I was watching my friend play Half-Life 2, not all that long ago – all part of my elaborate plan to turn him to the PC side, after a lifetime of console gaming. He was on the chapter called ‘Sandtraps’, and had just encountered a simple puzzle, where the player has to find two car batteries and place them into the socket to power up a gate, allowing the player to continue down the road. The first is close to hand, to show the player what it is they’re looking for. As he dutifully socketed the block, I thought about my own experiences playing the game for the first time, and remembered how long it’d taken me to find and retrieve the second battery lodged halfway up a small tower – I’d eventually got it down with a combination of carefully placed bullets and hurled projectiles, nearly losing the battery off the edge of a cliff in the process. It was a moment of victory I remembered clearly, and I wanted my friend to experience the same victory.
He is not a man known for his patience, with video games in particular, so in the spirit of wanting him to enjoy the game I decided to warn that the second battery would probably take a while to find.
Benjamin 'Games' Rose 