I'd heard that the Halo 2 ending was because they had to cut stuff, and it really was rushed. Whereas the Half-Life 2 ending seemed utterly intended--just poorly chosen pacing-wise. That framing story is just annoying in its intentional confusingness and disruptiveness. To be fair, I really really liked the ending gameplay of HL2. I think it's wrong for games to end with their hardest section; the ending is the time to make the game really fun, not really frustrating. You want an emotional climax, but game designers too often translate that into making it really hard, which isn't the same thing at all. [System Shock 1 was totally guilty of this, unfortunately, and probably unintentionally (we should have just tuned the ending a lot more)--too many people played through on low cyberspace difficulty and just couldn't cope. I literally went and did the final boss battle for a number of people. Then again, I did the level leading up to the final boss of Mario 64 for quite a few people too.] So I thought HL2's final gameplay style was very fun, very funny, and quite an appropriate way to end--plus a final tension clock that reminds me now of Ultima Underworld's ending. --Sean