Half Life 2: Episode 1: Attack of the Crabheads

I am not a video game player. More accurately, I am not a video game finisher. I own a PS2 and will probably own a PS3 when it appears later this year, but more for the graphics and noises than the enjoyment of actually playing games. However, my manfriend, Robert is a video game player, so it is that I can report on a video game for your PC, even though most of my friends have been brainwashed and use MACs, although so does Robert and he just boots into Windows or something technical like that, though how the Apple hardware doesn't burst into self-righteous flames is beyond me.

Giant Moving Buildings

Anyhoo, Half Life 2 is now about 2 years old, and I never played it, though I understand from reading the reviews of people who actually have that it's fairly amazing and fun. It's a first-person shooter, which means you shoot first and ask questions later, even though you'll never get any answers out of anyone because they seem to be always staring at you as if you know all the answers.

As the next episode opens, you're still a man named Gordon, and the world is still going to hell. A giant building is slowly wandering around and you need to go inside and turn off its giant ball of glowing goo using only your Gravity Gun and some chick in tight jeans who talks too much and doesn't even own her own flashlight.

Basically, your goal is to kill everything that moves, and if you can't kill it, put a car on top of it. Your Gravity Gun grabs onto almost anything you point it at and then you can thrust said thing like a missile at whatever is chasing you now. Sometimes, though certainly not often enough, the gun can also grab actual people like rag dolls and then you can throw bodies at bodies and it's terribly amusing in a grotesque sort of way. Robert seemed to enjoy holding bodies and shaking them like a dog with a rabbit in its mouth so th elimbs get all broken and you bang them into walls and such.

I have to hand it to the Havoc engine and the overall look of the game because it's very like wandering through an expensive film. Again, I relied on Robert to inform me how impressive it all was, and sometimes he'd stop dead in his tracks as he was killing things to say stuff like, "they do the best water," and "look at the reflections in his boots!" He assured me that boot reflection was really, really cool.

The game is the first part of a new trilogy that takes place in the Half Life2 world, and it's only $19.95 because it's not very long and you'll need (want) to spend another $40 for the next two chapters coming in time for Xmas this year, and the last part in 2007. You'll get into some fairly incredible fights with antlions and crabheads and these floating red-eyed mechanical sentries that Robert assures me "annoy the hell out of you," and you also get to fling bodies at each other and watch in amazement as the empty cardboard boxes you shoot at actually collapse in on themselves.

5 out of 5 stars for boot reflections, amazing audio over a pair of decent headphones, and Dog.