I suppose, but that makes it an FPS as much as Super Metroid is a Third Person Shooter for its camera angle and the main method of attacking.

First Person Shooters, at least as far as I understand the term, are games in which the shooting actually is the main focus of the game. The game generally sacrifices non-linearity and exploration elements in favor of a much more linear or in some cases level type structure so that it can easily control which enemies you run into, and, by extension, where you're going to be fighting them an attempt to make the shooting element of the game the most enjoyable one.

On the other hand, shooting is pretty clearly not the main focus of the Prime series. That would be exploration, and a quick look at the old GC control scheme is all you need to know that Retro did everything they could to make the exploration part the main focus while shooting took a bit of a backseat. Not to say Prime's control scheme is bad in any way, but it's not one that would work at all in your standard FPS type game. Heck, they give you a lock on that easily tracks essentially any enemy in the game and makes the major challenge of combat figuring out how to kill an enemy and avoiding their attacks, since aiming is no longer a challenge. I can't think of any game that's main focus is shooting removing all challenge from the shooting portion of the game; and on top of the extremely non-linear design of the game and the huge focus on making exploration the most enjoyable part, I'm far more inclined to call Metroid Prime an adventure game that happens to use shooting elements rather than a shooting game that happens to have exploration elements.

i like many of your arguments, but if the bolded is true, many of them also aply to the first Half-Life (The second, as I see it, is more combat focused).

That's my main problem with this list. Especially with Wolfenstein 3D, it was influental and all but it has aged really poorly in compairson to the first Dooms and Quakes. Goldeneye too was a good game for the time but going back to it today it just doesn't hold up anymore.

 Thank you so much for this.  Like hell I'm clicking through all those pages.

Anyway, Timesplitters 2 at #60; Timesplitters Future Perfect not in it at all.  I'm out.

Timesplitters 3 is #79. Still too low though for those games, and Perfect Dark should also be higher imo.

Right you are.  I control + F'd "Timesplitters" but he'd missed a 't' out of the Timesplitters in Future Perfect.

I actually enjoyed FP more than Timesplitters 2, so aside from the fact that they're both far too low, they're also in the wrong order for me.  Boo this list!

(I've never played Perfect Dark, but going off the fact that it's made by Free Radical devs before they became Free Radical, I am sure you are correct!)

Graphically or gameplay wise?