Played Half-life 2 recently...

It pretty much lives up to its billing in every way. Except the lack of warning about the linearity. Very nearly no deviation off the main line. No Advanced Degree (tm) needed for this game.

The gravity gun is pretty nifty. Unfortunately, you can't use it to grab and throw opponents until late in the game, which bites. What you CAN do that's interesting is use a 50-gal drum as a shield with the grav gun. The opponents are too stupid to realize what you're doing, and since they can't see you, they don't shoot. Mostly--eventually some of them smarten up and shoot the can out of your grip. You can use it to grab those flying attack-bots and fling them into a wall--that's nice. and slicing zombies with saw-blades--that is way cool.

There are more weapons that you find than you actually need. I didn't find the six-shooter particularly helpful. The shotgun was excellent, the machine gun ok, the rocket launcher is required for some things (incl ones you didn't expect). (actually, the six-shooter is good for those barnacle-things on various ceilings)

The biz about shooting helicopters: we lost a lot of choppers and fighter jets in Vietnam from casual machine-gun fire (give all the villagers machine guns and plenty of ammo, tell them when they hear a chopper or jet to run outside with the gun and just shoot up in the air--you'll end up shredding the flyers eventually, at very low cost). I should be able to bring down those helicopters gunships with any automatic weapon in addition to the rocket launcher. (Did you notice how much those flying things look like bugs?)

There's one spot late in the game where you have four snipers. The first two of them you can really just run past, so you should do so. The reason for this is that you may have a load of rockets (well, 3), and since you can use them to take out the snipers, you might be tempted. However: those first two aren't actually that dangerous. It's the second two snipers that are a problem, and you almost certainly have to have the rockets for them. Online walk-throughs say you can throw hand-grenades at the second two snipers--I absolutely could NOT do that, I got killed quick every time. You CAN hit them with the rockets--the trick is to realize that you can't really show yourself but just barely to where you can see the windows they're inside, and then remember how the rocket launcher works, because there isn't extra ammo around. If you stand up to where those two snipers can see you, you'll be dead quick. But if you crouch to where you can just barely see the top of the window, they can't see you yet, and you can rocket them both.

This game didn't really take me all that long to play, maybe two weeks of serious play time, during which my wife felt neglected :( Definitely worth the $20 I spent; at the moment, I'm not expecting to do any of the expansions. The gravity gun, however...need to see that elsewhere.

August: I went back and played again, after recovering my Steam login. Then I fired up the cheats opportunity, and the played the entire game (after about 3 levels), with the super gravity gun. game was MUCH more fun with that, and realizing that you can grab thrown hand-grenades mid-air and throw them back, in addition to being able to grab virtually any opponent...with one exception. I was not able to grab the ant-lion queens, reason not known, but since if you look at other parameters you can modify in the console, it's all heavy on the physics, they are probably weight-related.