Angry rant follows. Your opinions to the contrary are not wanted.

I had been considering buying Half Life 2 (not the prequel, the originial)
for a long time. I like Dystopian settings, and had just wrapped up
Fallout 3, which I loved....and HL2 was on sale at Steam (which I loathe) and the price was almost reasonable. I took the leap, and five minutes into the game, I regret it bitterly.

Fallout 3 is the only game I ever encountered that has a "Very Easy" setting. I used that for the whole game, and it felt "just right".
I quickly grew VERY tired of the frustration of locks in F3 and used the console to cheat and unlock things that way

I thought the music and graphics in HL2 were very good, but I was stunned at how difficult the game was on the Easy setting. The "armor" seems pretty much useless at protecting you. You are going up against bullets with a freaking crowbar....that's awfully steep for the very start of a game. The path you must navigate is a frustrating maze, when you do get a weapon, it has a patheticly small amount of ammo.

I know, I know...the the guy eventually gets a fancy gun that throws things. Maybe it will be okay, but I expect it to be tricky to give the commands, making it suck.

I enabled the console in HL2, and gave myself all sorts of those medicine packs. It did not seem to help at all. The enemies behave like Olympic Sharpshooters, and the damage racks up so fast that the game becomes: run 20 feet, stop, enable console, cheat up a medical pack, use it, run another 20 feet, and repeat, again and again. I didn't see any option to crawl or sneak, and the enemies always seem to have you in a "kill zone" of crossfire.

Worst of all are those damn flying "flashbulb" things. Fine, stun the guy on the screen that I am playing, but do you have to literally blind ME?!

Sure, you can cheat up any weapon you want, but the ammo runs out so fast, you have to do it every 30 seconds.

I've played a lot of games. Many FPS are just stupidly, insanely hard.
I'm bitterly disappointed to discover that such a popular game that I stalled for years before buying, has turned out to be so stupifyingly hard.

I 'd like to take a baseball bat and smash it into the genitals of game designers:
SMASH! "Frustration is not Fun!"
SMASH! "Frustration is not Fun!"
SMASH! "Frustration is not Fun!"
over and over and over again until they died.

I found Fallout 3 more difficult than Half Life 2.

Mostly because it's so easy to get lost, or not find a small item in those maze like dungeons.

Half life 2 is straight forward and easy to follow.

The answer is that, maybe, just maybe, FPS simply aren't your style of game. What makes them a challenge is testing the player's reaction time and accuracy foremost - and all else including tactics (some use that as part of the challenge more than other - is much less important.

Half-life 2, especially the beginning, is by FPS standards not all that difficult. Look at a few video's of people playing Half-life 2, maybe.

This also strikes me as a relevant question.

Are you playing the game using your feet?

HL2 isn't a corridor shooter. The level design is excellent. Take some time to look around and explore and you will find plenty of medkits and ammo all over the place. Also, it's not Serious Sam. Use cover wisely.

Dude, Fallout 3 is an open-world RPG, encouraging exploration and dialogue, with quite a bit of combat. It's pretty much uncomparable to Half-Life 2, which is a corridor shooter. It's got a throttleneck every 10 feet. That's corridor shooter with a great level design, but corridor shooter nevertheless.

Every time someone mentions FO3 without then saying, "Oh yeah, and I also played New Vegas and it was awesome!" a little part of me dies. :P

And yes, as has been said, they're completely different games and can't really be compared.

....wat did I just read...

Half-Life 2 is much, MUCH easier than Fallout 3. Fuck you even said you played it on VERY EASY! HOW can you even call Half-life 2 a hard game?
...wat...

If you're cheating to get past locks in Fallout 3 and think Half Life 2 is hard on Easy...maybe you should stop playing games, or consider a new hobby.

Well it does take courage to say one of the best designed turn-based tactical game is badly designed :D

i like this "Your opinions to the contrary are not wanted" lol

1st thought - get a life, it's a game / s
2nd thought - I haven't played either, so can't comment on difficulty - but I am a cr*p player, as black mesa is proving, but it fun anyway :D

Everyone says that, but i've seen several "social" people who are useless drunks, or fly-by-night personalities.

Telling the guy to grow up is a better way of saying it.

Aye. I hate the implication that somehow discussing games seriously makes you a lifeless basement-dweller, but it's alright to discuss any other media as much as you want.

And to the OP: Use cover. Shoot people. That's, uh, mostly it. Whatever you do, don't play Demon's Souls. :P