actually, I have to consider Halo as one of the best for the sheer number of innovations this title gave us.
Regenerating health, the melee, the grenade button, seemless Inside-Outside transitions, fully integrated vehicle gameplay
No, just no. People taunt these as things Halo innovated but when taken a close look at it, all those things were in other titles.
All those except melee and a specialised grenade system I can point out Battlezone 2 and Tribes which did it earlier (and there are most probably others that did it too even earlier). Actually the specialised grenade system was done by Tribes too.
As for the last one, the melee button, according to what I got, GoldenEye had one. Four years earlier!
EDIT: Duke Nukem 3D had it even earlier it seems.
Why do people repeatedly mention these things? Who knows. Maybe someone out there repeatedly mentions FreeSpace as the first Space Sim with beams for weapons.
Good comparison, because Halo is great for all the reasons FreeSpace is. It presented a compelling story with slick gameplay, an innovative and streamlined integration of all the major innovations of the genre, a few extra (arguably revolutionary) features thrown in on top, and a whole crapload of atmosphere.
You can't argue that Halo is not the source of all those innovations (melee, grenade system, regenerating health) simply because the reason they're all prevalent now is because games copied Halo. It may not have originated them but it perfected and propagated them.
But it's not innovating! It's popularizing (for better or worse)! It's a completely different thing!
It also popularized tea bagging and screaming into the microphone, do you call that innovating too?
By the way, which "extra arguably revolutionary features" did Halo have that other titles didn't have earlier?
It doesn't matter how many people do it first, it's the people who do it right. Halo was in the right place, at the right time, with the right ingredients, and now all shooters riff from it.
As for the generalizations about people who play Halo, the same could be said of anything with broad appeal in such a demographic. It reflects nothing whatsoever upon the game itself.
All that aside you're doubly wrong because Halo did innovate with those features. It was a console shooter with excellent design on the software, simulation, and gameplay level. Its controls, concepts, and graphics all came together in one superb and, yes, innovative package. The fact that other games had used many of those features first, again, means nothing: FreeSpace did almost nothing new but it was still
innovative.The thing that is most striking (and probably least recognized) about Halo is that it is, unlike most shooters, a simulation of sorts. The game engine does very little in the way of cheating. Every entity is a physics-based actor in a simulated world, using proscribed senses to navigate and determine courses of action. The player is just another such actor. This is is very much at odds with the heavily scripted approaches taken by Half-Life and Call of Duty.
Please don't say dual-wield. Bungie did that in the early 90's with their Marathon games.
You could even dual-wield shotguns. Oh, man.
