So I was reading GI's
Top 10 Shooters Of The Generation and thought about other top of the gen list and it made me thinking.
Here's a bit of rambling, might be interesting (or not). Episode 2 seems like a pretty overlooked game (compared to Valve standards). A lot of HL fans I know consider it to be the best HL2 game. It trimmed a bit of fat and provided better combat while still keeping the HL2 elements, the Strider battle and the ending come up a lot in "great moments" discussions etc, but I don't see it ranking on these lists. I guess one reason is the Orange Box hurt it, as Portal and TF2 overshadowed it. It also came out in the same year as MW and Bioshock, two games which were pretty big and influential. Also there seems to be a trend of only talking about the two main HL games, while leaving the smaller ones out (includes Opposing Force).
But it was also a remnant of a bygone era. It came out 2 years after "the golden age" of shooters has ended. DocSeuss
put that era between '97 and '07, to me it was '98 - '04 (Unreal - HL2). '05 - '07 was sorta a transitional period, where it would be decided what's going to define the generation (RE4 - technically last gen at that point, but you get it -, Gears, CoD and Bioshock would set the trend). Again, it came out in the same year as MW and Bioshock, or Crysis and Stalker. Two years before it was big, but by that time it became antiquated. The genre has "moved on".
Same goes for FEAR btw. A cult favorite which came out at the start of the gen (though for consoles in the upcoming years) and still has better gunplay than the games in that list, yet I don't recall it ranking highly in these lists. Again it came out in an awkward period. One year after HL2, the same year CoD2 and RE4 came out. The shift was already starting.
Stalker is also in a similar shoes. Its buggy launch didn't help, but otherwise it did lots of cool things, but it seems Metro has become a more relevant franchise. On a technical level Crysis overshadowed it (Stalker certainly looked cool in that '03 E3 demo, but that was in '03) and in terms of narrative and gameplay again MW and Bioshock set the trend. Oh and it also didn't come out for consoles.
These 3 games to me are all top 10 shooters of last gen regardless of any trend, but looks like for the media at least they came out at the wrong time. Weirdly enough Halo seemed to have survived all this?
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Also, it still baffles me that Bioshock would be chosen as #1. On PC with m&kb the controls were totally clunky. For me that's a reason to not consider it #1. Contrast that to RE4 where the tank controls "made sense" (played it with m&kb btw). And I'm saying this is someone who grew up on id, Epic, Valve and so on shooters. The encounters were designed and balanced around it. It never got in the way! It was weird at first, but the game made a good job of teaching me the hows pretty fast and organically. In Bio1 I spent the opening levels battling the controls and eventually got used to it.
