Good:

- Atmosphere is great, almost all locations are very convincing.

- Eastern European / Big Brother flavour for the city and stuff is very cool and quite refreshing for a A-list game.

- Water is amazing, first water I've seen that looks properly wet.

- Lots of nice locations. Favourite bits including the dam, the bridge (awesome), the ride through the combine tower.

- Art direction is generally great.

- Physics is great. Lots of fun to play around with.

- Feel of the game and controls are good, surprisingly solid.

- Facial animation shizznit is top notch. The expressions when Alyx is handing you the gravity gun made me replay it just to see it again.

Bad:

- Totally linear.

- Barely relenting real-life theme. The tower was cool but I'd like some more outlandish stuff.

- Lack of variety in enemy. 90% of the gameplay is against soldiers or headcrabs / zombies. Stalkers were great, but where's the rest?? Cool monsters, exciting combine constructs??

- Different sorts of gameplay (boat, jeep, zombie town, team stuff) were spoonfed to you in specific sections, made them seem artificially set-up and lacked organic gameplay.

- Some areas, i.e. the team gameplay in the urban enviroments was a blatant and shameless promotion for the style and feel of CSS - if I wanted to play that, I'd play CSS.

- Other gameplay aspects obviously derivative from HL itself. Gameplay ended up being a "Best of HL remixed with detatched vehicle sections and sponsored by heavy CSS advertising".

- AI didn't seem to be particularly exciting.

Ugly:

- Shadows are cheap hacks and show their b0rkage easily.

- Lighting from the sky also shows it's cheapness on occasion.

- A few other effects are weak. 

I did like it, a lot. A lot of it was very impressive, and most of what it was p1mped on (stylish locations, great physics, very effective art design) it succeeded on. However the gameplay did get wearing after a while, as did the non-linearity. I kept waiting to see some COOL enemy or to feel I had some choice in how I played the game. But for all of that, I still had a great time playing it.

Better than HL? Fo sho, w3rd. Now games have the technology to pull off what HL wanted to with enough style and convinction. And despite being a sequel, HL2 feels like it's pushing gaming further for the time than HL did.

Better than Doom3? Not sure. I think I prefered playing Doom3, in a different way. I found Doom3 gripped me more, made me feel I was part of something. HL2 made me feel more like I was being shown something. D3 was "woah", HL2 was "wow". Hard to compare. I like the style of D3 more. I think given the technology and atmosphere in both games, it's quite a personal choice.

Best game of the year? Quite possibly. Yeah why the hell not.

Best game ever? Not in my view.

But it's a damn good one. I don't feel assraped by the hype and vaguely blahhed about the game like I did about HL, I feel Valve have released a proper flagship game with this one. 

I'm not going to tell again what many people has said, the same problems as anybody.
The game has a Big Brother feel and in real life, Steam system itself is another Big Brother.

The game... without Big Brother, is excellent. 

hm, i just played like 3 -5 hours at a friends, always different bits throughout the game and watched like 3or 4 more - sorry, didnt like it.

- the art wasnt that good at all imo - go play myst: uru to see how good art looks. granted, the engine may be slower ( but thats a technique thing), but what the designers do with their given poly count and their textures is amazing (from the 4 levels ive seen :))

-models look shitty in hl2. yes, even barney, he wasnt sexy at all. combines look better tho. of course that may be influenced by seeing d3 and all..

- scripted sequences feel way too scripted for me - sorry, in hl1 i felt like the action was going on around me independently - in hl2 its action arranged for me

- no story feeling whatsoever for me - but everyone i spoke to couldnt tell me what the story was at all (besides aliens attacking earth or sth) also i felt reminded to elite force - same stupid story shit to justify stupid gameplay sequences

- gameplay. gameplay? yeah, guess there was some; not interesting or tense for me tho. worst sniper scene ever seen in a game.

-physics. i dont care that the physics are convincing if the world im running in is sooo unconvincing by being absolutely linear. didnt add a single thing for me. grav gun was fun for the first minutes, felt way too gimmicky to be convincing. inconstistencies with it broke the game world (no humans/bodies ? wtf. i need an upgrade to do it, yeah, right).

-soap opera feeling (e.g. stupid headcrab thing)

-water looked good yeah, but far cry's looked equally good, every game using pixel shaders has nice water. radioactive slime looked horrible tho, wasnt even moving.

-weapons /weapon balance felt totally broken from hl1. no fun weapons. that might be because i always was dropped in the game with like everything already picked up/discovered tho.

