XBox poop

My "vacation" failed to start last week, since my main active client had a bunch of revisions for me to make, which didn't surprise me. The work I have done went live on Friday, so we are now done-done and I hope to do interesting things starting today. (The client's already started to make new sales via the software I wrote, which makes everyone feel good.)

First, though, I spent the weekend sick at home, playing video games. Saturday classicaljunkie hung out and we played XBLA stuff together, and Sunday I spent alone playing Half Life 2, which is new to me. And, erm, I just played it all morning this morning, too. That's enough of that.

This is my first exposure to the current generation of digital gaming with a high-def display, sitting at the end of an intertube ready to pump more gamage at me whenever I wanted. I can see why someone could just sit and play forever. (Microsoft happily keeps your credit card info on-file after your first online purchase, so buying more downloadable gobbidge thereafter is as easy as pressing a button. They are bastards.)

I haven't played TF2 yet. I'm a little scared to. I had fun runnin around one of the maps alone just to check out the place.

The sickness was worrisome. After a month of masterful regularity, maybe the best I've ever had, I didn't go for five days and it was starting to hurt. Sunday I turned to a coordinated regimen of many things to get it all out, and it worked, and it was pretty awful. I am going to drink through this bottle of prune juice and hope that balance has been restored to the force. I have no idea what's going on.

Running a science lab in video-game land

The Half Life games explain away the protagonist's (genre-typical) ability to get shot and blown up a zillion times over the course of play by putting him in an "HEV suit", explained as a scientific tool for working with dangerous lab materials, and which happened to be handy when bad things started happening in his lab at the start of the first game.

What isn't explained is why it repels the vulcan-gun fire from helicopters and the slavering jaws of alien brainslugs with ease, but the moment you step into an actual hazardous environment (like the radioactive goo that's ubiquitous in at least one major chapter of Half Life 2) it starts yelling and falling apart.