ass again. After playing Battlefield 2, I had despaired for the SAW. However, in CoD4, it is the weapon of gods, problematic only in the fact that it takes about a geological age of the Earth to reload, which I assure you is a long time in a CoD4 firefight.

Also, you get to use Mk19s and miniguns. Yes, this is fun.

All of those good things aside, and they are quite good, believe me, I have two complaints, one of which is going to sound pretty familiar.

1. Actually, the end of the USMC mission was pretty cool, but instead of making me play that last level for no reason, couldn't you have done a cutscene?

1a. Also, could we have a modern shooter which features somebody besides the Marines? I love Marines and all, and, yknow, some of my best friends are Marines, but we have an Army, too, yknow. Not to mention a Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard. Just saying. And if you're not careful, somebody might accuse you of trying to be like Battlefield 2.

1c. The actual end of the game may have been a little TOO cinematic. I'm not entirely sure yet.

2. Time to completion: 7 hours. Delayed primarily by a string of deaths in the final bunker mission and a string of reloads in the sniper mission. Awesome levels, awesome plot, but couldn't there have been a little...more? Like Call of Duty 2. You remember that game, right? Had about twice or three times the gameplay time? Super fun? Probably holds the current title for Best FPS Ever? (This is currently in dispute) Be like that game. Make me hunt more terrorists. I am ok with this. For serious.

As a related note, and I'm going to apply this to Airborne as well, I notice a trend lately, stretching at least as far back as Battlefield 2 in 2005, of people selling their shooters primarily based on multiplayer. Now, I don't play a lot of multiplayer, but clearly a lot of people like it. However, it hurts me a lot when people who are clearly very good at making an engrossing single player game just don't make enough of it. Seriously, where is the other half of Airborne? I'd like to know.

Also on that note, for both games, and I'm going to lump Pacific Assault in here too, you've gone to a lot of trouble of putting in really fantastic bots, the best bots ever seen in shooters, never mind how Captain Price kept shoving me into the arms of P90-wielding Russian terrorists, bots that would definitely be a boon to the multiplayer experience, as they so clearly were in the days of Battlefield Vietnam. So, that having been said...

WHERE THE CRAP IS THE CO-OP MULTIPLAYER?

Your prompt attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.