Unpopular Opinion: Half-Life 2, as a game, isn't particularly good, even for the time. What actually had happened was, in the 2000s, we'd hit a crossover point where well-produced, graphically demanding games had largely become too expensive to make on PC to justify their relatively low sales, so the relative quality of PC games had declined so much that Half-Life 1 was still a stand-out game in terms of quality. The consequence was that, compared to snorefests, like Unreal 2, or cookie-cutter coliseum shooters, like Painkiller, Half-Life 2 was comparatively amazing.
But other than its graphics and interesting solid-body physics, there's nothing really special about it. The story, presentation, and scope are merely par for the course for an AAA game in 2004. It's just at the time, PC gamers didn't get a lot of AAA content. The lion's share of it was on the PS2.
Half-Life 2 eventually released on the Xbox 360 in 2007, where it is remembered...basically not at all. And it's not because console gamers are philistines who can't appreciate greatness, it's because the game truly is not that special. Nor is the original Xbox port, which is competently executed and holds up graphically against other Xbox games (remember, Chronicles of Riddick is considered a classic on that system and has a Goldeneye-like frame rate), especially fondly remembered.
It's just not all that good.
