Well, I am the latest victim of the rampant 360 hardware failure. I figure I am out of commission for up to five weeks and may miss the Halo 3 launch. That is not a big problem since I rarely buy releases on the first day. And I do have a couple of games I want to play on the old Xbox; Chronicles of Riddick and Indigo Prophesy. The hardware failure is not the end of the world but it is kind of a bummer. I was loving Bioshock and Kaboom, all over.

In the interest of game history, I bought the original Half-Life from Steam to play it and see what the whole thing is about. I have a couple of observations. First, playing on a keyboard is not nearly as fun to me as playing with a game pad and a mouse. And second, I know this game came out three years before Halo CE and allegedly revolutionized FPS's or something but the difference between this game and Halo in terms of fun, playability, and every other thing is light-years, not years. I am in the blast pit trying to get back up the ladder to the stupid button to waste big alien monster so I can move on and, honestly, I could care less. The tedious stealth mission is made worse by bad mechanics and the whole game is trial and error. It is just so boring, frustrating and really not much fun. If I do finish this, it will be because I just had nothing else to do or wanted to get to the end for the famous choices. Really, there is no other reason. This thing may have been ground breaking but there is a reason game sales have sky rocketed on consoles. Playing this game will give you a lot of insight into that reason.