Long ago, in 2007, during the lead-up to the release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two as part of the Orange Box, a man we know only as GooseGoose created a number of lengthy commentary videos of each of the Half-Life 2 games. These video critiques provided numerous insights, points and views concerning the HL2 series, tackling all sorts of topics, and analyzing the games themselves, on all fronts – story, gameplay, and tone alike.

These videos came at a time when most of the online video community was obsessed with superficial video reviews of various games – so, in a way, GooseGoose’s critique videos served as the forerunners to many of today’s comprehensive “Let’s Play” series, as well as other similar game-related video creations. And beyond that, his commentaries were simply very entertaining and extremely interesting, and to this day, I still consider the series a must-watch for every Half-Life fan out there.

But some time afterwards, GooseGoose simply… well, dropped off the face of the Net. His YouTube account vanished, and then Google Video went belly-up, which left us with exactly no remaining copies of GooseGoose’s HL2 commentaries. Community member Flamov succeeded in reuploading the original videos early last year, but those were primeval 240p copies that are practically unwatchable these days. If only someone could… oh, wait!