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 fucking spiders, they move like giant fucking 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 fucking 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.

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On a less gross note, I have started playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. This game has the most inexcusably long intro cutscene of any game I’ve ever played. If you try to skip through it by pressing A at each text box, even if you don’t read any of them, it still takes about half an hour. Add two short tutorial battles in the midst of that, and you’re looking at close to 45 minutes before you can save the game. The game after that seems like fun, and I’m sure I’ll be even more disgusted if I ever play Xenogears, but still… unneccessary.