Parts one, two, and three. This may be the last one for some time as the next chapter is allegedly a doozy.

Chapter 8: Sand Trap

- Not surprisingly, chapter 8 starts off exactly where chapter 7 ended. I admit, I do kind of like the way this game tells its “story.” You don’t get treated to a gap-filling cut scene between chapters, or a cutaway to Breen masturbating under his desk to statistics of oppressed masses, but you do get something that becomes far scarier (and more immersive, because it feels as though you’re putting things together for yourself) as a continuing narrative. Instead you come across some Combine or zombies, and nearby you’ll see citizens that have been beaten to death, or burned alive, or torn apart, or anything like that, and your survival instinct kicks in. Part of you wants to know what happened, but a much more urgent part of you wants to survive. I enjoy this. Onward…

- I’m in a tunnel and there seems to have been a big car wreck. There’s another napping zombie…I try to kill him with a gravity-gunned tire but he sleeps through it, bless his heart. Time for a crowbar to the headcrab then…

- I enter another room and find a zombie outside the window, reenacting his favorite scene from The Graduate. On the downside, I realize I’m going to have to fight my way out, because there was not a zombie out there before and now I triggered an invasion. On the upside, I now kind of know how it feels to be a fish in an aquarium while punk kids are pounding on the glass.

- Holy hell, it’s like zombie Woodstock out here. There’s masses of them bobbing toward me or sprinting naked through the wreckage. With the exception of the world’s most nimble spidercrab, I take them out pretty easily and clear a path with my gravity gun. I know everyone goes on about how great the gravity gun is as a weapon, but…I don’t know. It doesn’t work for me. I can grab an item to hold in case I see an enemy, but usually the item is so large that I can’t see around it and that defeats the purpose. If I’m approached by an enemy I can quickly grab something to throw, but once I do throw it I’m helpless, especially if more enemies are coming, and I’m too busy just avoiding them to even look for another object to hurl in its place. I DO like the gravity gun…especially for clearing things out of the way like in this tunnel…but jeez oh man does it slow me down in combat.

- By now I’m familiar with the Half-Life Roadtrip. Cruise a little while, explore the house on the side of the road, fight the enemies that weren’t there before you turned around to face them. This one is slightly different, though, because I seem to drive right into a Combine Family Cookout. Closer up it’s clear that they are making Soylent Green, and the house—oddly—is infested with roller mines…but I have no idea who’s throwing them in at me. Well, whatever. The game wanted me to shriek like a little girl, and I did, so mission accomplished.

- Further on there’s another complex and I arrive in time to see gunships lifting off. They’re not after me, apparently, but the footsoldiers are. I run around, shooting them, getting shot, thanking god for my bullet-proof Halloween costume. One thing I’m still hazy on…how is it that sometimes my suit gets damaged, and other times I get damaged? At first I assumed that the suit would take all of the damage until it was out of energy, at which point my body would take the damage, but that seems to have been wrong. Oh well. I should stop writing about these things and start returning fire.

- There’s an interesting puzzle here in which I need to attach two more batteries to this device to open the gate. I know it opens the gate because I followed the wire with my eyes. Clever clever! One of the batteries is in bed with this dead guy, who probably died from violating the wrong terminal sexually. I make a note not to try that myself. (At least not without first saving the game.) But that still leaves one battery unaccounted for!

- Outside I go about blasting cars with my gravity gun to see if, maybe, I can shake a battery out of one of them. The whole time I’m expecting to be raped by Combine but instead I’m raped by boring old roller mines. Eventually I spot the battery…it’s up really high on some kind of wind tower, teetering on the edge of a big piece of wood or steel. What the hell made them put it up there? Were they hiding it? What if they had to open the gate themselves?

- I look around for some explosive barrels to stack around the base of the tower but I can’t find any and can’t remember if I blew any up earlier. There’s no ladder, either. I don’t expect it to work, but I point the gravity gun at the battery and press “suck.” It works, but somehow that didn’t feel like the real solution to the puzzle, so I drop the battery (actually I accidentally fire it into the wall) and set about tossing barrels and crates up there to see if I can knock the platform down that it was sitting on. Sure enough, eventually, I can. I guess I kind of cheated without realizing it. Anyway, I hook up the battery, run my buggy over dead soldiers, and continue on my way.

