First person shooters are great fun (usually) and I have purchased and completed all of the Half-Life games. Half-Life 2 ended with a cliff hanger.

The next game in the series Half-Life 2: Episode 1 was made available today. I had pre-ordered and had the locked gamed downloaded and ready to be unlocked for a week now. After playing it for less than an hour it looks like good fun and continues the game.

The LOADING… portion is a pain. My PC is a few years old but it’s a P4 3.2GHZ with HT, has one gigabyte of RAM, a Nvidia 6800 AGP w/256MB, etc.

The loading of data is death and kills the flow of the game. I’ll do the usual optimization and make sure nothing is competing with the game. Once the loading screen is done the game plays very well but this is a pain.