big vibe, but i really just ended up playing it to loop the c1 because i made the mistake of starting with an ae86. i get why rolling guy are all like that, shit's a blast.

txr 2025 better bring back rolling guy in a bunch of clapped out toyobaru 86s mixed in with the ae86 oldheads. the first generation toyobaru is about as old now as the corolla ae86 was when the shutoku battle series started.

usually if i want to loop the c1 virtually these days i'd head over to either any of the versions of it for beamng or assetto corsa. need me a clutch button on my controller!!! or watch someone being fairly dangerous on it irl. the most incredible thing to me is that almost every ride-along/dashcam recording ive seen of people doing this shit IRL shows proper turn signal usage from the participants about 90% of the time. i mean, with highways as tight and as dangerously windy as this network, you still gotta have safety on the mind, and a near-unwavering alertness. it's good to use your turn signals no matter if nobody seems to be around, something like that can always change in an instant.

oh yes please dangle the prospekt of a potential havok physics showcase (intentional and unintentional) in front of me at all times, but please be sure to stretch it out over the course of the next 10-15 hours between locking me into at least one "Could You Please Climb Up And Start The Rotors" ass moment per chapter. thank you gabem for Saving Computer's Gaming. with Art.

oh yes please release the trojan horse Holy PC Gamer's Gift of an always online (good luck getting that shit to launch in offline mode before 2010 haha) drm-launcher-store that's Only Going To Have Valve's Games On It WE PROMISE it's only going to have our own games on it, to the sectors on my 20gb hard disc drive and all hard disc drives after. "UGHHHH what's your problem now???? oh quit that, that's just how ya Counter-Strike these days, get OVER it. :^)"

it's called half life 2 because you need to have had your steam account for over half of your life to begin an understanding of exactly how dire the normalization of its Ground-Breaking Havok Puzzles On A String Design with some stuff that is technically a first person shooting game and Getting Talked At In a Locked Room Until You Perform/Can Perform The Havok Physics Puzzle Correctly (at least once per chapter) between, has been, too. "wow, it's almost like they're talking to ME!"

i too was once blinded by the spectacle of hitting "e" and throwing things around in a computer enough to sit at those loading screens for over 20 minutes each, anticipating the next 20 minute loading screen after maybe 20 minutes of Level. that GeForce 2, already e-waste in 2005, never stood a chance with my dumb (then) barely computer literate ass not understanding what graphics options were after seeing them for the first time. a year later, this guy named gary released the 8th version of his mod on moddb, for free. suddenly after a few hours of downloading overnight, i could throw around things in my computer, exactly as one would in half-life 2, without having to deal with what half-life 2 tries to present to me as substance.

"Back In My Day..."
we absolutely ate this shit up. thank fuck i went and played quake later the next year.

5 times, front to back. many more left unfinished. and i like it less every single time!!!! for a while, that stretch from ravenholm back to the city would make up for everything preceding and succeeding it. any decent work in this medium should have an ethical reason for players to return and replay, regardless of whether that one-time experience is 20 minutes long or 200+ hours long. maybe that stretch could have been that reason to return based on my interactions and persisting memories with this game. by the 4th replay, well into the 2010s, it started feeling different.... dull. you begin see the self-proclaimed magician for the illusions they play and stop giving in to the ways they make your mind sway.

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dismembered footnotes:[1]
first, there was "codename gordon"
a green window appeared upon launching steam one day in 2005, at the time it was a rather uncommon sight (even moreso now as the windows aren't green). after a just about one minute of loading, this one showed an announcement for something new, available on the then-single page store directory. this time, it was for a game not developed by valve. then, another one. i had a premonition that the release of rag doll kung fu and darwinia on steam would eventually lead to some absolute bunk way down the line, but nothing has prepared me for what's happened there in the past 10 years. you could probably put straight up put malicious code or material in an asset flip and it would probably go unnoticed for weeks and unaddressed for months, well after the fact. find around and fuck out policy. want to list your game? they'll gladly take your money. a ben to get in their door. it took just 20 dollars for 5 compact discs at the walton market, the closest thing your town has to a cultural center, to get them in your door after all. "what's this steam thing... is that some sorta virus??", the bodies of counter-strike and half-life 2 served as perfect carriers for this program to infect the entire landscape of playing games on the computer, worldwide. maybe you were onto something back then, dad. that proton+dxvk do be hitting tho [4].

if you're an absolute sicko, there's always go-mod.

