Half Life 2 has always been for me a 70% game, that is 70% of it is excellent and 30% of it is crap filled with bad jumping puzzles, turret management, that terrible highway level, and the whole last level. This isn't to say that the game is bad, or even approaching, it just suffers in some spots between the awesome. this became even more clear upon replay when I felt I had to just skip some parts entirely in order to enjoy the game as a whole. the game seems to get itself stuck on a good idea for entire sections at a time and proceeds to run them into the ground, the ultimate example being how godawful it was to use the gravity gun near the end compared to how brilliant it felt earlier in the game. Episode 1 began to correct some of these problems with an almost totally bullshit free game (I say almost because there are still a few bad parts ie. cars in bug holes) that is blessedly short and tight comparatively. I say comparatively as this didn't become apparent to me until I played all three games back to back and realized what a perfect bridge between the overly bloated and ultimately unfulfilling HL2 and the fuck awesome Episode 2, which takes the good ideas from both games and distills them to their core parts (small scale encounters, puzzles, and the occasional large encounter) and distributes them evenly throughout, culminating in one of the best end sequences of the forever. Taking both episodes as a whole package it is clear that this is what Half Life 2 should have been. More thoughts later as this is kinda rambling.
