Episode Two Achievements

I was talking to Rob today about how the concept of game achievements brings a new level of game play to titles like Half Life 2 Episode Two. Normally I would just play the game once before moving on to the next big thing but since Valve includes a commentary track, I ended up playing it again. Now that they included Xbox Live! style achievements in EP2, I'm playing it for a third time.

I'm almost done with getting all the achievements except I only got 322 of 333 total grubs killed so I'm going to have start again to get that last one. I promised Rob to send him this link which describes how many grubs you should have killed in certain points of the game in order to successfully get all 333.

Besides trying to crush all the elusive grubs, my favorite achievement was called "Little Rocket Man", which involved dragging the garden gnome found in the beginning of the episode almost to the end where the rocket blasts off. There is a blog of someone that describes his experience doing the same thing. He uses a bit of harsh language in it but it's still a funny read, especially his comments on the posted pictures.