My Debbie Downer thread from 2005:
I did not like HL2, or rather, I always felt it should have been so much more. But then, I think that of every hyped FPS. I’m still convinced that SOMEBODY is going to heed the lessons of Deus Ex. But nobody ever does. 
I’m not into FPS games at all (never played HL1), but my SO got me into HL2 by gifting it to me in Steam. He even played it along with me on voicechat from beginning to end, so it was really fun that way for me, it gave us something to do together. I agree that the beginning was kinda tedious.
I sucked at the dunebuggy and boat areas. The controls weren’t as tight as I’d have liked, but it was okay.
Ravenholm freaked me out. I hated that place. I was on-edge the whole time, always nervous and jittery. I don’t do well with scary. I don’t go to scary movies for a reason! 
Though I admit that using sawblades as killer Frisbees was my favorite. I carried one around with me most of the time when I could.
If you use the Antlions as advance scouts, they work really well. And you don’t have to throw the bug bombs too much except to advance them much farther ahead, as they’ll home in on enemies and attack on their own. Though they have caused me to get hurt by blocking a ledge I was jumping on and causing me to fall. Erk.
Though the best part was when I was climbing a very tall cliff, and my antlions somehow had the smarts to fly very high and very far up there without my help. I happened to be watching them from below when I saw them fighting solders.
Who then died and fell hundreds of feet.
So awesome. <3
Allow me to quote from a recent thread I posted on the topic:
Oh yes, and let me amend by saying: I got to the first tripod stage, at which point Steam crapped out, eventually leading me to uninstall and reinstall all of my Steam games, which trashed my save files… and I haven’t felt motivated enough to work through the whole game again since.
Frankly can’t disagree with any of that, although personally I’ve never played an FPS with the “peek around the wall to shoot” controls you’re talking about.
I’m assuming we’re talking Call of Duty, etc.?
I’ve actually never played Call of Duty… I was mainly thinking of Splinter Cell and especially the more recent Rainbow Six games. I think it’s a bit of an unfair comparison, since both of those games are tactical shooters, and not straight FPS affairs, but it felt extremely intuitive. Essentially, when you held a certain key your character would flatten themselves against the wall or, if you were behind something like a garbage can or a car, they would make the best of it. While taking cover, if you held a direction key, your character would lean out from cover in that direction and bring their weapon to bear, letting you aim as much as the cover allowed.
The Metal Gear Solid series is the same way. But remember, all of those are predominately third person and over-the-shoulder perspective games (which seems to be the standard for all tactical shooters and CRPG’s), not first person.
The idea of FP is to give the player the feeling of them actually being there, rather than controlling someone else. As a general rule, I tend to prefer the third person games, but that’s just personal preference. I’m not really sure how one would do peek-and-shoot in first person and not have it feel wonky.
System Shock 1. I forget if 2 had it, but 1 definitely did. Q and E, presuming you used the WASD controls, would ‘lean’ you left and right, essentially just tilting your camera about 30 degrees in one direction, with the pivot point at or below the bottom of the screen instead of the center. I suppose with the current crop of games, that would be wonky, but it worked well enough.
I loved HL2, and for most of the same reasons people are listing here. I felt totally absorbed by the atmosphere, and I’ve played through the whole game several times, as well as mucked about in some of my favorite sections.
May I add one more cool thing no on has mentioned?
Using the crossbow to pin combine to things. When you first get it, you can use the scope to target some poor sap camped on a billboard. Twang! Dead combine, hanging impaled from the billboard. Muwahahahah!
HL2 is great for what some people have termed “asshole physics.” That’s a big part of the fun. I think in the into when I learned to pick stuff up and throw it, I spent at least 10 minutes picking rubbish up at heaving at the combine’s faces. Over and over. Especially the guy who knocks a can on the ground and tells you to pick it up. In your face! 
The other day I blew one of those blue laser snipers out of his hidey-hole with a well placed 40mm grenade. He’d been making my life miserable up to that point. I couldn’t resist flailing on his corpse with the crowbar while screaming “Who’s bad now, asshole? Who’s bad now?” at the monitor. I guess it is a mark of success for the game designers that their game does provoke such an emotional reaction.
Oh absolutely! If there were more crossbow ammo lying around, that would be my weapon of choice. Extremely accurate and deadly. Plus the malevolent glee in playing pin the combine on the donkey!
Some other favorite bits are all the underwater parts, where you have to swim from point A to point B. The timing aspect is challenging, especially contrasted with the dreamlike serenity of being underwater. If Gordon had sufficient oxygen I’d love to explore an underwater grotto or something.
Then there’s the bridge climbing. Firstly, that bridge is gorgeous! And then when you’re on top, you can almost feel the wind buffeting your body as it screams through the girders and makes 'em shake.
Maybe I’m just easily entranced by atmosphere; I’m also pretty inexperienced in other FPS games, basically having only played the HL series, plus earlier stuff like Doom and Wolfenstein. But the sheer immersion factor, coupled with the overall storytelling, of the HL games has me utterly captivated and hooked.
Of course, players who’ve experienced newer games may feel differently. Me, I tried the demo of the much ballyhooed Bioshock, and as beautiful and ambitious as it is, the gameplay itself gave me a big ‘meh’, with the repetitive enemies and the somewhat bizarre sliding puzzles to power up your skills. Also it was so choppy on my system I didn’t have patience to flail wildly at the enemies and hope for some lucky hit. So obviously I’m atypical since it’s so popular!
One of my second-grade students got me a Best Buy gift card for Christmas. I bought the Orange Box with it, and told him in my thank-you card what I’d gotten. Huh. Turns out this eight-year-old is a big fan of Orange Box, and since then, that’s all he’ll talk to me about.
