Quote Originally Posted by Duncan View Post
The reason Halo is so popular is because of two things: the mammoth marketing machine that is Microsoft telling us how great it is, and it was the first FPS on a console that played well.
And, you know, getting one of the only 10/10 scores in Edge magazine's history. That might have helped. (For those not in the UK, a 10/10 in Edge is as prestigious as a 40/40 from Famitsu.)

Halo was a good game, but that's it. I was just good. If you compare the game to all the FPS's that have ever been made, then it just doesn't stack up. Far Cry,
Halo is better
HL,
Halo is better
No One Lives Forever,
That's not even in the running
Jedi Knight,
Halo's better
Max Payne,
That's not even FPS
Undying,
Bwahahahahaha!

to name a few, were easily as good as or better than Halo, in terms of both story and gameplay. Wanna throw multiplayer in the mix and UT completely blows Halo 2 out of the water. The only distinction that Halo has over all the titles I've listed is that is was a console only game. So all the gamers out there that didn't have any 'good' FPS's for their consoles got Halo and Halo 2 and assumed that it was the only FPS that is good and nothing else could compare to it.
Name a few more, because the only valid thing you said there is that Unreal Tourney has awesome multiplayer, which it does. But so does TimeSplitters, and nobody considers that as highly as Halo or HL. Why? Because multiplayer is pretty much ALL it has. Halo has a much better story than most games in general, to be honest.

And of course, I must address the repetative gameplay, particularly in Halo. And by repetative I mean by stacking floor upon floor upon floor that look identical. It looked like the developers said, 'Hey our game is too short, just cut and paste that section you did earlier and slap it on top, or next to or whatever you need to do to add a couple more hours.' In Halo, the Library was the worst offender of this type as well as 343 Guilty Spark. This type of design wasn't quite so bad in Halo 2 but it was still present in some of the later levels.
Yeah that's called being an FPS. Oh, and I'll tell the Forerunners to vary their architecture in case someone hundreds of thousands of years later gets bored.

I also got a kick out of one of my friends when he was talking up all the features of Halo 2 and how innovative they were, for example the dual wielding of weapons. I thought to myself, that's nothing new, games as far back as Blood and Shadow Warrior let you use guns akimbo and Heavy Metal: FAKK2 let you hold two weapons and control them independantly.
Point conceded.

Anyway, to summarize: Halo was good, Halo 2 was better. But neither game did anything that anyone else hadn't done before, unless you limit your view to consoles.
Originality isn't necessarily the criteria for good. Good is the criteria, actually. Halo didn't do anything particularly new, it just did absolutely everything extremely smurfing well. It doesn't need a hundred different types of enemies and ten setting changes per level because it does what it does incredibly well. Same way Dynasty Warriors is incredibly repetetive, and incredibly fun. The pure gameplay is the best the genre has seen, and that's why Halo is so loved. That's why there were something like 50 people waiting outside GAME for the midnight release of Halo 2 where I live.

And yes, maybe it gets bonus points for doing all that on a console. Why shouldn't that demographic applaud it?