- the first really ambitious efforts at implementing the genre on a console from the ground up, rather than just pinching PC mechanics wholesale
GoldenEye on the N64 was also built from the ground up for its host console, and was also quite ambitious, in terms of both its structure (different objectives on each difficulty setting; polished presentation incorporating a time attack mode and unlockable options) and its use of the system's capabilities (Rare's David Doak: "GoldenEye pretty much exhausted the performance of the machine. It was hard to push it further. Perfect Dark had some good ideas but was dog slow").
- Both games were the first examples of their genre to actually feel natural on a console controller.
Again, so did GoldenEye. (You might bring up its non-centred manual aiming reticule as an example of a control pad fudge that feels unnatural, and I admit it's less intuitive than a constantly-centred crosshair and would feel a bit odd to people playing it for the first time today. But personally, I've always preferred the feel of it in that particular game, depite the fact it's less practical than the alternative. I feel the same way about pads vs keyboard and mouse: I actually find the less precise control system more fun!)
- In terms of sophistication and variety, both games were years behind equivalent offerings on the PC.
I disagree with the common complaint that Halo lacks variety. I think that it employs a few very simple elements (grunts scatter in panic when Elites are killed; Elites dive away from grenades; vehicles are used to temporarily increase the pace and firepower of the combat; all guns remain useful throughout the game rather than being superseded by an ultimate "BFG" weapon) and combines them in a thousand different ways to produce a rich combat system that encourages you to experiment with how you play. The enemy AI strikes a good balance between exploitable predictability and randomised behaviour. The emphasis is always on moment-to-moment tactics rather than precision aiming - a balance most obvious on Legendary difficulty, which is where you really get the most out of the game.
So I think its combat makes it a sophisticated game, but in a very different way to the likes of Deus Ex.
More on repetition: the level environments are undeniably constructed in a very "building-block" way, but I don't mind that - between them, those building blocks cover a good variety of layouts of paths and cover, and when you add in the variation in enemy numbers and arrangements between encounters, you get a good range of situations over the course of the game. Not as big a range as if each enemy encounter was set in its own purpose-designed enviroment, of course, but IMO Halo 2 showed that that philosophy also has its drawbacks...
Yes, Halo has are a couple of levels that are recycled wholesale, but again I care more about what the combat within them is like rather than the cosmetic similarities: "Two Betrayals" is just "Assault on the Control Room" backwards, but the addition of the Flood and pilotable Bansees make it play like a very different level.
- Both games had a storyline that thought it was far more interesting than it really was.
It does the job: "There are some aliens, figure out the best tactics to kill them!" And some of the names are quite evocative, like The Silent Cartographer and 343 Guilty Spark. The problems with the story came with Halo 2, where some twit at Bungie decided that a tale of political schisms within the Covenant should take precedence over the fact that Elites are so much more fun to fight than Brutes...
It showed how (...) you could render the genre playable - and even enjoyable - on a console.
I can't resist mentioning, once again, that... GoldenEye had already done that! :)
