The day before yesterday, I bowed to my genetic imperative and followed the geek herd to a local software vendor, where I purchased Half-Life 2. I’m not going to begin to explain what this is, because if you’re reading this, you likely already know. Mom, you’ll just have to call me to ask.

So anyway. Once I got the precious little box into my car in the parking lot, I whipped it out of its plastic bag and let the delicious odor of glossy printer’s ink waft up to my waiting nostrils. A synthetic, oddly alluring scent, no doubt triggering subconscious memories of glossy porno mags from my distant teenage youth. Hell, let’s not mince words: I was holding pornography, of a sort. A product designed, at its core, to appeal to the savage R-complex urge to smash and kill, an appeal to a pleasure of a most visceral and taboo kind, not altogether unlike the procreative drive also found in the primitive proto-human center of our brains. Like a good porno mag in the hands of a fifteen-year-old, I couldn’t wait to get it home and make use of it.

I’ve been playing Half-Life 2 for a couple of days now, and I must say that I am indeed impressed. The physics engine lives up to the hype, and the atmosphere is every bit as engrossing as the original. More so, in fact. So far, Valve seems to have produced another wonderful title that geeks will be fondly reminiscing about for years, if not decades, to come. Six years the faithful have waited for this gem, and, thankfully, it has not been found wanting. Six long years seem to have produced a meticulously crafted piece of software that is indeed complete, a near-mythical condition in the software industry.

There was, though an initial fly in the ointment, an unexpected barrier erected before which, I am sad to say, I sagged, defeated, denied the bliss that was my birthright ever since I fought my way out of Black Mesa’s dark warrens six years ago. I’m not sure if Valve can be faulted for this; it might be either Sierra’s or Vivendi’s fault. There’s a lame bug in the installer. HL2 comes bundled with Counter-Strike: Source. Well, I’ve played CS in the past, and didn’t like it. It wasn’t for me. I decided, therefore, that I would decline to install it when the option came up in the HL2 installer. After three failed attempts at installing it, getting all the way to the fourth disc of five, only to have it fail every time. I was figuring that perhaps I had a bad fourth disc, I was going to have to shlep back to the store to exchange it, what a pain, blah blah blah.

I decided to see if any of the other members of the herd had encountered similar problems with bad discs, but couldn’t find any buzz in the community. Finally, I ended up at Vivendi Universal’s site, where I was finally told that there was a bug in the installer that was triggered if you didn’t opt to install CS as well. My discomfort vanished, but in its place was a sense of astonishment. Six years and who knows how many millions of dollars later, to say nothing of the untold man-hours spent by extremely bright people to make this game, and this makes it past their QA team?!? An installer defect that obvious?

The mind staggers. It’s still a good game, though. You won’t be sorry if you pick it up.