>> That would be directly in the middle of the field of view of all three 
>> sentry guns. :-S
> 
> Oh. I thought they'd be facing out. Obviously, then you have to get them 
> to shoot each other. :-)

It's quite hard to do this without dying. They shoot at YOU, not each 
other. So if you stand behind one, the others will shoot you, and 
possibly hit it as well. (This induces it to cry "No! Don't shoot! It's 
ME! Aaaaagh!" in that cute cuddly little voice I mentioned.) But you 
will be long dead before the gun gets damaged much...

>> Go to the Stream website, download and install the Steam client 
>> (tiny), create a Steam account and browse the games list. Find Portal, 
>> hit "buy" and fill in your credit card details. Oh, and then wait a 
>> few hours (!!) for Portal to actually to download. It's quite... large...
> 
> Well, as I said, I already have HL1. I just uninstalled it for space 
> reasons.

Yeah, that won't help you. HL2 and later are distributed on Steam, while 
HL1 was distributed on physical CDs only.

(I understand - haven't tried - that you can "activate" your old HL1 on 
Steam, and it will run it under the Source engine. Which... basically 
gives you slightly cooler water effects. In particular, no Havok physics 
or anything. Worth it...)

> Cool to know. I'll have to see if it works with my graphics card, which 
> is getting kind of old. What happens if you buy a game your machine 
> won't play? Is it smart enough to tell you that?

Probably not.

However, bear in mind that if you buy the game, you can play it 
*anywhere*. Go to any machine in the world, install the Steam client and 
log into your Steam account. Any game you've ever purchased can then be 
downloaded and installed on that machine.

(Since you can only LOG IN to Steam from one PC at a time, you can only 
PLAY the game from one PC at a time. But you can INSTALL it a million 
times of you want...)

So if it won't play on yours, you can always walk round to a friend's 
house. ;-)

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