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Okay, so here's the situation... Lets pretend that one night, while you were sleeping, someone entered your house and made off with a whole bunch of your stuff. When you woke up you blearily stumbled out into your living room and found that everything in a straight line from your front door to the corner where you kept your television was just gone. Vanished in the night.
This might not seem like a very likely situation, but trust me it's possible. The exact situation above happened to me oiIt happened to me, and in a way it happened to Valve Software. Except with Valve what was stolen was millions of dollars worth of proprietary technology. In case you don't really follow video game news, you can read all about the theft here.
Now, I don't know how Valve handles this sort of thing, but I know how I handled it. I became more than a little paranoid for a while. I would check all the locks in my house twice before bed, and if I had to get up at night to go to the bathroom, I went to the bathroom by route of the front door. It was quite a while before I felt really safe in my apartment. Apparently over at Valve they have a different approach. You can't possibly be broken into if you just hand out keys to your place on the street. At least so it would seem. Apparently they recently sent out a bunch of Counter-Strike: Source beta discs. As a free bonus included on the disc was all of the dialogue files for Half Life 2, effectively allowing anyone who wants to have a listen to hear the entire story of the game from start to finish.
This, in my humble opinion, is a trememdously huge fuck-up. I don't understand how it could happen, honestly. It's almost as if they are using these thefts and screw ups as ways of gaining media attention, much in the same way that the creators of Duke Nukem Forever are generating hype for their game by shooting for the world record longest development time for any human endeavor, the Great Pyramid of Giza included (which is estimated to have only taken 20 years, Duke is almost half way there!).
Anyway, this post was only really started as a way of building up to a threat. If anyone reveals anything to me about the plot from Half Life 2 I will do terrible things to them. If I accidentally stumble across a site that has a transcript of those files on it, or if one of my friends breathes a word of the plot I will fart in their general direction, and I assure you, few things are more terrible.
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Two months ago I was convinced that I could do without Doom 3. One month ago I took another look at the screen shots and thought, "Well, it looks pretty nice, but I'm waiting for Half Life 2." Thirteen days ago someone in a chat room mentioned that it was due out in the next 24 hours, and something in my mind snapped. I was out in the street checking the local shops within fifteen minutes, buzzing from store to store like a bee gathering pollen. Not here? Okay, next place... Not here? Off we go...
Eventually I found out that it wasn't due out until the following day, so I placed a pre-order and went back to work. The next day I went to EB Games and waited in line for my copy, drooling and making nerd jokes with the rest of the people gathered there. Four days ago, I solved it. Desperate to squeeze a little more enjoyment out of it I went online to play some multiplayer. What a waste. The single player mode in Doom 3 had been so brilliant, so finely tuned, so incredibly immersive, that the multiplayer just felt wrong. I had gotten used to Doom 3 making me feel a certain way, a certain amount of tension, a creeping dread... The ever present sense that around the next corner could be a darkened shadow filled to the brim with nightmarish horrors intent on ripping out my intestines and feeding them to their half-insect hellspawned children. As soon as I logged into my first multiplayer server that feeling of dread packed its bags, defenestrated them, and then shot itself in the head with a rocket launcher. The feeling was dead.
The multiplayer was exactly the same sort of multiplayer I have come to expect from a FPS, fast paced running, shooting, grabbing weapons, and listening to the youth of the internet slinging racial and homophobic slurs. And in the corner, a zombie wept. Now, I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with standard FPS gameplay (except the slurs), it's just that after playing through the single player mode, the multiplayer just seemed empty.
Ah, well. The nice thing about that, I guess, is that I can trade in Doom 3 for Half Life 2 and not feel like I'm missing much... Unless I decide to play single player again in Nightmare mode.
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