Originally Posted by
Warsaw
Metro 2033 was clunky? You must think that Battlefield is clunky, too, because apart from the gas-mask the controls are nigh identical. It had mechanics that required you to apply some brain-power, but the controls were a simple key-press for everything and the gas-mask button-hold was actually embarrassingly ingenious. The cut-scenes were also so well-scripted that I had to do a double-take every now and then to make sure I hadn't triggered some kind of branching path.
And I did just say that I put Halo 1 in the same category as Half-Life 2. I didn't say it maybe compares, I said it's absolutely on the same tier. It has nothing to do with pushing limits of anything, it has everything to do with delivering a fine-tuned play experience that holds up under every potential circumstance. Halo 2+ do not do this (Legendary anybody?). Bungie nailed it with the first game in every category. It is challenging without being frustrating, is very rewarding to play, and it makes you yearn for more. Just like the other two games I mentioned do for me. I don't think that it was a fluke; they did a very good job and earned that title. The other games? Not so much.
Regarding ONI and Marathon, those didn't create rabid fan-bases that a publisher decided was big enough to milk for 5 more games plus some third-party spin-offs and general enfranchisement. Halo made the Xbox. Marathon couldn't make the Mac. ONI didn't even score well with both critics and players to even begin to tell me that "Bungie has earned every bit of praise they have received." They made one genuinely amazing game and then squandered their good name, as far as I am concerned, with, to use your own language, pig-headed decisions with the Halo games. They didn't keep trying to reintroduce Halo 1 mechanics over the course of the series for nostalgic reasons alone. They knew they had dug themselves into a corner with Halo 2, an evolutionary dead-end. They knew they had to change things, but that people would cry foul at every deviation from Halo 2, so they had to slowly make it more like the first game one step at a time. Every single iteration after Halo 2 went back to the roots a little more. And you want to know why Halo 2 became the standard? Xbox Live; it meant a lot more people could play it together. I would bet a good chunk of money that if Halo 1 had been Live-enabled, Halo 2 would have been crucified for how its multi-player behaved. It was already more or less crucified for its campaign versus its predecessor by the players.
Finally, saying that people are ignorant because, essentially, you are of the opinion that their opinion is ignorant, is assuming that your opinion is not ignorant. This is a moronic thing to do. In this case, it's also an ad hominem attack. Drop the rhetoric while you are ahead.
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