[kupoartist]

Originally Posted by Uchiha Sasuke

Sorry but I think Halo 2 will take best of show easily. It already got the award from IGN. And now TechTv is already saying shit about it. Hands down Halo 2. Most anticipated game ever.

IGN barely rated Half-Life 2 at all in fact, not giving it even a best action shooter award... Gamespy however, gave Half-Life 2 the best of show award, whilst Halo didn't even beat off the Handhelds. All a matter of opinion I guess, but it seems to me that IGN are biased towards consoles - quite how Resident Evil 4 is technically superior to Half-Life is beyond me - but Gamespy are just as biased towards PC games.

Having seen the non-playable presentations for Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, i'm definately with Half-Life 2 on this one, but then its sort of wrong to compare the two - The HL2 presentation was all about showing off Single Player, whilst Halo 2 was all about multiplayer. I just found the whole Single Player experience really exciting, and most importantly unique. I can't go and play what Half-Life 2 is promising with any other product currently on the market. Halo 2 on the other hand, has got a bit of innovation (destructable vehicles) and has done some well needed catching up (the map in the presentation looks like they actually did some "design" in the whole level design process). Trouble is, I can boot up Halo 1 and play something approximating what I've seen, right this second. Whats more, Halo 1 can't hold a candle to UT2004, and Halo 2 shows no signs of matching that fast paced, innovative and feature packed game to me...

they just seemed to be nothing more than well made First Person Shooters (although some parts of HL were incredibly naff). For me, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 were more important...

Yes Deus Ex and System Shock 2 were far better than Halo and Half-Life ever were. But there is two big problems:

1. Deus Ex: Invisible War was - to put it politely - like a piece of dog poo smeered around the inside of my letter box. Yeah, not even nice poo like Mr Hankey.
2. System Shock 3 won't start development until (in the following temporal order) a) Hell Freezes Over, b) Ion Storm gets their creativity back, c) Electronic Arts stop sitting on a licence they're never going to have the wit to use and d) Duke Nukem Forever reaches the Alpha stage of production.

As such, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 are simply "the next best thing" and worth getting excited about, before the sequels to the games you really want arrive, and Satan has to wear a fur coat to stop his nipples getting frozen.