Sean: I totally agree that the cyberspace thing was poorly chosen on our part because it was just way too skippable before then. I think there were lots of cool things about cyberspace, certainly. I though the Underworld 1 ending was far better... the tension of fleeing from the demon and the sheer unexpectedness of how it played out made it incredibly memorable at the time. In contrast in HL2 while the sequence was fun, I thought there were far more compelling moments all throughout the game. I did love bouncing those energy cores around though. So yeah, in terms of pure gameplay I can't complain too much... in fact Halo 2 is much weaker there I think just because of the way the AI can defeat the final boss while you aren't looking. You're right that the whole fiction of HL is just inherently more obfuscated than Halo's. They had some great character resolution moments before the ending and I think they were all set up to tie things off but then really missed the mark, IMO.