They’re waiting for you, Gordon

The third gaming juggernaut of Fall 2004, Half-Life 2 (PC), has landed. The first two are, of course, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2) and Halo 2 (Xbox).

doom3 and hl2.gif

My local Futureshop ordered in 200 retail copies, and all but twenty was sold out when I went in at 5pm. All the ones with the main hero, theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, on the cover were gone. Three Collector’s Edition boxes were left. I went with the regular copy with the female protagonist Alyx on the cover.

Vivendi QA issues: A nice employee was opening up all my retail box for me to check for CD rot. Sure enough, one of mine had a delaminated Disc 4. I had it replaced on the spot.

For a a game of this magnitude, there has been little talk of it on the net. Maybe GameSpy’s Daily Victim was right, you would never hear about the perfect game, because everyone would be doing nothing but playing it.

Boil the ocean with a grain of salt

BBC Radio 4’s John Humphrys laments the mutilation of the English language into “management speak” filled with rhetoric and cliches. When this is perpetuated by the world’s political leaders, Humphrys asserts that their slick, hyperbolic way with words can have sinister implications:

Humphrys notes [British PM Tony Blair]’s apparent fear of verbs and mocks his speeches, which are peppered with verbless phrases like “new challenges, new ideas,” or “for our young people, a brighter future” and “the age of achievement, at home and abroad”.

By using this technique, Humphrys says, Blair is simply evading responsibility. “The point about verbs is that they commit the speaker,” he writes. “Verbs cement sentences to their meaning so it’s not surprising that politicians tend to mistrust them.”

Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse once wrote, “The words you use control the thoughts you have.” Personally, I’m trying to ban the words “productivize” and “incentivize” from my local workspace.