Achievement Unlocked!

I just have to post about this, I’ve been sitting here happy, and want to show this picture around.

A little back story: Helf-Life 2 Episode Two has an optional achievement, you can find this little garden gnome right at the beginning of the game and you have to take it with you almost to the very end. This may sound like a simple task, but the way it’s done isn’t. Basically the gnome is like that damned flash light in Doom 3: you either carry it, or you do everything else. Add to this it has seemingly no friction at all, so the driving sections of the game become a real nightmare to complete (you put gnome into car, start driving, gnome slides off, you stop, put gnome back in again). Basically your best bet is to pick up the gnome with the gravity gun, shoot it as far ahead as possible (and pray it doesn’t fall somewhere unreachable), then repeat.

OK, so I found this save on my hard drive last night, where I had already dragged that bastard past half of the game and I thought “OK, let’s do this!”. I remembered some previous games, where it worked similarly before. For example I felt so fed up with Diablo II, that I had to stop playing it right before the very end. A few months later though I remembered the cool feeling and immersion, that I had when I played the game and just went for it. Similarly, here I was almost immediately ‘in’ the game again and the task didn’t seem so difficult at all this time.

I got through White Forest for (maybe) the fourth time, now together with the little fellow and after reaching the silo I put him in the little hatch on the side of the rocket, (where I guess he’d have some very deep conversations with that headcrab Lamarr, that also sneaked on board).

So there, the screenshot above was taken just moments before insertion, I pressed F5 loads of times afterwards, but it seems like the game internal screenshot function doesn’t capture the ‘Achievement Unlocked’ badge with the shot, so in the bottom right you can see a cutout of the achievement tab, that can be reached through the main menu…

Anyway, I did it, and it was definitely a great gaming moment in my life and as I’ve seen on the net for a lot of other people too.