my 30's are going well so far thanks for asking[2]. yet to have a single Monster Energy Zero Ultra and i intend to keep it that way!!!

anybody who genuinely sends the pointy nose emote in a packet on the information superhighway in the 2020s while under the age of 37 is likely a fed (but not always). and it was as fuckin patronizing to see back then as it is today. language, its usage and connotation changes and will continue to change over time. emoticons are a part of the written language, but not tied to any specific one. there are some words in my primary language (this one) that i don't really hear tossed around so frivolously anymore. it's almost always for the better. it gets to a point where the only people tossing those words around are doing so out of malice rather than misguided edgy provocation (edgy provocation seemed to be very common in both the reagan and bush [two of them] eras over here, which seems to either pass with time, wisdom and immense regret, or it never leaves and shifts real quick from provocative to malicious).

fluctuating "dailies" for "engagement", a common player-retention method in the current mandatory internet connection days are not the most ethical, but are far more ethical than a slot machine i guess. oh wait valve not only made those a thing in these stupid ass computer toys, but also normalized it!!! true gaming pioneers!! they really got motherfuckers out there gambling on shit you used to be able to get without paying, without limit on csbanana. "but other people can't see those" yeah my favorite thing about my tenure as an upper-bottom-tier counter strike 1.9 player was the bunch of teenagers, and many more adults poor-shaming me over the years after a sweaty, cigarettey night of minimum wage kitchen labor because i don't Have A Knife. the game is in the frags, in the objectives. the game is not in the attached mind-controlling money-siphon. "been watching you for a while.... you haven't hit shit yet! scrape it, scrape that motherfucker!!!!"

this household only has spinning discs drives in the desktop computers. i have patience as much as i have misguidance. perhaps it was because i'd spend a few hours just loading this game per day back in '05 that i can settle for going to grab a cup of water while my computer boots.

i still have 4 of those 5 compact discs. i still have an optical drive in my desktop. i still use the optical drive in my desktop. when i upgrade after a decade+ of service, i will also upgrade the optical drive in my desktop, as well as the case to one of the like 3 still being made that respects computer users enough to let them mount and install a 5.25 inch optical drive into their desktop computer if they want or need to.

funny how valve tends to get the pass for doing the bad shit folks criticize other megacorp publishers for, because they went about it in fairly low-key ways. (mandatory sign-in and internet requirements for entirely offline games, "but it's just cosmetic" slot machines for paid games [that later went free to play due to the "experiments" in exploiting that particular backdoor in the human brain], possible "gpl laundering"[4] in the video game space, etc)

one of those run-on sentences is intentional.

whenever i would get upset at my computer for taking too long to load a map i would quit half-life 2 as soon as possible (5+ minutes for task manager to appear sometimes) and just go over to CSS's cs_office in an empty local server and stab all of the Dell Dimensions Beefy Computers in any given wing of the campus. no, i wasn't the type of person to smack the case of the monitor if the pentium 4 was being a pentium 4 and/or the 256mb of ram were being 256 million Bytes of ram.

footnotes:
[1] aight this is staying

[2] (this footnote has been retroactively left blank, for the safety of you and i.)

[3] this is part 3 of my Galaga Review

[4] their push toward linux these past handful of years, starting post "machines" and pre-deck. might be the best thing ever done at that company. it's kinda like a "making the best of a bad situation" situation, and the bad situation here is having most computer games post-2006 tied to this single online service, only working on an operating system that has only degraded non-consensual update after non-consensual update. i do not think there is any "gpl laundering" going on at this stage, but i wouldn't be surprised if they ended up doing that in the early stages of steam for linux, the debian-based steamOS or proton. (perhaps it wasn't noticeable, as said earlier their far more heinous shit ended up just being welcomed with open arms by The G*mers as if this corporation was a messiah. the benefit of the doubt makes me wish that if any "gpl laundering" did happen, it was inadvertent)

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if i ever end up playing this again (nonzero chance i will play it again), maybe i'll be blinded again for just a few days afterward. maybe i'll drop it again after the particular stretch of the game that i kinda enjoy for reasons unrelated to either the gameplay or the story. it has some places worth hanging out in (if you're a sicko for utilitarian architecture and decay), but those spaces don't want you to hang out in them. it wants you to glaze over them. mouth open and all.

as for the black mesa compound??? that is a very, very different situation. that is place worth hanging out in, and a place that WANTS you to hang out in it.