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[Dodece]

You have to be realistic in your assessment about knowledge and ignorance. Unfortunately not every person who is going to venture a opinion is going to have played every single game in a genre. You can try, but you will not have much of a life. So everyone on these forums is going to have missed a few games. The sad truth is just about every idea is going to have been tried in some game or another at some point.

Basically for every example you site like counterstrike or half life. There was probably an even earlier game that had the same idea. Should you be shamed for ignorance. Should someone come in rub it in your face. You might say Counterstrike and someone else comes in and says true, but you realize they stole that from Faceball.

The Halo series has a lot of innovative features, and more specifically popularized many features that could be found here and there in other games. Thats how progress is made. What is innovative is the specific little gimmicks, and the way the entire game was packaged. You would not find all the Halo elements in another game. You found them in a dozen different games. Bungie was innovative in that they compiled the best ideas, and proceeded to polish them out.

What is very interesting is the component of the logic that is most often ignored. What was the developers intent. For example the man cannon is quite similar to the cannon in Mario 64. While the cannon in 64 was designed for the purposes of getting Mario to another hidden area. The cannon in Halo 3 will take you farther into a battle field at the risk you will get shot in flight. The same basic concept with radically different reasons.

Basically you can whittle the innovation out of anything based on arbitrary standards that you yourself set. Eventually you get to the point where everything is a rip off of something built two thousand years ago, and because in some twisted logic it is kind of similar. The newest thing cannot be innovative.

Innovative is a relative term, but personally I define innovative as not sharing more then fifty percent of the constituent mechanics with any other game. That would apply to Halo. Sure it has similarities to concepts found in dozens of games, but it is not very similar to any of them. Halo is a dynamic and different experience. High lighting the effect that having a simple jump, or dropping tanks into a multiplayer map can do to an experience. A handful of small difference can have a radical result on how a game is played.

Remember when you nitpick you also leave yourself open to counterpoints. Eventually your going to get chased down to a pong, or a Super Mario Bros. You know since they share one single element with a game you claim to be innovative. Innovation is just as much in presentation as it is in the fine details.