HL2 is a great game, IMO. The additions to it on Orange Box (eps 1 and 2) are also a lot of fun. The final battle in Ep2 seemed ridiculously impossible to me, until I realized what a great weapon the dune buggy was; using it as a weapon was so much fun that I’m kinda tempted to play through the original HL2 and the two expansions trying to use it as a weapon as much as possible. It’s especially fun to ram an enemy with the buggy while shouting, “YAAAAAHHHHHH!” at the screen.
I don’t know that it’ll replace System Shock 2 or Deus Ex as my favorite FPS, but it was tons of fun.
Daniel
Your students buy you Christmas presents? Is that normal at your school?
The dune buggy, alas, doesn’t work very well for squishing antlions (and is almost impossible to get to any Combine troops in).
I dunno about normal–I think half a dozen of my 17 students did. I teach a combination of upper-class kids and kids from abject poverty. And by abject poverty I mean can’t afford to send snacks to school with their kids but can afford flat-screen TVs. But that’s another rant entirely.
More’s the pity: in that final massive fight, it was tremendous fun for hunter-hunting.
Daniel
This part was too realistic for me. I have a minor fear of heights - it’s pretty much only triggered if I’m a few feet from a cliff or something. But boy-oh-boy, did this sequence ever trigger it. I pretty much white-knuckled my way all the way over the bridge, only to find out I had to go BACK.
I almost made Mr. Athena play that scene for me. It was not in the least bit fun.
And that’s why it’s such a great game… how the heck does a VIDEO GAME trigger my fear of heights? At the same time I was white knuckling my way through, I was congratulating the designers. That’s realism!
So I was playing the bit today where you first get a squad of resistance fighters. I hate the squad thing because they are the dumbest bunch of get-me-killed fuckers I’ve ever encountered in a game. They are constantly underfoot and they constanstly destroy any opportunity to eliminate enemy with anything but a full-on frontal firefight. Crimoney, I wish you could off NPC’s like in HL1 just so I could get rid of these fuckers! Every time I think they’ve all managed to get themselves killed, new recruits show up. They are seriously marring my enjoyment of the game.
Upthread, somebody mentioned the second turret battle as being nightmarish. I actually got a kick out of it. It took me a few tries, but I eventually came up with a plan where the three turrets did almost all the work for me. At one end of the cell block there is a cell with a light on, the only one. It is the last one on that side. I placed one of the turrets outside that room in the corner by its door, facing out the same way you would look out the cell door. Thus, any combine coming in through the entrance adjacent to it got cut down before they could act. Here’s the part that I’m proud of: I built a little “fort” around its legs out of some of the barrels and crates in the area.
I put the other two turrets inside the cell and cowered behind them with the gravity gun. The Combine got all fixated on the turret outside the door and concentrated their fire on it. The crap around its legs made it near impossible for them to knock it over with gunfire. Every once in a while they’d charge it to try to knock it over with a buttstroke. Then all three turrets would cut them down in a crossfire. All I really had to do was use the gravity gun to deal with the occasional manhack or to knock Combine grenades back towards the thrower.
It’d be cool if my resistance squad was 1/10 as smart as those turrets. The turrets did exactly what I needed them to do.
But, but, they’re so polite!
The game Jedi Knight had a lot of those moments too.
Back when I pre-loaded the Orange Box I got free gifts of HL2 and Episode 1. I still haven’t used them, so if anyone has steam and wants to try out HL2 I can give them one free copy. If they like that I can give Episode 1 as well.
That battle was so nasty that I went online to find some strategies for it. Here’s the super-complicated strategy I found:
Turn two of the turrets around in their alcoves, y’know, the exact place where you find them. Then go sit in the third alcove, the one between the two turned-around turrets. Go make a cup of coffee and catch a tv show. When you come back, you’ve won the battle.
It was cheap but hilarious. When the turrets are in their alcoves, they cannot be knocked down–and because you’re hiding in the alcove between them, the bad guys never even see you, because they focus on the turrets they encounter before they get to you.
Daniel
I loved HL1, despite the fact that it started to suck once you got to Xen or Zen or whatever. It is one of the greatest games ever.
HL2 is a good game, but not such a classic.
The way I think of them is HL1=great PC game. HL2=console game.
I had never played Half-Life when I got HL2. I loved, loved HL2, as well as Episode 1 and Episode 2(!!!) and eventually even bought HL1 over Steam just out of a desire to know more about the game universe.
I found HL1 interesting but incredibly tedious in parts. The jumping puzzles were totally asinine. Why on earth would someone voluntarily jump from unstable crate to unstable crate hanging over a bottomless pit, for instance? And why is it so hard to jump out of a trash compactor full of stable platforms?
Many times, it seemed like every surface Freeman was trying to negotiate was covered in an invisible layer of ice. Perhaps Black Mesa had a crack team of floor polishers or something.
The ladders in HL1 also had a nasty tendency to drop you right off of them after you’d climbed up, robbing you of valuable health.
The special forces troops were a bigger threat than the Combine in HL2, it’s true, but their tactics were nearly identical, or even inferior to the Combine’s. Their real strength was a very simple combination of more health and more damaging weapons.
I found the over-abundance of explosive barrels in HL2 to be a bit ludicrous, but the same could easily be said for the fact that every body of water in HL1 had an ichthyosaur in it.
However, I did have one big beef with HL2 as compared with HL1: the lack of variety in the enemies. HL1 had vortigaunts, eyehounds, bullsquids, the big troll-lookin guys, the flying blaster guys, etc. HL2 in comparison didn’t seem to have nearly as much variety.
That said, the ending of Episode 2 is one of the most powerful sequences I have ever seen in a computer game. The only games that rival it, in my experience are Planescape: Torment and Portal.