Anyway, yeah. About 2.5 or 3 years ago, Justin provided me with the Hoona Igna Chowa Neha CD, which I said I would get around to playing 'soon'. With all the hype about Half Life 2 all of the sudden, I figured that 'soon' has no lower limit, and decided to give the original a whirl. So, after my DVD-ROM drive decided it wasn't going to read the CD (the first CD it's ever not been able to read -- what the heck brand was that anyway, Justin?), I got it installed from my DVD-R drive. Trying to launch the game, I was surprised to find that it wanted a CD key. Justin had not supplied me with a CD key. *sigh* After a decent bit of searching, groups.google.com provided my answer (only using it for single player!), and I was on my way. Only Half Life wanted me to install NT Service Pack 3. Goddammit. After taking a few minutes to download the 80 megabyte(!) patch from my lovely Mercury account over at FileShack, I was on my way.
So, I spent a few minutes setting things up -- making the key layout not suck, choosing the OpenGL renderer, setting it to 1600x1200 with all the goodies, and I was ready to play. It should be noted at this point that I was feeling a bit under the weather -- I'd been a little off most of the day, and dinner hadn't sat well with me. So, I started up the game. The first thing I noticed was that Monsieur Freeman ran at about 800 miles per hour. After galloping through the training mission, I started the game proper. The intro thing seemed to drag on for a thousand hours, but wasn't too bad. I finally work my way over to the mass spectrometer / slip-gate ripoff, and by the time I get there I'm feeling a little woozy. After waiting for some retard to open the switch cover remotely (why do I need to be in this room again?), I push a button, and things start spinning. This was, perhaps, not the best thing that could have happened. Next they tell me that the sample has arrived, and I go around to both computers in the room, wondering how the heck I make it do whatever it needs to do (I still can't figure out why the heck I'm in this room). Finally I wander around the glowy, dangerous-looking room a bit. When I bump into the sample I realize I can move it, so I push the thing into the glowy spinny thing. (At this point, I can't help but wonder why they've hired a theoretical physicist to push carts around, when the robot who brough the thing to the room could've done the rest of the job too.) Well, anyway, at this point everything goes all spinnier and blinkier and flashing between dimensions and darkness and *ugh*. When I finally get out of there, I'm feeling pretty damn nauscious, so I do a quick save and exit. Later, when I'm responding to Justin's response to my ICQ wondering where the hell the CD key is, the idea for today's comic was born. I hope you find it hilarious (it took the place of the almost true story of my officemate's car catching fire, afterall).
And I can only assume that the text on the bottom of that Half Life CD says 'WAR32!!!', which I guess means that WarFTP is on the same CD or something. I can't conceive of what else it might say.
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