[General Battuta]

CoD is clearly a manshooter, while Halo is about shooter mans but is not a manshooter. Tribe is a fastgoer.

[MatthTheGeek]

FPS = First-Person Shooter.

If:
1.  It is in a first person perspective, and
2.  You shoot things

Then:
The game is an FPS.

Nope.avi

You sound like people that do word-by-word translations from a language to another. Or Google trad.

[Scourge of Ages]

CoD is clearly a manshooter, while Halo is about shooter mans but is not a manshooter. Tribe is a fastgoer.

This seems a good definition for our purposes, at least to start. Now designate:
Metroid Prime (shootjumper?)
Xeno Clash (facepuncher?)
Oblivion (magicshooter?)
Age of Chivalry / War of the Roses (manslicer?)
Farcry 1, 2, 3 (mansneaker?)

[Phantom Hoover]

I do feel that FS2 fills the same general niche as Halo or CoD, though.

[Lorric]

FS2 is a space combat simulator. This designation has always existed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Space_combat_simulators

[MatthTheGeek]

I do feel that FS2 fills the same general niche as Halo or CoD, though.

Hahahaha

Try to get any of the Halo/CoD crowd to play a game like FS.

The learning curve is just too damn high. Especially when they haven't played any game like it, ever, since the last good space sim was FS2 itself, back in '99.

The two markets (I don't think Halo and CoD can even be qualified as "niche", they're way too bloated for that) have just nothing in common. And thank unexistant god for that.

[Phantom Hoover]

have you ever actually played either halo or cod

[Mongoose]

This seems a good definition for our purposes, at least to start. Now designate:
Metroid Prime (shootjumper?)

If we're allowed to add another, I'd peg it at a shootjumpsplorer, with the exploration being the main focus.

[Ghostavo]

Games can have multiple genres.

As MP-Ryan said, FPS just means it's a first person game, and it's a shooter.
Nowadays you might not find it to be a very useful label but if you look a bit past the origins of the genre, you'll see that it differed very wildly from the games that were played back then, and that there weren't many FPSs. However, because there are so many different kinds of FPSs nowadays and there's what some might consider a sort of main branch of FPSs that have very similar characteristics, they confuse that main branch with the whole genre. Which is why we presently see games that have multiple genres or sub-genres and multiple labels describing them.

Long story short, the FPS label is overused because of the quantity of existing FPSs.

[BloodEagle]

It doesn't help that there's no established nomenclature for games.  You can go pick up actual textbooks about them, and most of the terminology differs wildly.

[Nakura]

It was being developed by the creators of Metroid Prime?! The game looks pretty awesome too, why did they have to cancel it?

I lost faith in Capcom a long time ago, when they butchered the Resident Evil series.