Favourite HL Title

No inclusion or even a mention of Uplink??
I shall write a slightly displeased letter to the council about this! 😤

Blue Shift gets slandered by people too often. I think, it's a neat mappack.
It was the first Half-Life game I played, so maybe I am biased.

I played Half-Life, then Opposing Force, and then Blue Shift. I was expecting new weapons and monsters and whatnot like we got in Opposing Force, so Blue Shift felt like a real let-down to me.

OG Half-Life hasn't been topped imo. Opposing Force was fun but took too many liberties with the lore. Blue-Shift on the other hand, didn't do enough with it. It kinda peaked with the pre-disaster section and all the little character moments during the tram ride and walk to work. Can't really cast too much shade at an intended Dreamcast game mode turned full release, but it's just kinda mid.

i miss the old poll

Oskar Potatis: I played Half-Life, then Opposing Force, and then Blue Shift. I was expecting new weapons and monsters and whatnot like we got in Opposing Force, so Blue Shift felt like a real let-down to me.

Same. It also doesn't help how I hate headcrabs and in Blue Shift they've placed them in various cheap spots. No saving grace in it for me.

I have played the most hours in Half-life (over 1400). And the second part is loved for its plot of development and overall progressiveness.

EP2 all the way. I loved the outdoor levels and the feeling of being on a journey. I like EP1 for the improved Alyx AI, but EP2 just takes the cake.

Plus, I use it as the basis for all my mapping, simply due to the improved engine, so I've logged around 6x as many hours in EP2 than in HL2.

My opinion is that HL2 is a good game, but a bad sequel.

The change in setting is too abrupt, jumping 20 years from the Black Mesa research facilities in the New Mexico desert to a cold-war looking eastern European city similar to Prague, from contemporary military sci-fi of “experiment gone wrong” to a futuristic “alien 1984” setting.

The Combine were never mentioned in the first game. The fact that they managed to conquer the whole Earth in a 7-hour war is ludicrous, and contradicts the fact that an underground resistance movement exist that not only opposes them, even manages to score several victories. If they wiped out all of the world’s armies in 7 hours, how come they can’t squash those pesky fighters? And despite the assistance of Gordon Freeman, his actions are seemingly unneeded for the “war” to advance.

The fact that many former Black Mesa employees (and Gordon colleagues at that) are all coincidentally at City 17 and lead that resistance is too much to believe. Not to mention that they still recognize Gordon after 20 years, and are not puzzled by the fact that he hasn’t aged a single day. In addition to this, Gordon has now apparently turned into a messianic figure, a legend, in spite of his actions in HL1 being minor and mostly secret.

The HEV suit, the crowbar, the zombies and headcrabs, the Barney Calhoun character (a generic security guard in the original game, there were dozens of them) or the Eli Vance character (another nondescript scientist in the original) and other stuff (“prepare for unforeseen consequences”, oh come on!) seem to have been thrown in to justify the game being a true sequel and make it relatable to the players of the original, but feel forced.

In the original game, the G-man character was known to be some kind of government officer, perhaps CIA, now he turns to be an omnipotent alien being, a broker for Gordon in his role as an intergalactic mercenary. This took many people by surprise, HL1 single-player mods released before 2004 are a good example of this. And what exactly his plans are? Probably not even Valve know for sure, they just keep running forward.

The Black Mesa "administrator" (only briefly mentioned in HL1, some even thought it was G-man) now turns to be the local Combine overseer for Earth, after negotiating peace with them (not the US President or anyone, just him).

The whole plot (and setting) feels like a mix of ideas that the developers thought were cool, loosely tied together by the Black Mesa theme used as an excuse, and even contradicts some events in the original, retconning several things. Back at Valve HQ they were probably proposing new ideas constantly, and Gabe was like “Yeah sure, whatever!”

And the “HL universe is the same as Portal’s” is just preposterous. They just did that because the latter was very successful and they wanted to capitalize on that.

If you ask me, HL2 is not canon. So far, HL has never had any true sequel.

@DaSalba, good point. I agree with your arguments, HL2 is still my number one due to sheer nostalgia... hard to choose between HL1 and HL2 for me though. I never really clicked with any of the expansions