Ah, I remember when Half-Life 2 was first released.
I was told over and over how my PC at that time couldn't handle it and you needed some ungodly-priced rig to even get it working on medium settings.

I've just ran it today on full blast and man does it look like crap.

How far we've come....

B... b... but it doesn't...

I still find HL2 graphically very good and pretty each time I play it... not sure which other shooter have managed to age so well. Even been playing newer shooters which I think looks a lot worse.

So yes, subjective opinions are subjective.

Yeah, well, that's just, like... your opinion, man.

But, and this is a very big but, my subjective opinions have much more worth than everyone elses subjective opinion. Dang narn it!

It still looks fantastic imo - what are you comparing it with ? PC gaming needs this kind of viewpoint like it needs a hole in the head. Remember when nearly everyone was forced to buy a new PC in order to play Crysis ? There was already a thread on this subject titled "Graphics Begone" or something similar. Half Life 2's graphics are easily good enough for me.

He said a Valve game has faults!!! Burn the WITCH!!!

/sarcasm
Seems to me Valve are focusing more on art style than fidelity nowadays (with the Source engine being extremely out-dated, I'm in awe of Respawn and how they made Source work with TitanFall)

Crysis is showing it's age a little bit, but to me it still looks amazing.

Define crap.

We really want to go through this? :P

crap 1 (krp) Vulgar Slang

n.
1. Excrement.
2. An act of defecating.
3. Foolish, deceitful, or boastful language.
4. Cheap or shoddy material.
5. Miscellaneous or disorganized items; clutter.
6. Insolent talk or behavior.

intr.v. crapped, crap·ping, craps
To defecate.

interj.
Used to express anger or displeasure.

I played Need For Speed II SE (1997) with the Glide wrapper a couple of days ago and the graphics didn't bother me at all.

Graphic capability only bothers me in 2 instances:
1) It interferes with gameplay e.g. making it hard to quickly identify targets.
2) The minimum settings are still too high for my computer to handle, which... also interferes with gameplay

I just replayed it (and now I am on Episode 1), and I was surprised how good it still looks. Ok, so current games do have more detailed faces and bodies than HL2, but e.g. the water effects in the Water Hazard level still impressed me. But maybe it was partly because the game I had played just before HL2 was the original Half-life games... But before that, I was playing e.g. Spec Ops: The Line, Crysis 2 and Witcher 2, if they count as new games.

If you e.g. load the free Half-life 2: Lost Coast and crank everything up from the advanced options and resolution to 1920x1080, does it still look like crap?

So I'm in the camp who thinks the game has aged quite well graphically (and frankly, I think Valve has updated the graphics engine over the years; wasn't it so earlier that the special effects in "Lost Coast" were not originally in the main game? Now it seems to have the same.). I probably wouldn't mind still playing some new games with this same graphics engine. Maybe the main difference to some newer games I've played is that everything in HL2 looks "too smooth" to be fully believable.

Another 3D game that has aged quite well IMHO is the Serious Sam games (Classic). You can see the age and low detail on models, but it still manages to impress on some levels.

However, something like Wheel of Time (with Unreal engine)... I must admit it doesn't look that good today, but I guess I survive. And yeah, the original Half-life...

Not to mention physics are still better than in most corridor shooters.

Weird, hl2 is one of the few games I could say has had no problem with age at all. It looks awesome now and it will probably still do a long time from now. I don't even like the game that much but it does look really nice with the facial expressions and the lighting and the physics.