Blogcoven

Pasadena got marble-sized hail yesterday, and everyone is talking about the few minutes when “Everything went dark.” One lady who’s more prone to hysteria than the average SoCal individual pointed out there were some earthquakes last night. I noted that such storm-induced darkness isn’t uncommon where I grew up, and that earthquakes are usually similarly common and unremarkable here.

While dodging hail and wondering where I packed my umbrella, I acquired Half Life. For years, people have been telling me I need to play this game. Separate people. People who don’t know each other. I’m not sure if it’s because I am, like the protagonist, a scientist, or because I strike people as someone who’d like to blast the heads off of aliens. It may be a bit of both.

Whatever the reasons for the recommendations, I resisted purchasing the game for years for the same sorts of reasons I am warily avoiding World of Warcraft and computer/console games in general. They are a time sink with very little benefit on the other end for all the trouble, and I am dangerously susceptible to abandoning things like work and social obligations in favo(u)r of a pleasant and entertaining distraction. I’ve done it before. Additionally, I resisted Half Life specifically because I didn’t think I’d enjoy soloing a first-person shooter. It’s fun to run around in a LAN environment, but wandering around on my own seemed like a dull pursuit.

(No, I didn’t play LANs either. I didn’t have the skillz, and didn’t want to end up embarrassed and dead most of the time. You can see how I conveniently created a catch-22 for myself in further efforts to resist the lure of the PC first-person shooter.)

An era of my life has ended. I have started playing Half Life. The results are, apparently, almost as entertaining as the game itself. I started out, as advised, in the training room. It took me a bit of time to get used to what I needed to be doing with the mouse, but I eventually figured things out and started rolling along through the opening sequence. By the time I finally got to the aliens, I was pretty much committed to playing the game through. There are side-effects, though.

The Wanderer scared the daylights out of me when he walked into the room where I sat, eyes wide as saucers, at the computer. I didn’t think I’d jumped that much, but apparently I did. The pace of the game, alternating between stretches of quiet dread and moments of blinding panic (especially when you’ve hit a dry patch in your ammo reserves and find yourself defending yourself with nothing but a crowbar), stretches my nerves and compresses my shoulders. It leads to audible responses to suddenly appearing aliens. The Wanderer, apparently, found this hysterically funny, and stayed to watch as I wandered around and beat the stuffing out of critters that were probably intended by the designers to be shot, not bludgeoned.

His top piece of advice, given several times over the course of the evening, was, “Use the mouse!” He also mused later, “Maybe we should have started you on something less engrossing.”

I don’t think a less “engrossing” FPS would have held my attention long enough to learn the controls, but it’s moot ’cause I’m stuck now and I really want to go home and monopolise the computer. (Yes, it runs on the tiefling. No, it’s not nearly as pretty.)

Unfortunately, duty calls. There are scientific frontiers I need to be pushing back.