Half Life 2 - Dark Energy (game finished!)
Well, I have finished Half Life 2, and I must say, with mixed emotions - but I’ll get to that later. I walked through the tunnel to preceed what would be some of the most spectacular images and architechture of the entire game. From the earlier post, you could tell that the Citadel is a very tall structure. At this point, I’m towards the bottom, but not the very bottom, which looked thousands of feet below me. There were a lot of piston-type colums on outside of the Citadel that were slowly pumping every 5 or 10 seconds. I had to jump down a cliff to get to a part where I could jump onto the outside of the Citadel. Once inside, I made my way through a maze of columns and small alleys. Then, I made it into the assembly line where the pods of humans were being carried off. I eventually made it to a spot where it didn’t look like I could walk any further, and it was quite obvious what I had to do. There was a line of empty pods that would stop, open, close, and get carried off. I jumped onto one, and then lost control and could only move my neck around a little.
This part took a while, but was amazing to watch. I bet I took more than double the amount of screen shots just in the Citadel than in the entire game. Of course, it’s easier to take shots when you aren’t busy killing bad guys. (I’ll be sure to post a link to my gallery where I’ll put up an album of my screenshots.) Anyway, I ended up at a containment area of sorts and was dumped out. They scanned me and found my weapons, so they got torn from me and disintegrated - except my gravity gun, which turned from an orange color to a light blue. Whatever it did was good, because once the guards came at me, I was able to suck him onto my gun and shoot him at his buddies! The evil guy came on to every screen I came by and was asking me to stop and insulting my intelligence. My HEV suit was also upgraded from 100 energy to 200, and every charging station only took seconds to fill up. So, I ascended my way up as far as I could go, taking out many waves of guards. I was delayed at a large tunnel where I had to take down guards and a strider. This is where I discovered my second source of ammunition for the grav gun besides guards. Throughout the Citadel there were these beams of energy columns supplying fuel to various devices. They carried these orange balls of energy that I could suck out and use as a rocket. So, I used these on the strider and took it out in 2 hits! Moving forward, I came to another dead end where I had to get into another pod.
At end of that long and bewildering pod trip, I came to a drop off where two guards met me, took my grav gun, and then Dr Mossman showed up. She told me how sorry she was and that Dr Breen (evil guy) wanted to talk to me. I was still in my pod and was carried into his office, where he was arguing with Eli about how great his society of new humans was going to be. He asked Eli to consider helping him, he refused, then he brought out Alyx in her pod, and he still refused. So, he said he would teleport them to some random planet or something. Then, he turned to me and asked me to help, but Dr Mossman could take it any more and locked the doors to his office and told him to leave us alone. He grabbed my grav gun and shot out one of the doors to go teleport himself somewhere. Alyx and I said our thank-yous to Dr Mossman and Eli and left them to get Breen.
We saw him talking to some alien person through a hologram and he dropped my grav gun and shot out to an elevator to go down to the teleporter. Alyx got on the system to find out what he was doing and told me the only way was to go down to the core to stop him. I took the elevator down to follow Breen and was met with lots of Combine guards. At this point, I basically had to scale the outside of the teleporting core to get to the top. Along the way, Dr Breen insulted me more and I kept getting shot at by guards. Finally, I made it to the top and Alex told me to grab the energy balls and shoot at the core to destroy it. Two big gunships flew up and started hammering me with bullets, but I just kept throwing those balls at the core. About halfway down to my health, I destroyed the core and Dr Breen, and Alyx came out from the console to see. She said something about us having to get out of there because the destruction of the core could level City 17 or something like that. I started looking around for where to go and then, all of a sudden, the core made a huge explosion!
But, the explosion paused almost as soon as it stopped and I saw Alyx shielding her face. Then, out of the paused fireball, the infamouse G-Man came walking out. He told me how great of a job I had done in such little time, so my services were being asked for somewhere else. Then, the screen when black, then white and inverse colors, then some pychadelic stuff started coming through the G-Man’s face while he was talking to me. He was basically saying that my job was done for now and then he said he had to go. The screen was black at this point, and a white door slid open and he grabbed his briefcase and walked out. THE END. I had a big question mark on my face. I was dumbfounded. But, then again, that’s pretty much how the first game ended too. I will say that this is probably the best first person shooter game I have ever played, and probably the best game in any genre I have ever played. It had non-stop action, great gameplay and problem solving, and a really great story. The parts with the zombies and aliens really freaked me out sometimes and made me jump. The only downsides were parts that seemed to go on too long and the ending. But, I play too cautiosly sometimes and the ending definitely hooked me in for Half Life 3!
Add comment January 17th, 2005
I took out the next two generators to disable the barriers, but got trapped in one of the rooms in the house. Combine solders started throwing grenades through holes in the walls and busted through the doors in massive numbers. After my squad and I took them out when headed downstairs to exit the building and met more waves of soldiers. This was probably been the most gun fighting I’ve done yet in the game. After exiting the area, we went downstairs and met a resistance force soldier that told us they dropped a crate of rockets in the courtyard that could be used to take out the striders outside. Striders?!? Striders are these huge spider-like vehicles that have a powerful mounted gun and an even more powerful energy canon that has a cool animation that I can’t describe. They take about 6 rockets to take down, so that means that you can’t just get some rockets, hide behind a wall and take it down. I ran around like a freak taking down around 6 striders, so it took a while. Then, I got past a barrier in the street and headed down it. 
Watched Garden State Friday night, and I was pretty impressed. It was Zach Braff’s (from the tv show, Scrubs) first major motion picture to write, direct, and star in. And for it to be this good, I will be expecting great things from him in the future. Just from watching him on Scrubs, which I think is hilarious, I would never have expected him to be so artistic because of his quirky comedic style. The movie is basically about a young, depressed actor, Andrew Largeman, that comes home for his mother’s funeral after being away for 9 years. He expects to leave soon, but meets a girl (Natalie Portman) that changes his mind.