Review: "Half Life 2: Episode One"

Last weekend I finally caved and bought "Half-Life 2: Episode One". First of all, kudos to Valve. Their Steam content delivery platform is awesome. Credit card, click, and about 20 minutes later (depending on the speed of your pipe), I'm killing Combine.

For those kindred souls who felt betrayed when the credits scrolled at the end of Half-Life 2 ("but I only just started playing 73 hours ago!!"), this is going to be akin to the feeling one gets when opening a bleary refridgerator and finding that the pizza isn't over after all.

Pros:

• You get to play (almost) the entire game alongside Alyx. She's kinda hot. And kicks ass with a shotgun.
  
• Fighting in the dark (whenever your flashlight battery runs out). This is scary and pretty cool. Kinda Doom-esque.
• Nice progression of the City 17 storyline. As always, they've done an incredible job meshing story-arc and gameplay.
  

Cons:

• No real novelties with respect to the gameplay, weapons or enemies. But for those of us who just wanted more, it's enough.
  

"i" is the new "e"

iPod, iMac, iRobot, iGoogle, iCan't really understand what the fascination with this letter is. It's like back in the days of the dot-com boom when people would prepend an "e" all willy-nilly to any idea and instantly receive venture capital.

Now Nintendo's gone and named its next generation console "Wii" (pronounced like "We") since it's a "console for everyone". Ooh-ooh, I have a couple more:

• iPii: Especially after all those cups of coffii
• F#$k yii: Suitable invective if yii bii annoyed by superfluous "i"s

Vacation Retrospective

A couple of things I've discovered in the last 10 days or so:

• I like to run. Ever since I saw the reduced gut on the other woman, I've been all inspired and stuff. Even better, I'm starting to lose all the weight I gained from the damned eye-medications.
  
• Used-book stores rock. A few days ago I found a nice little hardcover copy of Reading Jazz.
• I can't ever really stop working. Even when I'm taking a break. I seem to be most productive on my days off.
• The little Venezuelan coffee shop in Palo Alto has awesome spiced hot chocolate.
• No other game (FPS) comes close to being as playable as Half Life 2.