Their decision not to include the manual could has been made only for saving costs.... it's the only logical reason i can see. 

Oi, I wasn't expecting to be really blown away by HL2 ... and I wasn't. Basically what I expected. 6 years for cool looking water and physics puzzles that are not at all hard to solve and are just to fill up time. The action scenes are cool, scripted sequences are great. Story is pretty good. My biggest complaint is that there is really no correlation between HL and HL2; Nothing is ever explained. I loved the ending. Though most people won't. But enough about that.

Other complaints (don't read if you don't wanna know about this stuff)

----------OK-------------
Combine Soldiers: repetitive
Where'd all the cool Xen monsters go to? We get fuckin headcrabs and ant lions? Bull shit.
The aresnal, like Doom 3, was sorely lacking. Nothing special here at all, cept MAYBE the Zero-Point Force Manipulator (whatever its called), but that got old pretty fast.
Puzzles are simple, not very fun.


Good things:
Interesting, windy level design. Cool to see an area then come up on it time after time... this I thought was very good, seemed like a real place, but it was "convenient" there were so many fences and gates, etc...
Uhhh... there's a bunch of generally cool stuff, everything overall is welldone.

So, I thought it was good, but definitely over-rated by most people imo. I would give it somewhere around 90%. After all that time, they got rid of all the cool alien organisms, the cool organic weapons, and gave us "soldier, shotgun, car." But still, it's pretty good. Ravenholm was the best fun I had in the whole game.

Good stuff. 

90% would count as a great game rather than a good game. 

not on a scale from 0% - 5000% 

90% would be an extremely crap game and not a good game :) 

not if you skip from 100 - 4800% 

don't get in an argument with Zwiffle when there is math or stats involved. He has some real good ones up his sleeve. 

The only things I didn't really like about Half Life 2 were having a team with you. Even more than that, the fact that you just couldn't blow their heads off when the annoyed you(which was all to frequent for me), they just get in the way to much, I would much rather not to have had them. I know you could send them away, but they always come back.

And there were places that were just frustrating, and places where I just didn't know what to do next, easy enough to just plug away and work it out, but frustrating for me none the less.

=============================================
===============SPOILER================
=============================================

czg
That place with the turrets was a bit annoying/frustrating. Until you realize what triggers things off etc. If you don't set up the turrets first, and just look around, you have plenty of time to notice a dead end type thing on the 2nd floor, you can stack the crates up so you can climb up there. Place the turrets at the bottom, then just lift them up with the gravity gun, place them on the second floor, sit back and let them do there thing, toss down a few grenades................

==============================================
==============END SPOILER==============
==============================================

LOOSE CD's
An all to common thing these days, but I guess with the amount of discs in some games, and the trend towards smaller boxes etc..........
I get DVD versions when I can, but even then you get that DVD type case, I prefer the old CD cases, so I can stack them in my CD towers.

Familiar Names
Did anyone notice any familiar names (names known to people around here) in the credits at the end of Half Life 2 ? 

Dario Casali
Yahn Bernier
for example ;) 

err. the gravity gun got old? wtf, its the most versatile weapon in any fps ever! The gameplay possibilities with it are potentially endless, either you missed pretty much everything you could do with it or... well I dunno :) I just cant understand that comment...

HL2 rocked my world, all other shizzle out of the way, its amazing and should be played religiously by every fps fan. apart from a few duff areas (nova prospekt turret fight etc) its great all the way through. 

I'm pretty surprised people generally found Doom 3 to be a better game, or even better looking than HL2. 

Iikka Keranen, of course. 

Pick things up. Shoot things. Of course, you could pick things up and stack them. Mmmmm... fun. 

I guess the grav gun can get boring after a while. FallOut 2 let you shoot heroin, does Half-Life 2 let you shoot heroin?

If not, perhaps the interactivity isn't all it is cracked up to be and falls way behind even a 1997 title. 

Not sure I know what constitutes a better game, but although I really, really liked Half Life 2, I think I will be still playing DooM3, and Quake's for that matter, long after Half Life 2 is just a memory. I guess I am just old and stick with what I like the most.

A meandering wander into the seemingly unrelated
To me it's like the standard answer that gets given when people ask the question, "Whats the best telescope to buy?"
Answer "The one that you will use the most"

The Grav gun was a blast, I especially liked carving creatures up with those saw blades

Did anyone think that the sound that they used for the Buggy, was, well better than most sounds you would get in a dedicated driving game. I thought it was just awesome 

You'd have to be joking... right? 

Don't forget Ikka Keranen, teh Fingered One =D

Finished the game yesterday, btw -- and it was great. Have to agree with DaZZa on the Nova Prospekt standoff with the Combine, but overall the game was engaging without being too simplistic or difficult. I'm replaying it again, and waiting on that damned SDK... 

Just saw BlackDog's post. Gah. 

who was it? His uncle? That is a hell of a thing to be known for. 

Well, on my machine at work, Doom 3 looked nice, but was very samey the whole way through. The composition of the views you would often see didn't seem to be as interesting or generally accomplished in Doom 3. I guess because you spend most of the game in a military base.

I didn't think that all the fancy shadows in Doom 3 really made such a huge difference, apart from making the game feel a bit more solid. The lighting in HL2 wasn't as technically dazzling, but had a much more real world and gritty look. Doom 3 just looked a bit shiny.

Also, I couldn't run Doom 3 at ultra high res with all the fancy stuff turned on, so perhaps I missed out on a few things (the warping effect on glass for one.) I ran HL2 at 800*600 with most effects supported by the GF4 on. Doom 3 I ran at 640*480 low quality settings.

I don't think you need me to explain why I thought HL2 was a better game to play. 

I borrowed a Geforce FX 5700 from a friend for a week or so when Doom 3 came out. I have an Athlon 64, so I ran the game at 800x600 at high quality, which seemed to be the same speed as medium quality. I never benched it. I thought the game was ok.

I have a GF 6800 now, and have since replayed the game. With a higher resolution and double the frame rate (maybe) I found I very much enjoyed sections of the game a more, even that I react differently and use different tactics.

Half life 2 just set itself to run at some crazy resolution with AA and everything going, and it always seemed to be running very fast - 60+ fps I'd guess. Near the end of the game the stuttering bug got horrendous though. After Valve fixes that I'll give it another try. Anybody else suffer from that problem?

I'm thinking that Doom 3 has more room to grow. I'd like to see a cavernous Hell, uh, cavern with 50 odd imps to run around in with. 

Audio Stuttering: Many Half Life 2 gamers are experiencing small pauses or "stutters" when playing the game, regardless of their hardware and/or settings. You hear stutters in speech, sound effects. The problem is that the game continuously loads textures into the RAM whenever you go aroudn a corner or see an enemy. This is not an audio issue, so don't throw away your sound-card just yet. The problem is the engine. This issue has been fixed already via a steam update.
The main change from the fix is the addition of a new command variable: mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware , I will come back to this command in a bit.  

stupid line breaking thing...

mat_forcemanaged texture into hardware
(remove spaces) 

Just thought I'd chime in and say:

- I'm *really* enjoying this game so far. I just got to 'entanglement', i really enjoyed highway 17 and ravenholm was pretty good. I really like the weapons so far, especially the shotgun and the gravity gun, which serves many purposes with puzzles, etc. Maybe I'm dense but I did feel there was a bit of a discrepancy between the very noticeable linearity and how you were for the most part forced into following task by task, but at the same time some of the puzzles have left me frustrated as I had no clue wtf I was supposed to do or where to go.

- I still haven't finished doom3. Got bored after hell. Meh. 

Restart steam and it will auto-update the game as per usual, this could be interresting :)