I'm with you on principle, and the airboat section sucks ass (sorry Valve).

However, the rest of the game is great, and still holds up.

Some of the complaint is "the game spends too much time jerking off its physics engine". Yes. It does. That's the core appeal my dude.

The way the physics interact with the level design is great, allow me to jog everyone's memory.

Ravenholm is amazing, using the gravity gun and sawblades is great, as is the use of environmental traps. The ragdolls are hilarious.

Playing 'the floor is lava' with the antlions is great, and the moments where you realise you may need to touch sand for a second too long is thrilling.

Storming the prison with the pheromones is great, and having endless minions to throw at turrets satisfies my latent psychopathy.

Supercharging the gravity gun is great, and pulling those energy orbs out and richochetting them off the walls to disintegrate the combine is unique and fun.

And of course, the crème de la creme, playing basketball with Dog.

I would agree with you in theory, however I am the same age as Half-Life 2. I never got around to playing it until it was already an old game (11-12? MAYBE 13). I played other shooters before, like various CoD games, Bioshock Infinite, etc., but they never clicked with Me. They obviously took great influence from it, every shooter did, but I could tell even as a kid that they didn’t do it as well

Unfortunately several parts do not hold up when you remove the novelty and temporal context. The whole game was mind blowing when it was new; I very much enjoyed it then. On a subsequent playthrough years later, there were definitely parts that just did not hold up. I used the console liberally at times because I couldn't be bothered to do them for real.

I think it's the consequence of bringing a truly revolutionary game to market with limited resources. There are clearly portions that exist to showcase the cool shit they could do rather than to drive the narrative or be genuinely fun.

Agreed. And in this line of more subtle storytelling, from the games I played from the franchise, if anything, it took all the way to Portal 2 for some things to start making sense.

They make some good points about how we view "classic" games too.

A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like "look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they're almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!".

Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I've tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.

On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being "revolutionary for their time" often don't hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it's possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.

When I look back at what I've played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don't think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say "wow that's a Control-like" game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that's the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.

That's an insane claim to me. HL2 set the bar for worldbuilding. From the guy muttering "don't drink the water" in the train station, to the people and vortigaunts building homes in the sewers, to the stick legged stalkers waddling around the citadel, HL2 took "show don't tell" to heart. It was the most immersive experience anyone had played in a video game up to that point, or for years after.

I'll grant you that other games have learned a lot from it, but I would say the vast majority haven't. Games still come out today where everything needs to be spoonfed to the player literally for them to stop and process what they're looking at, instead of just running and gunning mindlessly.

When you say HL2 can be boring and nonsensical if played today, the first thing that comes to mind are all the people who turn movie subtitles on, and then for 75% of the runtime their eyes are in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, not taking in any of the visual information the filmmaker is putting in front of them. Like, yeah, HL2 is quite boring when you're not looking at it.

Friends of mine who played at two different points far after launch still found it to be just as great, even if the physics and facial animations were no longer best in class.

HL2 has a ton of story, but it isn't spelled out in cutscenes or written down in item descriptions. It's discussed by NPCs and inferred from the environment. You experience it all in a first person frame, without third person cutscenes or by asking someone to exposit at you. You don't even have to go out of your way with a guide on your second monitor to unlock that info, it's right there with you, you just have to pay attention.

You're a person in the world and nobody will be the explaining the concept of lightbulbs or the where the combine came from or how the city was built. But you can absolutely find out more about that in the game.

But yes, we all hate the cliffhanger.

Its world building and such is visual story telling.

If you launch the game outside steam the time isn't accounted for. I know this because I love playing Timespinner with a randomizer. Inside steam I have 40h of played time. If the timer counted my randomizer sessions I'd have at least 4x that