Gordon Freeman Makes Me Nauseous

Black Mesa, Half-Life 2, and Motion Sickness

The first couple of times I tried to play Black Mesa I ended up quitting about 45 minutes into my session. It's not because of a dislike for the game; from what I've seen, the recently-released mod is a fun and relatively faithful remake of the original Half-Life. My main issue with Black Mesa is the fact that I start feeling queasy and need to stop playing after 45 minutes to an hour of gameplay.

Labor Day - A Few Quick Notes

Hopefully everyone is enjoying their unofficial "Last Weekend of Summer." Just wanted to post a few quick items before I go back to watching baseball and golf while eating grilled meat.

Windows 8 - Assign Default Programs

A few days ago I mentioned that Windows 8's handling of the default programs assigned to different filetypes was a little weird. If you've got multiple options for opening something like a picture or video, this window pops up:

Media files are opened in Metro apps by default, which is pretty annoying. Luckily there's a way to edit the programs assigned to each filetype en masse. Open the Start page and type in "default programs" - the resulting Control Panel options let you switch things around.

Windows 8 - Antivirus Programs

Another thing I touched on the other day was the fact that MSE is basically baked into Windows 8 in the form of Windows Defender. That sounded great to me since I already use MSE in Windows 7, but I wasn't sure if a conflict would arise if you were to use a separate AV program. To see what would happen, I downloaded and installed AVG Free.

After installing AVG, everything works as expected - Windows Defender is turned off and AVG takes over all of the protection detail. After uninstalling AVG and restarting, I checked the status of Windows Defender; the program told me it was still disabled. A couple of minutes later Windows finally prompted me to re-enable virus protection. Everything looks good here.