Depends on what you are looking for in a game - and while I love the HL series as a FPS fan and realize the impact that specifically the first game had on the genre. I was never more blown away by a game than Deus Ex - I can remember booting up the game for the first time and rushing into Liberty Island with a sniper rifle and promptly getting killed. Up until that point every shooter I had played was a shooter (even the Shock series) - and while I had played the Thief series, it took several times trying to get to the Statue of Liberty to realize I was actually playing a stealth shooter hybrid. Once I got the hang of it I was amazed at the depth of choice in the game - the game at the time was so much more reactive to player decision than anything I had played before.
Where as Half Life was an entertaining thrill ride that continued the design principles laid out in games like Duke3d but with much more interesting scripted sequences and a (for the time) serious narrative. It was essentially the same experience for everyone who played it - outside of a few shooting segments in levels that allowed a little bit of emergent gameplay.
Deus Ex on the other hand - was different for everyone who played it and while it was a FPS game it was also so much more than that. It was a world with deep lore that encouraged player agency in a way that only the Thief series had touched on.
I miss the 90s and early millennium as far as PC gaming goes - I feel privileged to have grown up during that time and to have had access to those games when most of my friends were playing either Playstation or N64 (later PS2 and xbox).
I remember trying to explain System Shock to a
friend right around the time that System Shock 2 was getting ready to be
released. I didn't know the term immersive sim yet - so I was trying to
explain that by saying it was like Doom but you're really there on a
space ship and you can lean around corners and pick items up and hack
security systems. But everyone was still on about Half-Life which I
thought was really good but not great.
When System Shock first came out, I was the only person in
my college class that liked it. The reason the others gave for not
liking it: the starter weapon was a metal pipe, which is boring. You
have to start with a gun.
I don't know what they thought of Half Life's crowbar 4 years later. :)
That's awesome - I showed it to a few friends when I was growing up. I don't remember a single person being impressed by it the same way I was - they always wanted to play Doom or Duke. I can admit that the first System Shock is not an attractive game in the way Doom was at the time. But I was always like - wow I am really in this space station, this is a real place and not a level.
When Shock 2 came out - it was the same thing, I'd show it to friends and they'd either get bored and almost always ask to boot up Half Life.
