I'd quote you just for the sake of reference, Tryzon, but your having received a warning makes it impossible for me to do so.
I'll join the droves here who've mentioned that this might have been better served as a blog post, seeing as you have the option of cutting off your Wall of Text into manageable sections. Otherwise, I would've posted your Wall of Text as a blog entry, cut it up for legibility and then posted links to the anchored points of your entry in a forum post here. It's less direct, but it's a lot more fluid.
As for what you've said, I don't know. I hate these "Overrated Games" threads as a rule, seeing as you could really rephrase that as "Games I Didn't Like" or "Games I Think You're an Idiot for Liking". Not saying that this is what your post suggests, but it indeed is what some of these common threads do suggest.
The way you're presenting your information makes it seem as though you'd immediately forgotten that you were essentially working on an opinion piece. You might not have *wanted* to sound like a professional reviewer or to give the semblance of being one, but through your style, you gave the impression that you were making a statement of authority. Ergo, you sounded pretty much like a reviewer. I'm sorry to say this, but you actually reminded me of a *bad* reviewer, more concerned with striking off a flame war or a heated discussion than with reasonably explaining the why and how of your personal choices.
Your content, on the other hand, makes me furrow my brows a bit. Most of the games you've mentioned might be overrated now, considering as their then-innovative mechanics are now all over the place, but I really don't see how Half-Life 2 could be considered as being overrated. At the time of its release, it was one of the highest-quality FPS experiences on the market, that successfully managed to balance both gameplay and narration. BioShock followed along the same tradition, although it drew from a different source. Yes, it's far less focused than System Shock 2, but I'd come to accept and cherish that fact, largely because modern technology allows for levels of open-ended gameplay in experiences that are still designed to be fairly linear. You could approach BioShock as a simple run-and-gun shooter, or you could choose to approach it as a quasi-sandbox, which is what I chose to do. For me, the game was a lot more about seeing which Plasmids I'd be able to use where for the best possible effect than simply storming through Rapture, murderizing everything in my path.
On the other hand, you've got Doom 3. I'll agree that id Software doesn't have a storytelling bone in its entire body and that its partnership with Bethsoft won't fix that fact, but considering this, you have to take Doom 3 as a tech demo, and nothing else. Back when it first came out, that was literally *all* Doom 3 was aiming to be. A hardware whore and a benchmark station for the early two-thousands' graphics enthusiast. That also extends to the gameplay, in that they replicated the old Doom's closet scares. Yes, there is a story, but who honestly cares about Marine McScowlyface's trip through UAC facilities? id tried to give Mars a sense of place, but it was mostly washed away by corridor-crawling design. I'd say this is a bad design choice, but it's precisely what they were aiming for.
Considering all this, I consider Doom 3 to be a merely adequate shooter. I still wouldn't go so far as to say it's overrated, considering id consistently makes games you could consider as being average.
