Quote Originally Posted by NayusDante View Post
Even HL1 was a bit of a chore to play through. I did finish it before playing HL2, but you can skip over it if you want. The Half-Life story feels more like a prequel to HL2 than the first game in a series, at this point.
Crazy talk! Don't skip Half Life 1...it's superior to many of todays FPS's - aside from its graphics. If you can take the time to play just about anything else, you owe it to yourself to play the original Half Life.

Regarding the original question - definitely go for PS2 over Dreamcast. The load times just kill the Dreamcast port. I hear they were the last thing left to optimize in that version of the game, but as-is they are very frequent and annoyingly long. Also, I hear that the PS2 version can utilize a USB keyboard and mouse, which is one of the main reasons people keep pointing to the PC version. I haven't tried that myself, but I should one of these days.