- Another installation appears, and—for once sharp-eyed—I spot a man with a gun. I back up and zoom in visually before I open fire…good thing! It’s a friend. So I drive up and he asks me to put my buggy in a garage, so that I can trigger a major airborne assault which will leave no survivors. Well, I can’t disappoint him, can I? Two hundred times I drive the buggy into the wall before getting it through the door—how embarrassing! How will they ever trust me to topple an evil empire single-handedly again?

- As soon as I’m in he shuts the garage door and points out the airships. We all get shot to pieces as we take out the soldiers one by one. Eventually someone shouts that there’s a gunship by the lighthouse, so I figure I’ll go take care of it before I get more good guys killed. The lighthouse has a big spiral staircase on the inside, and I am convinced I can find rockets here. That’s the good thing about only being able to carry three rockets: there must always be an infinite supply of them whenever they expect you to take down a ship.

- On top of the lighthouse I blow away the big flying potato bug that was firing at everyone, and a man from the Red Cross asks me to follow him. No way man…I’m hurt! I scrounge up some health kits, and then, much to his dismay, walk back to the camp to see if I can find any survivors. I can’t…but I can’t find any dead bodies, either, so it’s comforting to know that they ascended into heaven. (They deserve it, too…they’ve had a hell of a day.)

- The guy from the Red Cross tells me to follow him back to the lighthouse, so I do, and he opens up a door in the basement that leads to the cliffs. I try to talk to him a few times but he doesn’t say anything. As I walk out the door, something strange happens: the man screams and says, “Argh I’m hurt!” I turn around quickly expecting to find a slew of Combine soldiers firing on him…but nobody is there, and he’s just standing there grinning. What the hell? Was he telling a joke or was that a glitch?

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- I slip from the cliffs and die.

- Eventually I make it to the end…uh-oh…headcrab crawling around and a dark tunnel ahead. I expect to find loads of zombies but I don’t even find one. Odd…usually a stray headcrab is a nice warning sign. Then I realize something horrible…I just killed a lost headcrab who was trying to make his way back to his family that accidentally left him behind on vacation. I just prematurely ended the headcrab version of Lassie Come Home.

- Up ahead I see a friendly guy squatting over a blood-spattered body and a dead antlion. I approach and he tells me to stay where I am, because walking on the sand makes the antlions “go nuts.” I think those are his words. So I try to stay on the rocks, like he tells me, but the earth opens and antlions swarm and kill him. Did I do that? (haha Urkel joke) No, but really, DID I do that? I can’t tell if I accidentally stepped on the sand and triggered it, or if it was supposed to happen so that I’d know the consequences of stepping on the sand.

- Nevertheless, I step on the sand because, as should shock exactly nobody, I have serious difficulties with the platforming aspect of this game. Each time I fall it’s a huge race to get back to some solid ground before the antlions eat me…and I always DO make it, but for some reason when they attack me I get shoved backward about fifty feet, which puts me in the sand again, which summons even more antlions. What the hell? This is brutal.

- By the grace of Quick Save I make it to a fork in the “road.” I hear something to my left so I head that way, and I find an orange antlion feasting on a dead body. I take him out from a distance, easily, and then work my way toward the cave to get at the goodies. Unfortunately one of my eyelashes falls out and lands on the sand, triggering exactly five hundred trillion antlions who pull my skin off and piss on my exposed lungs. Load saved game, please.

- This time I don’t even bother with the detour. The body was dead anyway so I can’t be missing much. Now I have to solve another physics puzzle: keeping one side of a ramp weighted down so I can run up the other side and onto the cliff. Should be easy, but I move really slowly because the ramp is narrow and unstable. I stack a crate. Then two cinder blocks on top of the crate…gently…careful now…I’ll stack a barrel here, too, just to be safe…using the gravity gun because, obviously, I can’t walk anywhere…okay. Now the ramp should be properly weighted against me. I turn around and fall onto the sand and get eaten alive by fucking monsters. Bullshit. I quit for now. Never before has the “Do you wish to save your game before quitting?” dialog box seemed so steeped in sarcasm.

