Love the ending. Especially.

Honestly the way it works is liek this. If you played HL2 when it came out any shooter that came out of it feels bland and a boring copy. Now if you haven't played until after you played all the copies, then of course it's gonna feel less amazing.

Didn't read all that but i certainly agree. Even counter strike, the best multiplayer shooter, is basically HL...

The saddest moment in any game.

^CS is a crappy and the most overrated game in the history of games, even beats out Halo for that title imo.

It's one of the best shooters ever made thats for sure...
so I can't argue that...

As long as we are talking about this. When is Episode 3 coming out?

That's interesting. I've never played Half Life because I thought it was the traditional shooter. I agree, I get bored with most FPS because of the repetitive gameplay. Perfect Dark was awesome because it had different kind objectives and missions. If HL is something similar then it deserves to be considered one of the best FPS.

WELL... I would say back in the day HL2 was the best game for years. To me I rate HL2 #1,  halo #2 and  #3 a ton of old Nintendo/sega games next. When i see peps say that GeOW2 and R2 are there best games To them it might just be. Different era different games.

I don't get it. You lumped every shooter, regardless of quality, features or innovations into one pile. Red Steel and Killzone in the same sentence as Halo and Call of Duty? Seriously?

Also you seem to be under the impression that every game that takes place in first person and features projectile weapons should be considered a shooter and all judged under the same criteria. Your three current best all have the same thing in common. They are all more adventures than they are shooters. Two of the three don't even feature a gun as the default weapon. I'm not under the mindset that the first person perspective is the exclusive domain of shooters, and other genres can be included while still featuring guns.

Your opinion seems to lie with you enjoying first person adventures more than you like first person shooters, which is fine. Half-Life 2 is the pinnacle of first person adventures. The fact that you put Bioshock on the good list while everyone else got put on the copy cat or bad list surprises me. If any game over the last four years was a complete knock-off of Half-Life 2 it's Bioshock.

Half-Life 2 is not the best shooter to me, but I haven't finished it either. The reason I say that is, what makes Half-Life 2 so great is the narrative, atmosphere, physics, etc. but I have played games that I have enjoyed the shooting portions of much more.

You're also putting it up against games you haven't played or aren't even out yet.

Bottom line is, Half-Life 2 is a superb game, but it has no business being in a comparison with something like Gears of War 2(or insert other shooting-focused shooter here) because they are just so different in their strengths and weaknesses.

PC does have eras really.. it kind of blends itself together as the years pass.

The Orange Box was also released on the 360 and PS3 and obviously brought the greatest shooter of all time to the consoles and guess what? destroyed every shooter on both consoles. Even with framerate issues on the PS3, HL2 and the rest of the box is still better then most games on the PS3 and 360 except for itself on the 360. Of course once we get into the PC realm its officially done and over with. Even Half-Life has a tough time against games like Wolf 3D and Doom. And of course multiplayer games like Unreal and Quake bring a massive challenge to the HL mods and Counter Strikein the multiplayer realm.