I found Half-Life 2 easy. That is, until I got to the gunship. The NPCs knew shit was going down, because they all hid indoors, Wild West style, leaving me alone to take care of business. One NPC had the sense to hand me a rocket launcher, albeit minus instruction manual. He muttered something about a laser, then locked himself indoors. Meanwhile, the gunship circled overhead like a disgruntled sky whale.

I started shooting rockets at it, but the rockets didn't go in straight lines, and sometimes they even came back to me.

"They're heat-seeking!" I realised. "They must be locking onto my own heat signature!"

This realization made the battle even more thrilling, because not only was the gunship peppering me with alien lead, but even my own rockets were trying to kill me.

This fight was unusually difficult compared to the earlier levels. It went on for ages. Thankfully there was unlimited ammo, because the chance of a rocket actually hitting the gunship was close to nil.

I developed a tactic of firing a rocket and then ducking behind cover, where I'd look down at my feet, instinctively shielding my eyes from imaginary debris. Strangely, whenever I did this, my rockets would almost always home in on me and hit my cover.

The battle raged on for almost an hour before I finally got the gunship down. I cheered and punched the air. It had been one of the most spectacular battles of my life.

Then, later in the game, there were two gunships at once. "Fuck", I grinned. "This is going to be epic!" 

My brother's friend, Cain Gibson, happened to be watching over my shoulder. "You know", he said, "your rockets are laser-sighted. They go wherever you're looking at".

Once I knew that fact, I could swat the gunships out the air like flies. The fight had lost its excitement.

But I will always remember the time when I didn't know how to fight Half-Life 2 gunships properly. And, frankly, I preferred not knowing.