Half-Life 2 is such a good game, but I figured out why I have such long stretches between play sessions: This game scares the hell out of me. Sure, it’s not Resident Evil, with zombie dogs jumping in through the window. That’s not to say there aren’t zombies though; they do show up every now and then, usually after noticing a large smear of blood across a wall and floor, leading to an ominous closed door. And when the inevitable beast shambles forward, and the headcrab leaps towards me, I fear (if only for a moment) that it might actually jump out of the screen and devour me.

So once I get past the burning fear, and the confusion that comes from continuing a story-based game after a break of several months (“Where am I going again? Wait, do I need to go across that bridge, or is that where I just came from? Why is that guy shooting at me?”), I am back in the world of City 17, guns blazing. It is immersive and disturbing, but also immensely satisfying. Playing it is amazingly intense, but I find myself days later, thinking back on how cool those events were. So here, in no particular order, are the things that really impress me about Half-Life 2:

1. Interactive “cutscenes”: I put “cutscenes” in quotes because, unlike the cutscenes in most games, Half-Life 2 does not actually cut away during the story progression. You are still in complete control while events unfold, free to walk around the room, view a conversation from any angle, or just stand in awe as a giant robot throws an oncoming van into a crowd of snipers. You see the events happen in real time, and it draws you in to the story. You observe the action not as a person watching a television screen, but as a character in the middle of the scene. The importance of this perspective can not be overstated.

2. Immersive environments: Half-Life 2 is not populated by boogeymen in closets, waiting for you to stumble by so they can pop out and say “Boo!” Your attackers are creatures and soldiers and yes, sometimes even zombies. Sometimes you will stumble on a battle in progress, and you have to ready yourself to face the victor; sometimes you come upon a desk littered with soda cans and papers, and then notice reinforcements arriving on the security monitor; sometimes you see the remains of a headcrab attack, and are left to face the unfortunate soul who was killed. Either way, you happen upon realistic enemies who inhabit realistic locations, not wax mannequins waiting for a tripwire before they spring to life.

3. Interactive environments: Remember those games where you need to get the gold key to open the gold door? Or you need to blue keycard, which happens to glow brightly as it sits by itself on the desk? Half-Life 2 has none of these. What it does have are realistic environments with real-world solutions. So when you are faced with an electrical fence, you can actually follow the wires to the control panel that you need to disable. Or maybe you have a fan that needs to be disconnected. In that case, you can see the air vents that travel the room, and follow them from room to room until you reach the generator. But these are not painted red or under a bright glowing arrow; they are just normal, ordinary air ducts, like you might see in any other building. The environments are put together logically, and everything pretty much works, so you can solve a problem using common sense, instead of trying to figure out what arcane series of steps the creators wanted you to follow. You begin to see the environment as a real thing, not just painted bitmaps on featureless walls.

4. Realistic physics: In the same vein, you have real objects that you can pick up and interact with. Maybe you can jump from one rock to the next to avoid the toxic sewage…or instead you can grab that board for a makeshift bridge. If that ramp tilts as you walk across it, you begin looking for something heavy to weight down the other end. And maybe that barrel will float long enough for you to jump on it and bound across to the other side of the lake. But again, you can see and use real objects to solve real problems.

5. Gameplay variety: You face military forces that require direct combat. You encounter overwhelming forces that require stealth. You are sent into a zombie-infested town, and forced to battle as you run for your life through a never-ending onslaught. You have to drive across the countryside, avoiding or shooting the huge attacking insects. Then later, you have to avoid those same insects by only jumping from rock to rock, because touching the sand will bring forth a swarm that will most likely destroy you. And later still, you gain a gland from one of these creatures, and throwing it at your foes causes a swarm to emerge from the earth and attack the enemy. From mission to mission, the gameplay changes and evolves, making sure you never get bored.

6. The sound: Oh sweet merciful fate, the sound! The machine guns generate a room-shaking amount of sound, and yet you can still hear the “clink clink” of individual shells hitting the ground. You can pinpoint an attacking zombie simply by the direction of the approaching shriek, and you sometimes hear large mechanical beasts doing battle behind the walls nearby. If you can afford to play this with the sound cranked beyond tolerable levels, I heartily recommend it.

Luckily, Prime has a few key features to help alleviate the confusion. First, it has huge 3D maps, where inaccessible doors or passageways are (usually) clearly indicated. So when I get the Ice Beam that opens white doors, all I have to do is look for rooms with white doors that I haven’t opened yet. So that at least gives me a place to start. And if that doesn’t work, there is a hint system that can be turned on and off at will. It’s direct, but subtle: You are given a “sensor reading” that shows you which room you need to get to, but you are not told exactly how to reach it. Instead, you have to figure out which room is closest on the map, and see if you can find a previously-undiscovered door or ramp or clue. It doesn’t hold your hand, but it lets you do the gruntwork of searching, without that nagging feeling of, “What if I’m not looking in the right place…?”

So after running into a few areas where I was blocked by water (you can swim in water, but you can’t jump very high in it), I finally figured out that I needed to find the Gravity Suit, which would let me move through water as if it were air. I sussed out some likely candidate locations, and after a few dead ends, I ended up back in the research labs of Phendrana Drifts. I turned on the hint system for a moment to verify that I was, in fact, in the right place. Then I went about searching for that secret room.

