Ye Olde Halfe Life. And a Gnome.

I decided last week that it was about time I played through the original Half-Life games again. I had finally gotten to play through Episodes 1 and 2 of Half-Life2 just a few short months ago, and wanted to see if the backstory still made sense and actually built up to the plots of the newer ones. I finished regular Half-Life this weekend, and followed that with Blue Shift (which is an impressively short game). So far, everything matches up and makes more sense after playing the new games, and it was a lot of fun going back to this piece of my history that I have always looked back at so fondly. I haven’t started Opposing Force yet, but likely will soon.

This got me onto a Valve kick, and so I revisited Portal and Episode 2 to see what Achievements I had yet to make. The Achievements are something new for TF2, Portal, and Episode 2, where you are given random little tasks to try to complete. For example, in Portal you can try to destroy every video camera in the game (I managed to find all but three), fall 30,000 feet (which I did by lining up one portal above me, one below, and then fell for 15 minutes while I read Ayn Rand), kill one turret with another, etc. You also get achievements for beating the Advanced levels, which I have yet to finish (they’re friggin’ hard).

One of the more challenging and bizarre Achievements is set forth in Episode 2: carry a garden gnome through the entire game and then stick him in the nose cone of a rocket (the task is called “Tiny rocket man” or something similar”). I decided to do it, and put the game on easy to make it take less time.

[Edit: just finished the project and moved the pictures to a new post]

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