A Bit of Half-Life 2

September 28th, 2008

So I’ve been playing through the current Half Life 2 series backwards, starting with Episode 2 and going back to the original. It is interesting to do this because you get to observe the subtle changes made to the overall visual quality of the game as DirectX and graphics card capabilities have improved.

But let’s face it, the original was so good the changes are pretty hard to spot so really all I was doing was enjoying a bit of classic gaming before heading back to university. But when I reached the Grab-the-Gravity-Gun and head for “Don’t go through Ra…” Ravenholm point, having completely played Episode 2 using mostly the Gravity Gun as a killing machine thanks to the Hunter’s resistance to bullets, I decided that keeping hold of Dog’s rollermine toy ball would be a fun experiment.

And what a BRILLIANT option it is!

Let me outline a couple of the better reasons for having it tag along, firstly because it will, as it magnetically follows you should you want to drop it and do something else such as manipulate some SAW BLADES.

Secondly, it does considerable damage, for instance requiring only a few punts to take a Poison Headcrab zombie. Now I’m not suggesting it did all the damage seen in the screenshot above, but it is a good demonstration of the third reason for having it.

That is the fact that zombies will actually assault it seemingly IN PREFERENCE to attacking you, giving you time to knock the first few in a horde down with it and then while they are occupied, select a suitable saw blade or similar to finish the rest.

A fourth reason might be that it can actually KILL headcrabs by continually rolling into them while they attempt to run away but can’t because they are too slow for the mine. In the case of several headcrabs, again they will attempt to jump it rather than attack your own head.

These final screenshots demonstrate the rollermine killing zombies in a single hit, but also come to one of the disadvantages. You’ve got to be careful of explosions, because if it is absolutely anywhere near to one, it will explode as well.

Also, Father Grigori WILL shoot it as well, although not necessarily in preference to zombies, so you need to hold onto it when he is about. And finally, it’s not really as cool as it could be if it were an Alyx-programmed yellow rollermine that did the proper electrical zapping. But that all comes later in the series.

Additionally

Getting the image files for this blog entry from my PC to my laptop (and also transferring an email I needed to print out to enroll for university) wasn’t all that easy. Plugging in my old but ever-reliable USB memory stick would not make it appear as a drive on my PC at all.

It turns out that an old experiment I did to see what happens when you exceed the number of drive letters in the alphabet was to blame. Basically I had used this memory stick as the tipping point to see what happens when something would go past (Z:/).

If you ever do this, and your device permanently gets allocated no letter, the way to fix this I discovered is thus: you can go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools and then Computer Management. From here there is a list of all the storage devices and it is a simple matter of re-assigning the drive a letter!