*brow furrows*
It was one of the best FPS games in years and you know it! 
And the creation of Steam, Starforce, etc is your own faults. Well, maybe not your specific faults, but most likely it actually is...
So now it's
our faults that Steam treats us all like criminals?
On top of that, HL2 fell flat on story, in that it had none. Every HL2 fan goes on about how awesome the story is, but in reality, it's just not there. The only way you get the backstory is by reading random out of the way newspaper clippings - that's worse than Doom 3 (which people said was worse than HL2 story wise), where at least the PDAs that you picked up were obviously visible. On top of that, you basically just ran through a set of linear levels, with no real purpose behind it. Oh, let's go kill that guy. Why? Because he's evil. Let's kill Breen. Why? I dunno, because he surrendered or is cooperating or something, I don't know, he's just bad, let's go get him. At least Doom 3 kept the story going, and you knew why you were doing stuff.
Now, in terms of graphics. Puh-lease. OMG OMG OMG PHYSICS LOLLERSKATES! Excuse me, ragdoll physics have been around since 2003. And moveable boxes and objects have been around long before that. If I knew coding I could add a gravity gun into Unreal Tournament 2003/2004, and ta-da, it'd be exactly the same as HL2. There's almost no difference physics wise, it's just that HL2 gave you a gun that actually exploited the physics (which was a nifty idea I'll admit). In terms of straight eye-candy - come on, you gotta be ****ting me. When games are coming out with dynamic shadows and bump, normal, and parallax mapping, what does HL2 have? Uhh...high resolution people textures and HDR lighting (aka bloom lighting on steroids - and bloom has been around for quite some years now)? Please. The game was outdated graphically before it even came out.
How about gameplay? Eh, it's alright. Once again you run through linear levels and kill random gas-masked humanoid enemy/zombies/wild creatures. Yawn. Been there, done that for the last ten years, give me something new. The gravity gun was pretty nifty, but again, that's only
one gun out of a (incredibly boring) arsenal of your usual assault rifle/shotgun/pistol/melee' assortment. Multiplayer deathmatch was fun though.
Basically, HL2 is an overrated, under-par, run of the mill shooter, that everyone salvitates over simply because it's the sequel to a shooter that they all have fond memories of (and if you go back and play it now, wow, you'll be surprised at how crappy it is. I couldn't get past the second or third level because I got so bored with it).
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Now, in comparison, we have Far Cry, released a couple months before HL2 and Doom 3. Lush, beautiful graphics, with all the new whiz-bang shader features, reasonably intelligent AI, gigantic maps that allow you to truly play the mission YOUR way - as opposed to having two or three ways to actually complete it, and a dozen others that will pretty much get you killed every time (probably the most amazing and fun aspect of the game, or any game I've played in awhile), a storyline that you actually, you know,
see and
interact with, (as semi-cliche as it is), and even though the weapons are your typical modern day varieties, they all have a purpose - unlike Half Life 2, where it goes - small - big - bigger- biggest.
