I’ve thought about this since the days of Wolf3D and Duke Nuke’em 3D. How do these guys move at all with all that hardware, much less jump over gaps or crawl through tight spaces. And how quickly they can switch weapons is amazing! Are they all hung on little shoulder clips? And what a racket they must make! How come I can hear footsteps, but not the cacophany of clanging and jingling that would accompany such a loadout?!

Oh, and military hardware OCD comment: AT4s are one-shot disposables like their predecessors, the LAWs. So how can you reload it?

And yeah, the mystery is cool. Actually, this is a brilliant storytelling device - the less you actually say, the better. It’s funny, but I noticed that most of the shows, movies, books and games that I enjoy have this element of mystery - where characters refer to certain events, or concepts but they are never fully explained. This sort of thing just gets your imagination working and makes these things have so much more depth than if you would just explain things in detail.

I’m forty-something years-old and have been playing Half Life 1 (and now Half Life 2) regularly since 1999. Hell, the Half Life series are the only PC games I play anymore, and the only reason I have a (small) windows partition on one of my computers.

Some may consider me a bit odd in that I can replay the hell out of a game long after most people have lost interest in it.

I’m right there with you, impatiently waiting for episode 3.

Some might disagree with me, but I think Valve made a good move in focusing more on the larger backstory of the game. I *love* not knowing what is going on, and trying to gather bits of information by listening to NPC interactions… sort of reminds me of the old “The Prisoner” television show from the 1960’s… like watching the second act of a three act play and trying to make sense of it.