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cheeseslice73: Your mileage may vary, but Half-Life is a difficult game to measure the importance of, because so many of the features that made it stand out from the crowd back then are just "how things are done in first person shooters these days".
Everything about it at the time was just sublime though. Present day (now past) black ops setting, unusually restrained protagonist, cleverly AI'd military soldiers (I still remember the first time one lobbed a grenade at me to flush me out of cover), and a wide variety of weapons from the beautifully mundane (crowbar) to the enjoyably ridiculous (snarks, hornetgun, laser gun thingy).
Shogo stood out to me at the time only because it was the closest thing I'd ever seen to an manga-styled game, and IIRC, it would soon be displaced by Bungie's "Oni".
Ooh, Oni. BRB, Gotta go vote for that on the list of games I'd love to see on GoG :)

I was about to write a lengthy post on why I don't think Half-Life deserves more than a 80-85% Meta-Critic score, even considering when it was released, but the only thing that could have accomplished would be starting a lenghty and extremely pointless discussion with a decent chance of a flamewar. Let's just agree to disagree on how good HL is and was.
Oni is IMO Bungie's best game, better than any of the other games discussed in this thread so far.
PC games, even today, live and die on their release day performance and stability. When a game launched with massive bugs or bad optimization, that opinion will carry on through the game's life even if the issues were fixed in a patch a month later, or if there is a simple fix you can do.
Examples are everywhere really, I can't tell you how many times I have said "I love X game" and someone said "that game was broken in Y ways" and I had to say it was fixed a week after release and no one noticed.
And Blood 2 launched with insane problems.
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cheeseslice73: Your mileage may vary, but Half-Life is a difficult game to measure the importance of, because so many of the features that made it stand out from the crowd back then are just "how things are done in first person shooters these days".
Everything about it at the time was just sublime though. Present day (now past) black ops setting, unusually restrained protagonist, cleverly AI'd military soldiers (I still remember the first time one lobbed a grenade at me to flush me out of cover), and a wide variety of weapons from the beautifully mundane (crowbar) to the enjoyably ridiculous (snarks, hornetgun, laser gun thingy).
Shogo stood out to me at the time only because it was the closest thing I'd ever seen to an manga-styled game, and IIRC, it would soon be displaced by Bungie's "Oni".
Ooh, Oni. BRB, Gotta go vote for that on the list of games I'd love to see on GoG :)
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WingedKagouti: I was about to write a lengthy post on why I don't think Half-Life deserves more than a 80-85% Meta-Critic score, even considering when it was released, but the only thing that could have accomplished would be starting a lenghty and extremely pointless discussion with a decent chance of a flamewar. Let's just agree to disagree on how good HL is and was.
Oni is IMO Bungie's best game, better than any of the other games discussed in this thread so far.

Your (perfectly valid) opinion of Half-Life doesn't hurt me or my memories of the fun time I had with that game in any way. So works for me. As I said, your mileage may vary.
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WingedKagouti: Oni is IMO Bungie's best game, better than any of the other games discussed in this thread so far.

Oni is a different genre though. And it did have some awkward controls and bland levels.
That said, I am very disappointed that my copy doesn't run on my system (keeps crashing on load with some OpenGL error in the logs.)
What stinging velvet said is true. Back in the 90's a really buggy release could badly hurt a game and give it a rep that was hard to get rid of. And, partly due to it using a early version of the Lithtech engine, Blood 2 was very unstable. Patches fixed the more serious problems, but still the game had the lable of "unplayable due to bugs" being stuck on it.
Combined with being just plain not nearly as good as design as the Original Blood, this was enough to badly damage the game and kill the franchise.
It's still worth the Six Bucks, though.
Well I played the Blood 2 demo when it was came out. I don't remember having any big issues with bugs, but I do remember thinking "this is one mediocre game."
Blood 2 was a pretty meh game in general, but that penny arcade strip is just unfathomably bad. What's the punchline? The joke seems to be "I would rather you shoot my mom than play blood 2," but the joke doesn't really go anywh
Oh, wait. I'm talking about penny arcade. Carry on.
BLood 2 is just OK at best, but there are much worse games out there.....