I REALLY don't see what's so great about the Halo series. It's just like any other shooter. Just different weapons and designs and better graphics in some terms. The only reasoning i've heard from people is "OMG VEHICLES OMG MULTIPLYER", yet alot of other shooter games have both? There's just nothing about it that interests me, hell, the way I saw it, it was like a complete rip of Unreal Tournament in some cases. Oh well, that's just me I guess.
I think Halo was one of the first games to really successfully incorporate vehicals in a simple yet fun way. In other words, they ended up being actually useful rather than just a novelty.
That's what permeated the first Halo, in fact: usefulness of everything. Unlike most any other shooter I've seen, it was entirely balanced in firepower. What I mean by this is that no one weapon had the absolute advantage. In a game like UT if you got something like the rocket launcher, or Flack cannon, you became godlike, and someone with a standard rifle or gun would have been hard-pressed to defeat you. But in Halo each weapon, in the hands of someone skilled, could be equally potent: you had guys with the normal rifles and handguns taking out guys with the rocket launchers. Beyond this, something with the way in which they used auto-targeting allowed for a far more precise shooting... it seemed to auto-target that perfect amount that made it useful and fun without being annoying. All in all it was just a very polished game. Some of those aspects didn't quite make it all the way through to Halo II, though I think III improves upon II. Anyway, the point is, what makes Halo better than those other games is that it fixes the things those others didn't, essentially perfects the shooters, even outclassing the good ones.
See, people these days (at least, this is my opinion), have a rather ridiculous view of things like games and movies and all. As soon as they see anything borrowed from something else, right away it's crap or something. That is, I would say, a rather ignorant viewpoint. As any student of literature will know, it doesn't matter if the story has been done before, and 'originality' doesn't lie in setting out some ridiculous setting in an emperor's new clothes attempt to be faux profound. Sometimes the old hallows are revered because they were good. To take something, borrow it, and improve upon it... there's art in that, too. So just because something like Halo seems to be copied off something else... well, it probably is. But it's good that way, and that's the way it works. I'd challenge anyone who thinks contrariwise to tell me how their favourite work doesn't in some way derive off what came before it. That's just neccessity. None of the great ancients would have ever had any trouble with this. Aeschylus didn't; Shakespeare didn't. The stories they told had been told ten and a hundred times; what they'd done had been done a thousand times before. But they took it, and did it BETTER. That's why remakes and things seeming copies can be good. Because someone can put their own spin and own improvement on it. Sometime for the better, sometimes for the worse. In my opinion, much of the fantasy post Tolkien (and I'm thinking particularly anything with Elves in it) has abysmally used what he set out, and are only halves and shadows of anything he ever did. Nevertheless, the act of borrowing and copying is alright. Sure, we've seen Elves before, but who knows? Maybe some day someone will do something really neat with them again (and they probably have, I just haven't seen it myself.) Tolkien did, after all, because in his day everyone thought they knew what Elves were, and suddenly his Caliquendi and all just totally reversed this, and gave birth to an entirely new thought. People even then would have thought him derivative and that things were just copies (indeed, all of Tolkien's stories are heavilly borrowed from other works.) But people, this is what art is. It is taking something and making it your own.... either something from the world, or from other artists. As such, just let's not call something a ripoff. Ripoffs have given us some wonderful things.