- Okay, I’m back. I eventually fix the ramp. It leads me to an abandoned barn…but then, what doesn’t these days? I get some health and try to make it back and…I can’t. There’s a jump I can’t clear. However the sandy beach stretches off pretty far into the distance and there sure are a lot of loose doors and sheets of metal laying around. Obviously I’m supposed to construct some sort of land-bridge to keep from stepping on the sand. Obviously this isn’t going to be easy. Obviously I am going to say some really, really obscene things that will make me happy I don’t have a roommate anymore.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- Ooh! I made it a little further!

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- Fucking mother fucking bullshit; my little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- My little toe slips off the sheet of metal and the antlions kill me.

- I manage to get up onto a cliff on the morning of my sixtieth birthday, and on the other side I see a man who has murdered his wife and then himself with a shovel. I don’t agree with his morality, but I admire what must have been serious perseverance.

- Oh, shit. Nevermind. The Antlion King (voiced by Jonathan Taylor Thomas) arrives and chases me around, probing me, being noisy…doin’ all kinda antliony things. I see loads of explosive barrels so I decide to throw one at him, but the gravity gun can’t grab it in time…the Antlion King always comes between me and the barrel and eats my brains out. So I decide to forget it and just run…and what do you know! A friendly person with a mounted chaingun helps me fight the monster. Now we’re talking. Eventually it goes down and a hungry alien comes out and cooks it for me with his inborn ability to flash-fry things just by pointing at them. He hands me a tennis ball with Christmas lights on it and crowns me the new Antlion King. (Elton John climbs out from the sand, sings The Circle of Life, and then feasts on still-warm antlion meat.)

- I’m invited into the rebel camp for all of seven seconds before they start bitching at me to leave again. First my alien friend wants to teach me how to use the bugbait. While I’m there I take my aggressions out on a Combine they’ve strung up as a festive pinata.

- Apparently I’m going to fight side by side with the creatures who made my life a living hell for the past few hours. You know, this would have been much easier if someone just mailed the bug bait to me at Black Mesa East. Do we get Combine bait later? Because that might also come in handy.

- We storm the beaches, my bug friends and me, shutting off antlion repellent devices and tripping every emergency siren we find. When at last we meet some evil men and I get to see my soldiers in action…

- …and what the hell! They’re awesome fighters! I mean, a lot of them die but each time they get replaced by a fresh one (this also prevents me having to feed them). Every so often a Combine points his gun at me, but, if I wanted to, I could actually just sit back and watch the bugs slowly kill everybody. Now THAT’s how it’s done.

- A few more stations to storm…I do seem to be taking a lot of damage, that’s true, but I’m fully aware that I’d be dead around ten times over if not for my antlion buddies. My squad needs a name. I’m thinking…Big Phil’s Murder Bastards. We also need a team photo. I’ll use this one.

- I’m not in it because I’m taking the picture, and pointing a rifle at them.

- Anyway I love these things. Not only are they making up for the hours of torment on the sand (Oh! I get it. Sand Trap…) but I no longer give a shit about the NPCs who couldn’t care less about helping me. Between Grigori and the antlions, I’ve got myself a pretty good resistance force of my own. (Note to self: rechristen garage band Grigori and the Antlions.)

- My antlions even fly up to the top of towers and kill the guards there. Awesome! I find a rocket crate and concentrate on destroying two gunships which have been shooting us for the past ten minutes. All the while my tenacious antlions keep up the fight against ground forces. Division of labor! This is what I’ve been bitching about all along!

- I made it to Nova Prospekt. Looks nice! Someone told me earlier that it used to be a prison. I’ve never known a prison to advertise itself in big neon letters, though. More likely Nova Prospekt used to be a go-go bar.

- Soon I can’t find anywhere to go except for a flaming hole. I crawl inside and find a door…but the floor is shaking. Assuming there’s some gigantic monster in there preparing for his hot lunch, I save the game before I step through.

- Hmm. Nothing here. But there’s another tremor, the wall collapses behind me, trapping me without antlion assistance, and the chapter title is superimposed. I’ve heard (or read, or something…) that this chapter is the longest in the game. I think I’ll cap off this commentary for a while, then, and return with Nova Prospekt in one big burst. How bad can it possibly be?