Okay recently Ben and I finished Portal 2.  Understand that Portal may be his favorite game ever.  Can't tell you how many times he and I ran through that thing.  The Portal Song was the 3d song he ever liked.  (A song called Sha-boom or something like that from Cars was his first, Can't Get No Satisfaction his second.  Yeah I see a leap there too.  Anyway.)

He wasn't so impressed with Portal 2.  We did play it twice.  He often saw solutions long before I did.  I think he didn't like it because that one computer was far too yappy and there was too much running around and not-portaling.  More than once he mentioned that Portal was short.  He wouldn't let us race too much through Portal (the original) because we always had to stop for him to examine the signs.  Though he did like the potato parts and the moon in Portal 2.  (Sorry for the spoilers.)  Plus the song at the end is decidedly unimpressive.

Anyway as he/we've already played Half Life 2 and it doesn't look like Black Mesa ever will come out, I sat him down just to let him see Half Life.  I'd told him it was the best computer game ever of course.  Didn't take him long before he totally got into it.  The train at the beginning probably sold him. He's outgrown Thomas and Chuggington (mainly due to familiarity), but he hasn't outgrown trains!

My daughter Jordan (16 months old born on Valentine's Day 2010) liked the part in Half Life where the big monster is bang bang bang bang banging in the missile silo.  She may have thought it was a kind of music. 

Half Life is tough to play on a modern pc.  Lots of sliding around b/c the machine runs too quickly and jump inexplicably is messed up.  Can't jump high enough to get over even low barriers.  Couldn't find anything online about how to mod that either.  Go figure–not much online for a 13 year old game.

Anyway at one point Ben said it was a great game.  So quality I guess does show even through severely dated graphics and even to a soon-to-be 5 year old. 

Now of course he wants to play Half Life 2 again.  We'll probably spend 20 minutes throwing the can at that guard.  HAHA I like that part too.  Especially these days (glower) when authority seems to have gone insane.

He didn't like Alice–which I'll talk about out in the TR blog about the game.

Not because it was scary really.  Remember this kid survived Metro 2033, Dead Space 2, and Singularity no problem.  Though not the creaky door in Amnesia.  He'll probably reach middle-age still remembering that door as the epitome of frightfulness.  

But long before then (say in the next couple of months) he'll probably also experience Doom 3.  Which will be interesting for me too to see after how well-done Dead Space 2 was (especially that part when we went BACK on the ship)!  What a great sequence that was.  Right up there with the train sequence in Uncharted 2 (which might be the single best gaming sequence in the history of computer games).

Oh yeah!  We played both Uncharted games and he was there for every minute.  Eagle eyes spotting stuff everywhere.

I love that kid.  One day last week when we were hanging out together he said, "Dad, this was my favorite day".

Only thing I remember about Doom 3 was you could run through the rooms, spawn all the monsters, then just turn around and fight them.  Every single room.  Took away a lot of the atmosphere.  Ha!  Almost a kind of joke.  Removing atmosphere in a game about a space ship.  Anyhow.

Stalker Ben's staying away from.  Not fast enough for him I think.  But oh boy I LOVE it!  It's how Fallout 3 should have been!  (Lots of posts elsewhere complaining about how many times it crashed on me.)  Not a crash ever in Stalker--and creepy as heck!

Okay that pretty much gets me up to date.  Oh yeah: Duke Nukem Forever.  No it is not disappointing because it couldn't live up to the original.  It's disappointing because its humor is so puerile and just…not funny.  I mean how many "stop playing with your balls" lines do we need to hear?  In my opinion it's just AWFUL.  The original was cute: cops as pigs, occasional references to excretory functions–but this was just….And whoever came up with the idea of eliminating saves should have been fired.

Anyway okay that's it for now.  Too busy being a dad and working to worry about much else.  I am losing my life every day and I am gaining it every day.  I study my children's faces so they will be the last things I remember in those final moments when the electricity goes out in my brain.  I wish we could live forever just so I could be with them.