I won­der if any­one under­stands how much the release of HL 2 means to me. I won­der if any­one can under­stand how emo­tion­al I get just see­ing the con­cept art. The first Half-Life defined more than a year of my life, the way decades have defined phas­es for pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. Half-Life was my favourite game of all time, not even sec­ond to Chrono Trigger. It was an expe­ri­ence, a jour­ney, not just a game, and the sequel is being released tomor­row.

I for­mat­ted my machine yes­ter­day (some­thing I haven’t done in over a year, even though I used to every quar­ter before the release of XP), to clean up my sys­tem in prepa­ra­tion. I’m hop­ing I’ll be able to run it on a decent graph­ics set­ting; my video card is a lit­tle dat­ed now, but it’s still a DirectX 9 gen­er­a­tion ATI Radeon.

I can’t wait. The entire idea that some­thing I’ve been wait­ing more than four years for will be released tomor­row has­n’t quite set in my head yet.