Get a Half-Life, Part 1

One of the things I loved about Portal was that I was able to get all the way through it in my first sitting. It took about 3 hours, and was a complete immersion experience from start to finish. In that light, I enjoy the episodic nature of the later Half-Life games. While I wasn't able to get through them in my first go, I could get through them in an afternoon if I were simply interested in enjoying the story or replaying. As I find Portal to be fairly re-playable, because the puzzles are fun to solve even if you know the solution, I suspect the HL games will be equally fun to revisit, especially if I can do so in a fraction of the time.

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

Let's be honest, this is a glorified tech demo. It features one level where you fight some soldiers while you climb a mountain, solve one physics puzzle, kill a few headcrabs, and finally take down a helicopter. The gameplay is fine, but the point of it is to show off the dynamic lighting that had been added to the Source Engine and is most notable in the reflection of sunlight off the rocks on the beach. The level succeeds in looking far larger and more complex than it really is, so kudos for that. But the real treat (for me) is that this is the first game that Valve made with commentary, which is the whole reason I decided to play through it at all. On the minus side, it's only a level and can be completed on a first run-through in about twenty minutes. It came with The Orange Box, and to be perfectly honest, I had forgotten that I owned it until I decided to play through it. But if I had paid the $9.99 for a stand-alone copy, I would have felt ripped off.

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Valve President and founder Gabe Newell freely admits that the HL2 "episodes" were poorly named. Yes, they continue the story from HL2, but this one ought to have been called Half-Life 3: Episode 1. Oh well. This game picks up immediately where its predecessor began, and in fact even retcons the ending a little. The big changes in this episode are: Alyx is now your travel companion and she accompanies you through most of the game. Most of the time she fights at your side, although you sometimes get separated. Once she mans a sniper rifle to give you some cover, but on the whole she's a well-acted NPC who helps more than she hinders during the combat and sometimes gets in your way during the platforming.

The commentary system is upgraded from Lost Coast, and again provides many nuggets of information (although a few of the nodes are wildly out of order--you have to proceed with a certain amount of faith that the missing nodes will show up before you complete the game). The game starts out in the Citadel, which means a return to the suped-up gravity gun combat from the climax of HL2. Once there, your ultimate objective becomes clear: the city is going to blow up, so get to a train station so you can get the hell out of dodge.

Along the way you are aided by the resistance movement, and you aid them in return, which means you end up involved in a lot of urban combat. You start out stripped of all your weapons, but you get them back fairly quickly after you leave the Citadel. There's a lot of flashlight combat in the beginning, but your flashlight seems to have grown better batteries since HL2. There are a few nice vistas, but nothing as grand as the Citadel ride from HL2.

There are some new game mechanics and a couple new enemies--the stalkers that were first glimpsed at the end of HL2 and the "zombines", combine zombies. There were a couple bits that felt uneven, but on the whole it's a great next chapter.

]{p