All I’m saying is that the general feeling about Half-life 2 (outside of the dedicated gaming press) is one of dissappointment. Sure, the game may have been upgraded in the areas of graphics and sound, but it’s still the same stilted gameplay.
As with Half-life 1, the player is still following an ultra-linear thread, leading him/her from one big scene to the next. It even has the same “cheesy late night sci-fi movie” atmosphere of the first one.
The problem, in my opinion, started when the games industry somehow added the word “cinematic” to its vocabulary. Since then we’ve been seeing more and more games trying to be more movie-like and less worrying about the actual gameplay (or level of involvement).
Adventure games are in their very essence NOT cinematic, and rather more novel-like. And you’ll notice that the decline of the adventure game coincided with the games industry striving to produce more cinematic gameplay.
But anyway, to each his own. I would simply suggest that people do not relegate past games to history so easily. Many (most?) classic games were released years before Half-life 1, and I would love for people to go back and rediscover them. Which I guess is what this site is all about (at least to a large extent).