Islam and Half-Life

[Epoetker]

I find it useful to compare things to things I know.

If I were to compare the three major monotheistic religions to the games made by Valve, here's how I would do it:

1. Judaism is like Half-Life 1. The product of people who had no experience making video games but a vague desire to "play something they wanted to play," they set out to make a game using the Unreal engine that would go on to appeal to almost every one of the current generation of 1988 computer gamers (who are the Jews in this scenario.) The revolutionary integration of story and gameplay (you never, ever, ever have to simply sit through a cutscene and control is never relinquished throughout the entire game) enabled it to give an experience like few others and inspire nearly every other game designer in the world. By today's standards, the game was ugly, unpolished, and often relied on glitchy and unfinished physics applications limited by the technology of the time, but its central theory of gameplay was so intellectually complete that even now it's considered the benchmark model for any aspiring Tier 1 game designer. Here's the history of the company and the game:



2. Christianity is like Half Life 2, obviously. When Valve gained the money, fame, and manpower it needed to make it's OWN engine, and the time required to make it exactly how they wanted it, Half Life 2 was the result. And Half Life 2 wasn't merely considered one of the great achievments in computer games. It regularly makes the top ten lists of Greatest Games of All Time. Nearly as revolutionary was Valve's concomitant release of the Source Engine, that eventually enabled the release of such incidental games like Portal, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. All of these developments not only made Valve a lot of money but radically expanded the number of people who played video games in the first place. Good News is not limited to the Jews. The Gentiles may also game, and be enlightened. But don't take my word for it. Take the word of an actual artist:



3. Islam? Full Life Consequences. The Half-Life story retold as imagined by someone who's not too invested in anything but making his first big debut. Watch the following video and imagine if that were the only version of Half-Life available to us.



Even with the obvious cheesiness, there's still a lot of 'there' there. The graphics are still disturbingly good-looking, the environments still stark, and the story still a quarter of the way intriguing. We can tell that the narrator is unreliable as hell, but despite the exaggerations, lies, self-insertions and distortions he's obviously seen something much better than he is.

And that is my kindest opinion of Islam. Mohammed is John Freeman, and the Koran is earnest fan fiction told according to his own point of view and foisted on people who were denied any other Source of information. In Islamic countries, it's a matter of who controls the Internet and media Valve.