-ending had the worst gameplay ever. use healing, have everything full, take out enemies, be full again, repeat. also - they have these nice laser walls i cant walk trough - why don'\t they just block the one way thats always open with em ? bad. very bad. 

Evil like a hitler tsunami! 

You are wrong about:

- the art wasnt that good at all imo

-models look shitty in hl2.

-physics.

-water looked good yeah, but far cry's looked equally good, every game using pixel shaders has nice water.

-weapons /weapon balance felt totally broken from hl1.

The other points are fair, though. 

shambler: k :) 

everyone i spoke to couldnt tell me what the story was at all

I liked that no character came out and spoon fed the story to you. That would have been contrived. After all, they don't know you've been away so it's easy to assume you would have noticed the Earth being attacked. If you pay attention to what's said and look at the cork boards you can easily piece the events together. You get back what you put into it, so if you don't understand the story you probably don't care so it's just as well. 

1. Thanks to speedoo for pointing out the Half-Life full game speedrun in SDA's "we refused for years to host any other game runs when people were finding all sorts of runnable stuff and asking us, and then out of the blue we randomly start hosting a whole load of console game speedrun's shit" Other Games' section: http://www.planetquake.com/sda/other/HalfLife.html pretty entertaining, a few great tricks and a lot of deviant stuff. There's also a HL2 run but it's currently slow (2 hours) so I'm gonna wait till it gets caned a bit.

2. Watching that HL run reminded me of one thing: The HL1 monsters piss all over the HL2 monsters from a great height, with the exception of the Striders. The standard alien grunts, the big alien grunts with the bee weapon, the gargantua, the bulltoad things, the cute things that do a sound shockwave, the snarks....all of them very cool in aesthetics and character. Now THAT is something HL2 is missing for sure. Also cool in the variety of gaming options, too... 

REALLY benefit from large bio/mechanical enemies. Say take something 'DOG' size and have it tossing debris at you. That would of been spectacular in the wider vehicle levels. 

And they fucking owned. The gunships/dropships were one of the best things in the game. 

We've seen that since Doom, boring. 

We've seen that since Doom, boring. 

pretty much all generic looking bipedal soldier things...
i couldn't understand why they got rid of the bulltoad. that was a cool monster, and with some of the new ai, could have been really fun. 

man, HL2 should have been more like BGE in the mean of player freedom and game progression
just imagine.. 

btw any1 finds it funny that u operate objects via the powers of telecenesis or some other majik, or maybe u get smal grav gun just from the start 

well its a small price to pay, making custom hold anims for all the different sized objects would have been REAL fun Im sure ;) 

thought of that
could just make objects closer to the player view, to make it seem that the holding arms are offscreen
and it really behaves like small grav gun too, not like hands 

and it really behaves like small grav gun too, not like hands

Exactly. Gameplay before realism. 

It would have been neat to see some hl2 monsters back as sort of ambient wildlife. Not everything eats humans, surely. Might bullsquid not just roam around sewers and aquatic areas doing their general water face-sucking thing, and disregard Freeman after having grown tame around so many humans? Houndeyes, too. Wouldn't a herd of those grazing in a field look cute? Or a guy with a domesticated one as a pet. 

that someone wrote to valve asking if they had any inflateable hound-eye dolls. By inflateable dolls, I mean a sex doll.

Don't remember where I read it though - it was a long time ago.

I bet it was CZG 

I obviously would have asked for Barney dolls. (Or the real thing.) 

Steam just updated with news about a upcoming HDR showcase level called the Lost Highway. Additional game content is certainly welcome, but to my mind the interesting bit is this:

"it will be made available free of charge to Half-Life 2 customers that meet a specific set of high end hardware requirements."

And presumably won't, to those that don't.

Meh. 

I just spotted that myself. What actually is High Dynamic Range lighting anyway? I don't really under... fuck it, I'll go google it ;)

Ok, done that. HDR lighting seems to be what fitzquake's overbrights are to standard glquake. Standard gl looks lifeless (or shit, to most people) because of the low range of brightnesses in the lightmap. I assume fitzquake multiplies the brightness by two to get the overbright stuff and gives a much more satisfying appearance.

HDR lighting seems to be doing the same sort of thing, but I don't understand exactly what it is.

Someone intelligent please explain! 

Oh well.

Overbrights are a compromise. They allow you to push up the colour range of your scene at the expense of precision, which leads to teh fugly when things get very bright or very dark. What HDR does is increase the dynamic range - the ratio of brightest representable pixel to darkest - by adding more precision to colour calculations. That means you can light things very brightly or darkly in the same scene, and still get correct colours without the banding and blotchyness that normal precision rendering suffers from.