Silent, I agree that Half-Life 1 and 2 were great games. I also agree that the engines, at least, were important for the development of gaming, though I do find it a bit funny that people give the games credit for things that were done with the engine. Oddly, you don't see Unreal Tournament the getting credit for what has been done with the Unreal Engine, or Quake, but the Half-Life games are *constantly* credited with things that modders did with the engine. Great games, but overrated because we've got grown men apparently makings sounds like little girls getting ponies and ridiculous crap like that when the domain name is even mentioned. There are loads of good games, and even a lot of other GREAT games, that people just sort of brush past, but these ones are special. Some thoughts on why...
You insinuate that I'm just one of those young CoD whipper snappers who doesn't know a good FPS from a hole in the ground, but the irony of this is that, between some of your claims as to what Half-Life did and your jump to throw insults at me, even if you hadn't dated yourself I'd have guessed you were quite a bit younger than me and hadn't been gaming nearly as long. I'm guessing you don't realize that Duke 3D had a far more flexible engine than Half-Life did years before, and the things which the 3DRealms fanatics did with it easily rivaled what was done with the Half-Life engine for destructibility and scope? And did you realize that Quake had an active modding community well before Half-Life was released - and yet you attribute Half-Life with having "sparked the idea that games could be customized and lead to mods and other." Just sentimental nonsense giving it kudos which it simply doesn't deserve. And I'm guessing you also didn't know that Team Fortress was a Quake mod before Half-Life was even released, yet you listed this as one of Half-Life's big accomplishments?
This is the OoT effect. I'm guessing you're familiar with Legends of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time? THAT is the game most widely considered to be the "greatest game of all time" I'm sorry to say. Don't agree with it, perhaps? Pity for you - since you've already cited some sort of consensus to say that "Half Life 2 was and still is considered one of the greatest games of all time" and more people consider OoT to be the best. The thing is, when you get these popular games that were the big things when someone was a little kid, they are almost always looked at through rose coloured glasses and all of the sudden they're leaping tall buildings with a single bound when, in truth, they were really good games. OoT is *constantly* dubbed as the first big open world game when EQ came out on the PC before it and had larger open worlds. What's more, it is constantly credited with being the first game to include the "revolutionary" z-targeting when a host of wrestling games were doing precisely that two or three years before its release. People who loved it as a kid gloss over its flaws and load it up with accomplishments that it did not actually achieve, and then it is forever "the best game ever made" and blah blah blah.
I remember when I was first told about Half-Life, my nephew, who largely a Super Nes gamer was ranting on and on about it, telling me about how it was the very first game to do this and that and the other thing, so I tried it... And all the while I was playing it I was thinking "Uh, Duke 3D did this better two years ago." The game itself was awesome, as was the second, and I'll be getting the third very shortly after its released... But these games are the definition of overhyped, and your post is a stunning example for that overhype, heaping praise on the games for things other games did better years before.
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