Bush has turned the U.S. into a 5-year-long game of "Half-Life"

[Enraged_Ape]

I don't know how many of you remember "Half-Life", but it was an award-winning computer/video game released in the late 90s. The central premise was that you were a scientist in a lab that had a terrible accident, unwittingly unleashing a slew of alien monsters into your facility. You had to fight your way through what seemed like an endless stream of mind-shattering horrors to freedom.

What made the game so popular (it was dubbed "Game of the Year" for many years) is that at every minute, you had no idea what was around the next corner, but you could absolutely bet that whatever you would encounter was even more horrifying and awful than what you had JUST faced before. This game was nerve-wracking beyond belief. I couldn't even make it through the whole thing.

But that's exactly the feeling I get from this administration. It's getting to the point where I don't even want to read the news in the morning. Every time I think that the gang of diseased jackals in Washington has committed the ULTIMATE outrage, they TOP IT the next day. Every single time.

I had to stop playing "Half-Life". I wish I could stop playing "Life in the U.S. Under the Bush Administration."

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

1. If we're currently playing Half-Life, then...

Half-Life 2 is Bush's vision of the future. And it isn't pretty.

Totalitarian state with enforced curfews and armed "Civil Protection" officers patrolling everywhere, raiding buildings at random and arresting "disruptive citizens"

[Enraged_Ape]

2. I haven't played Half-Life 2

I couldn't even make it through the first Half-Life. I made the mistake of playing it late at night and early in the morning.

If only cheat codes worked in real life.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

3. It's very good, but what was the most striking was the realism

The city you start in, City 17, a city with no name, no history. You know nothing, except that someone calling themseves the Combine have taken over. The citizens look beaten and broken, shuffling from one dilapidated area to another, passing through Civil Protetion checkpoints. And looming over every part of the city, viewed from every city block, is the Citadel.


The military are everywhere in the city. It's a PNACer's wet dream come true.

I play that game now, and it looks more and more like what America's future will be. There will be a few people (the "Have Mores") in the walled off sections of our cities that are protected from the massess, but the rest of us will flounder in the ruins of what was once a great country.

[Enraged_Ape]

4. God, that's horrifying

That's even more scary and depressing than those brain-sucking things from Half-Life 1.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

7. Oh, the headcrabs are all over the place.

In fact, the Combine uses them to clear out a rebellious area, "shelling" the area with canisters filled with headcrabs. There's a whole town in the middle of the game that was shelled by the Combine, and now it's full of headcrab zombies. (Not to mention that there's two more types of headcrabs, fast, and poisonous. Fear them.)

The most satisfying parts of the game are when you're in the city. At the beginning, and the end. The end part is, quite simply, open rebellion on City 17's streets. And it is gloriously horrifying in its own way. City 17 looked dismal before, but now it's in ruins.

I only say this because if (and I am in no way endorsing armed revolt) this ever happens in America again, the results will be frightening to behold. While Half-Life 2 is only a video game, it does an excellent job of encapsulating the horrors of totalitarianism, and the inevitable(?) backlash against said absolute rule.

[Enraged_Ape]

9. I only wish I had the stomach for this game

After dealing with the "headcrabs" et al. of the first Half-Life (and it was those sonic dogs and the hostile marines that finally put me off), I really don't think I could handle the upgraded version. This Bush administration is providing me with a real-time Half-Life. Nothing but terror and horror and fear and total doom every single moment of every single day. Every morning, it seems, there is some fresh hell that this administration yearns to unleash on those who are not in the top 1% of income earners in this country.

[kenny blankenship]

5. Never got past the point where the govt. sends soldiers to kill you

that part sure seems true to life (Life-As-We-Know-It-Under-Bush).

[Enraged_Ape]

6. That's also where I had to bail

It's like, you've gone through all this crap, and now your own government wants to hose you?

And they're even worse than the aliens in that game.

[name not needed]

8. Yeah, except for the fact that

the US Army does not consist of 12 year olds saying shit like "BOOM HEADSHOT", "OMG LAG", and the classic "WTF ST3AM IS SO GH3Y"

[Enraged_Ape]

10. Dud3, you play way too many online gam32.

I have no idea what the h311 you'r3 saying.