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Fei-Hung on 11 November 2008
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As the OP said, It depends what you enjoy and this is where an individuals opinions will come from.

My all time great 1st person shooters are: Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Serious Sam 2 and now the addition of R2.

The way I see it is quiet simple. To me, before anything else a game does, it should fulfill its purpose. The same goes for video games or anything else in the world. I'll give a few examples.

1) A comedy film - before it has a great plot or a great cast, it has to have the humor. The humor is key.
2) Mobile Phones - As many applications as a phone may have and how sexy it may look, they key for a phone being good is its connectivity. Like the Iphone, it may be the best gadget in the world, but now it is being sued for not being able to fulfill its primary duty to minimum legal requirements - connectivity.
3) FPS - they are meant to be shooters; blowing things up, shooting people, shooting things and making it all fun. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

I have played Half Life and I enjoyed it, but to me, it lacked shooting. When I play a FPS, I expect there to be a lot of gun fights and explosions. It may take the form of comedy (Serious Sam), take the horror approach (Doom), take the adventure approach (HL), take the Sci Fi approach (Halo), but as long as it does the FPS well, everything else should fall into place.

To me, there are a lot of games that do the FPS better then HL. This is just my opinion though. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark managed to blend the 2 perfectly and keep true to the FPS genre. This is why to this day, I still rank them the best. Serious Sam is just Serious fun with a good sense of humor. No need for mega puzzles or the like, it is just pure fun. GeoW is 3rd person, but for arguments sake, if we are to compare, GeoW does the shooting more justice then HL IMO and it does so with a lot of fun. It may seem repetitive, but damn is it engaging and fun to do.

The same goes with R2. I don't know how anyone can say it doesn't have any great moments. Those Boss battles and those giant set scenes are WOW all the way through. Even the sections when the human infected Chimera's jump out of their pods when the entire town is covered in them and they come after you an hordes popping out from everywhere. It has several WOW factors to me.

As an adventure game though, I don't think anything out there can beat the original adventure game of them all - Zelda. Half Life to me does a decent job of bringing in some adventure with some shooting. however, it doesn't do both to its fullest. There are shooters who shoot better, there are adventure games that have better adventure elements. Imo, I still think Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are the only 2 games who managed to blend the 2 elements perfectly.