I agree that I am being unfair to Valve here. But I’m just making a subjective judgement that I don’t like their combat engine, and the rest of the game doesn’t make up for that.

Yeah, level grinding is universal… but I’m not allowed to play that other game.

That’s… um… the start of the game.

I think it’s a pretty cheap criticism to slam the game on whether or not the physics puzzles are boring — they make up a pretty small percentage of the gameplay. Ultimately, one’s love of an FPS is dictated by the visceral pleasure in mowing down senseless herds of enemies with the tools provided. Half Life 2 and the follow ons accomplished that goal for me. Did the plot make a lot of sense? Not really — even less sense when you read the timelines people have put together. They did a pretty good job for me, though, of providing punctuated bits of adrenaline that drove me onto that “one more thing.” The episodes also did a pretty good of job of being done around when I was ready to be done with them.

I’m glad I didn’t try to play HL2 and both episodes all in one long chunk — I think fatigue would set in pretty quick. And yes, Portal is clearly the shining star of the Orange box — perfectly balanced in tone and length. But that didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of taking out a bunch of Combine, one more time.

As for FPS overload — that’s sort of been the normal state of affairs for a few years now. There was a time when I’d try to pick up each new shiny FPS that came down the pipe, but I gave that up back in 2003 or so (yes, before Warcraft, shut up you). It is, however, interesting that what most attracts you to COD4 is the experience point grind and the inevitable gearing up of a character in, shall we say, a massively multiplayer world…

For me, TF2 (PC) has been the most fun I’ve had gaming for a long time. Lag-free and runs smoothly on my old iMac. All the classes have strengths and weaknesses that force you to work together and allow people with different play styles to play – you could play as medic and never fire a shot.

A coordinated team will win everytime, as I learnt yesterday (3 ubered Heavies make a mess of any defence)

You need to play in a team with half-way adequate engineers. They’ll set up teleporters to help you out with this. Of course, the fact that the game design has map delays in order to make engineers half-way adequate is a different issue…