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Half-Life 2 Panoramics
rgovostes writes "VRMag, an online panoramic magazine, has QuickTime VR scenes from Half-Life 2. The corresponding article, Half Life 2: A Panoramic Approach, explains how the images were made and relates photographic elements with the game's rendering engine."
On second thought, I think I might know what you are referring to... It's not a stitching or composition problem, but it boils down to this: When you pan around a QTVR the high default field of view can make things look out of perspective.. IE 90 degree corners look sharper on the edge vs in the center of the picture. If you click the "+" to zoom in you can sort of make this problem go away at the expense of a reduced field of view.
The other minor problem is the way QTVR maps panoramas. QTVR uses a cubic map which essentially draws the panorama onto the inside faces of a cube. Sphere mapping looks marginally better and has finer detail, but remember QTVR was designed back in the days of the 68k macs and thus speed was of greater importance than consistent image resolution.
As an aside most FPS games set the FOV a little higher than it ought to be for a 3:4 display, so maybe these scenes look normal because you are used to seeing them with a high FOV in the games... Or maybe the default FOV for the QTVR is something more appropriate than QTVR's default (like 120 degrees or so)