I ended up in a room filled with water and tentacles and electric fish, which is about as fun as you might expect. Furthermore, the walls were too steep, and I couldn’t find a way to swim out. So I started switching visors, and lo and behold, I spotted the Gravity Suit, safely ensconced in ice at the bottom of the lake. I grabbed the power-up, watched the animation of putting on my new suit (ooooh, gold with purple highlights! I will be quite the hit at the annual bounty-hunter ball!), and bounded off with my newfound powers. Oh, and the Gravity Suit also improves visibility in water, so it goes from being downright murky to just slightly hazy. Thanks Nintendo! I went off, found my save point, and now I am ready to play again tonight because I already know at least a few areas that I can now reach thanks to my new suit. In all, I would rather have too many options than too few. We’ll see if I’m still feeling so positive after tonight’s session.

With that in mind, I am starting a new column: Daily Gamer. Every day, I will take a few moments to write about videogaming: either the latest games I am playing, things I am looking forward to, thoughts on gaming in general, or interesting facts about my videogame database.

Yes, I have a videogame database. But it is not as geeky as you might think. It is more so.

So that’s it! Stay tuned to this page for my daily thoughts.

But with the latest Star Trek…well, to be honest, I just wasn’t that excited about it. Nemesis was painfully dull, poorly thought out, and really stabbed the movie series in the heart. So with that in mind, I really had no expectations for the latest film, and certainly didn’t imagine that it might revive the…>shudder<…franchise.

Then the reviews started pouring in. “Fun,” “accessible,” “great storyline”…okay, now I’m starting to get excited. So, paradoxically, the more good things I hear about the movie, the less I want to hear. Then Wayne passed along a review from another friend, saying it was the best sci-fi movie since The Empire Strikes Back. And now I find myself trying my hardest not to get excited about the film, because I am afraid that the more I am looking forward to it, the worse I will be let down by the end result. (See Spider-Man 3 or Indiana Jones and the Stupid Crystal Alien Head for other examples of this phenomenon.) All I know so far is that Kirk is apparently some sort of captain, Spock is torn between two worlds, they punch each other or something, a bunch of spaceships fly around and shoot phasers, Sulu fights on the hull of a spaceship, and someone sky-dives (space-dives?) past a giant space station that is exploding all around him. Oh, and Scotty thinks something is exciting. That’s all I know, and frankly, it’s already too much.

I’ll let you know what I think after the movie tomorrow.

What’s new with you?

OmniWeb also has lots of preferences for ad blocking, and all preferences can be set on a per-site basis. So I can adjust the ad blocking for a particular site, or I can do tricky things like telling my banking site that I am using Safari so it doesn’t give me the “Your browser is incompatible” warning every time I log in. Set it and forget it.

My favorite OmniWeb feature is website shortcuts. For any site I visit frequently, I have set up a two-letter shortcut, so whenever I want to go to Penny Arcade, I just type “pa” in the address bar, and I go right there! You can also set up search shortcuts, so if I want to find a book on Amazon, I just type “am thomas sowell” and the search results show up. A Google search is “g”, Wikipedia is “wi”…you get the idea. You would not believe how much time it saves! And all of these are compatible with Quicksilver, so I can jump to Facebook from any application by typing “command-space, fb, enter”. It is really convenient.

There are a bunch of other little interface niceties that I probably just take for granted by now, like tabs with little thumbnail previews. But in any case, you can’t go wrong with OmniWeb 5.9. And it’s free. Go try it out.

With those problems in mind, enter Mint! Mint recognizes that data entry and balancing are the most tedious aspects of any personal-finance system, so Mint is makes it easy for you. In fact, once you complete the initial setup, you never need to enter any transactions again. (Well, you may want to tweak the already-entered transactions, but we’ll ignore that for now.)

How does Mint manage this monumental task? It’s simple: You just give it the online IDs and passwords to your financial institutions, and Mint automatically downloads and categorizes the transactions every day. Now, I know what you’re saying (and apparently everyone else online): This sounds monumentally unsafe. From what I can tell, the passwords are kept securely, and your name or account numbers are never entered, so there’s nothing that anyone could ever DO with the data, even if they got it. So if you can get past that hurdle, you will have a system where every transaction is automatically tracked each day, and you can see where your money is going at any given point in time.

So how well does it work? Well, I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far, it seems pretty good. You can set up your own categories, set budget numbers, and Mint even tries to automatically categorize transactions for you (although I have no idea how it manages to do this). And if you have some retailer that it doesn’t recognize (like the local Gas Depot by my house), you can just assign it a category, then tell Mint that all future transactions with that retailer should be assigned the same category. You can also set up monthly budgets (Mint will tell you your average monthly expenditures for any category, if you need a baseline), and you can even get email or text-message alerts when your budget items go too high, or your account balances drop too low.

It doesn’t have as many options as Quicken, and I certainly wouldn’t use it to track every transaction to the penny. (There is no account for Cash, for example.) But for a reasonably close snapshot of your current financial state, with little to no data entry involved, Mint beats Quicken hands-down.