I played Half-Life 2 on Friday for the first time since February. I am now in the thick of Ravenholm, and have encountered every horrible thing that the sleepy little hamlet has to offer: all three varieties of headcrab and zombie.
As I’ve blogged about here and elsewhere, I’m a great big wuss when it comes to Ravenholm. I actually wouldn’t mind the lightning-fast, shrieking, skeletal zombies leaping at me from the rooftops if giant spidery-looking things didn’t subsequently jump off of them.
The worst, of course, are the poison headcrabs. They look like giant spiders, they move like giant spiders (say what you will about the creepiness of the original headcrabs — I could usually remind myself that they looked like walking Thanksgiving turkeys), and they make rattling/hissing noises like the giant spiders in movies. These things scare the bejeezus out of me. Given the opportunity, if I know or suspect that one of these is around the corner, I will saturate the area with grenades rather than face the potential of having to watch one of these move. I should also note that I’ve been playing through Ravenholm on God mode, so none of these things can actually HURT me.
If that wasn’t enough, the poison zombies each carry four poison headcrabs, and can throw them at you from up to two stories below. Typically at that point I’m too busy spontaneously evacuating my bowels to actually kill the things.
I'm a structural engineer and improvisor. I like nerdy stuff. A Minneapolis boy born and raised, I have a lovely wife from California and an amazing toddler son.
