So I had a chance to play Halo2 this weekend. It was visually rich, really cool, great music, blah blah blah. Fun. I finally jumped back onto XBox Live as well (gamertag is "LetsKillDave") and played for about 10 minutes. The multiplayer experience was fun as well, but sometimes suffered from lag effects (nothing serious -- all games seem to suffer this when there's a lot of players in a serious furball). I really need to replace that hand controller with a mouse/keyboard combo...I just can't get comfortable holding a controller...must be an age thing 
But what I was really doing was marking time until Half-Life2 releases at midnight tonight. Sure, it doesn't have the same advertising budget that Halo had, but this is a visually RICH game that will definitely get great buzz (yes, I've played part of it at Valve's office already). But the really cool thing is...
I can start playing this game exactly at midnight tonight.
Why? Because Valve has delivered, in little chunks at a time, the entire Half-Life2 game onto my computer (plus a couple of other freebies, like Half-Life redone using the new "Source" engine that powers Half-Life2). This was made possible by the content delivery service provided by Valve, Steam. As a benefit to die-hard players of their Counter-Strike game (a mod based on the original Half-Life engine), they've made the Counter-Strike: Source game available as a kind of "early gift" (using the new Half-Life2 engine) over the last several weeks. This was an incredibly clever approach for Valve -- they gave a good sneak peek into the workings of the new Source engine, let thousands of users beat on the Source engine to help find some bugs, plus opened up their server code for testing on other servers. Overall, I'm extremely confident that this game will have very few bugs.
"But how is the gameplay?" you ask.
Let me compare to the recent release of Doom3. One thing that clearly differentiates Doom3 from HL2: Light.
Just like the original Half-Life game, Valve doesn't use nearly perpetual darkness to stimulate the mood or danger. It's like the difference between a cheap horror movie (the ones that benefit from having monsters pop out of dark rooms and go "boo!") and a quality adventure-thriller (in precisely the same way that "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace" isn't). Half-Life2 starts you quite mysteriously in a 1984-esque city called "City 17"...very different from the Mesa Research Facility of the original game. This disorienting shift helps set the mood...but the mood is only the beginning. The visual quality is quite fascinating...just look at the water...throw something in it...pick something up...the world _lives_ around you. Finally, the physics and AI are both impressive. Things almost behave the way they would in real-life, if only the bad guys would drop dead at the first bullet This is going to be a fantastic game.
But wait, there's more! The original Half-Life wouldn't have gotten very far without a decent SDK to help other people build mods like the classic Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat. So effective immediately, you can get the Source SDK through Steam. If you're looking to stick your toes in game development, this is a GREAT way to do it!
Oh, if you're looking for me playing HL2 online, do a search for ChiliConCarnage. See ya!