Holy cow, just noticed this: At the time of me writing this, Gears 2 has 0.1% lower then LBP on Gamerankings. That would put it either right below LBP as the 14th highest scored game, or right below Half-Life 2, right ABOVE Halo CE, as the 16th game of all time.

As of writing anyway, but thats **** impressive for a shooter, and not a genre that devs don't know much about yet.

My bad, replace FPS with Third-Person Shooter. I should stop making these kinds of posts at work.

I can't believe I made that mistake even though I've seen the gameplay footage.

Absolutely not. Personally I still think the benchmark for shooters is Half Life 2 because I have yet to see something even come close to it. Aside from Metroid Prime but it's hard to relate the 2. Point being its hard to be a benchmark setter when you still can't set it past the best.

And as for all videogames that is simply laughable. How do you compare benchmarks for cross genres. Gears 2 is a benchmark for nothing other than showing that Epic could improve upon Gears 1 greatly showing just how simplistic the first was. I credit Epic for being able to improve on the first so much and not just give us a rehash.

And on Metacritics it's currently level with LBP, but like I said LBP has had more reviews and it's harder to sustain a higher rating for more reviews. So Gears 2 could drop to 94 or 93 on metacritic yet.

The reviewer implies consoles only but says 'best graphics ever' without qualification.  I know its nitpicking but in general it seems writing skills are going downhill in terms of being explicit vs vague and I don't like it.

I did point out I thought GeOW2 pushed envelope for consoles graphically.

I think it might have the best single player, and it certainly has the best co-op. I think you're just biased against it. Quite obvious, actually.

Metroid Prime is a FPA. It just has the ability to shoot things in it.

Lets be honest the talk of the newest games being a benchmark is just laughable at times.

Why? Because there just doing what other games did earlier before them. Yes it nice since then they've learned from them and improved but they weren't the ones setting the foundation of the genre.

So can we please stop this talk, or maybe PlayStation 3 fans keep coming in the Microsoft 360 section or vice versa, yes we know you enjoy your games doesn't mean you have to piss into everyone's cereals.

I don't understand your point. Why should people being Playstation 3 fans have anything to do with their opinions on gaming benchmarks, unless they're fanboys....and if they're fanboys, it's very obvious, so an intelligent poster would know enough to disregard their opinions.

Seems a lot of people have different definitions of the word benchmark.

If a game raises the level of quality in other games, and said quality becomes a standard, then it has set a benchmark.

Some benchmarks from recent years in the gameplay department have come from the cover system in Gears, the onstar system in GTAIV(Fable 2, Dead Space, have copied very successfully), and the limb targeting system in RE4. The hardest genre to set benchmarks in is the FPS genre.

A benchmark isn't something that every new game copies. Games are still released today that aren't up to snuff with recent benchmarks set by the industry. Benchmarks improve a game, they don't create it.

As far as Gears 2 goes, we don't know if it's set any benchmarks, nor will we for a while.

"Piss into everyone's cereals"... now there's a Bill Paxton line if ever there was one!