Picked up an odd telegram in Budapest yesterday:

H

HEARD YOU HAD GONE TO GROUND IN TRANSYLVANIA STOP GLAD YOU GOT OUT OF THAT DEBACLE AT THE CLUB STOP HAVE FLED TO BURMA STOP UNABLE TO BE MORE SPECIFIC YET STOP CONTINUE TO LAY LOW AND DO NOT CONTACT ME STOP THEY ARE AFTER US BOTH STOP BEWARE THE SIGN OF THE THREE AND TWO HALVES STOP

MCW

All very cryptic. I do hope the old chap is alright.

Meanwhile, I’ve just finished Half Life 2, the widely proclaimed ‘Game of 2004’. It has this whole ‘Steam’ online connection shenanigans intended to deter software piracy, much like the way Windows XP needs activating. I sort of object to the whole ‘The Innocent Have Nothing To Hide’ attitude the system implies, but as it turned out, it wasn’t that much extra hastle. I guess we’ll never know if it actually made much of a difference, since Valve are unlikely to make any kind of public announcement if it didn’t, but apparently cracked versions with the Steam bit removed are already doing the rounds.

However, the game itself is so genuinely revolutionary that it can get away with quite a lot of Steam nonsense. I hadn’t gotten around to Doom 3, or Far Cry yet, so the last, ‘technically best’ game I’d played was Thief: Deadly Shadows, and this outdoes even that. It’s clearly one of those landmarks in gaming history, a quantum leap forward in graphics and speed, but even better than that is the sheer ingenuity they’ve used in demonstrating all the wonderful things their physics engine can pull off.

There’s all the usual goodies you expect from a first person shooter in there; pistols, shotguns, grenades, sniping, zombies, and the rest, all executed with consummate skill; but there are bits of James Bond, Starship Troopers, Grand Theft Auto, Enemy At The Gates, Saving Private Ryan, even Jedi Knight in there in one form or another. And they’re all bound together with such a coherent storyline that none of them seem ‘tacked on’ in any way. Most of all, the game is immersive to the point of panic, a rare thing for one as jaded as I – I usually work methodically through levels, being sure to visit everywhere and hoard all the Stuff, but playing some levels in this, it was all I could do to keep my wits about me and get through the set-piece in one go.

Downsides are few, but include the old Half Life problem of very small, albeit very full, ‘levels’ with a lot of loading, and to some extent the sheer unexpected nature of the puzzles, which had me confused at times, but led to very satisfying ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh!’ moments. Oh, and the f*cking helicopter is back, with a vengeance.

Summing up: Worth the wait, the hastle and the hype – 9/10.