What do you felt when you played Half Life 2 for the first time?

I felt so sick playing that game, five minute game me motion sickness and i need to stop playing.

i finish it 5 years ago, it was awesome, really .. really awesome, as a big HL1 fan i enjoyed the game a lot :) .. same goes for ep1 and 2

i was a kid, and felt only sv_cheats 1 and noclip :(
but then i realized, that play this awesome game without cheats is more fun.

Pure garbage. Not trolling, this is honest, straightforward answer. I failed to see what makes Half Life stuff so damn popular.

Excitement. Played it on release and it was a very good game at its time.
If I would've played it in the recent 5 years I'd probably would call it overrated.
But at dat time the game revolutionized the genre in terms of graphics, physics and everything.

It was right after I finished the first one, so I was pretty excited to see all the chars that got brought over. It was so improved, but it still didn't make it feel the first is out of date, they're both very fun.

Didn't play it. ;c

I loved it all the way but back then it was crashing on my ooooooold ass PC with a memory error, pissing me off as i had waited for so long to play it x) later my brother was kind enough to install it on his pc which was better than mine back in the day and i loved it really much :D no disappointement it was just THAT good to me. Finished it thousands of times, had lots of fun on DM too and i also love the first game, even though IT PISSES ME OFF THAT THE HD PACK REPLACES THE GLOCK, FFS. I don't need that pack anyway, I ain't a graphics bitch, but the Barneys are so horrible xD I can live with it :P But well, Half-Life's cool :)

I played HL2 for the first time literally 30 minutes after it was released on Steam. Yep, I was one of the people who stayed up until 3 in the morning (I'm on the east coast, the game was unlocked at midnight PST) to unlock and play it. It took 30 minutes for the whole thing... and before I knew it, the sun was up and I hadn't even gone through a quarter of the entire game.

I was just so engrossed the entire experience, "oohing" and "aahing" at every little detail, going out of my mind thinking just how awesome it was and how I was finally getting to play the game I had waited so long for.

To this day, HL2 is the only game that not only lived up to the hype, the hype that I experienced and was a large part of from the moment of its announcement all the way to its release, but in fact exceeded that hype by a large margin. At least I feel that way. And what a glorious rollercoaster ride it was too. The source code leak, the "beta" leak, finding out that the game was still just a shell by its originally scheduled release date, having to wait another whole year before it went gold... and, oh man, the gold announcement. Gamers everywhere creamed their pants when the game finally went gold.

At least, that's how it all felt at the time. Just epic.

And to everyone that played it for the first time recently and weren't impressed... you guys react exactly how I reacted when I played games like Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind for the first time, only a few short years ago. I was old enough to play those games when they first came out, sure, but I wasn't interested in RPGs in the slightest. I was in my mid-to-late teens and addicted to competitive FPS gaming. Now I understand what it's like to be on the other end, to be the guy that experienced the epicness of a really good game when it first came out, only to see younger generations scoff at it later on because it's "behind the times".

Someday you will be at the other end too, I hope.