It is arguable that without Master Chief, you'd be able to carry eight bazookas, a dozen submachine guns, and 42 grenades into battle in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 . So the next time neo-Communist troopers grind your hero into the front lawn of Main Street USA, put blame where blame is due.

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Microsoft+shared+original+Halo+tech+with+other+developers.

And just why is the celebrated Spartan at all connected to Infinity Ward's billion-dollar shooter? Because aside from Nintendo's Super Mario Bros., no series has shaped videogames quite like Halo . Each chapter is a certifiable blockbuster, driving overall sales of the franchise to a staggering 34 million since the original Xbox's killer app Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001.But Halo is more than a gaming phenomenon with a level of success coveted by all of its rivals. It is an influencing force within game design, constantly setting new markers and driving other developers to consider its advancements, adopt the best ideas, and then (hopefully) put their very own spin on borrowed elements in an effort to improve them.Getting back to our outgunned soldier in the American suburbs, there is little doubt that Bungie's decision to go realistic with Master Chief's loadout – two weapons at a time – is the moment that shooter heroes dropped their +7 Bag of Holding. Consider your average Quake gladiator, practically armed with a backpack octopus about to hold everything from a pistol to a lightning gun to a rocket launcher without slowing him down. By stripping away this superhuman ability to hold a zillion guns, a strain of strategy was reintroduced to the shooter. Now you had to actually consider your enemy and your chances of finding extra ammunition (because that badass launcher is useless without shells – except as a melee weapon, and more on that in a moment).Now, there is an arcade thrill to having every weapon at your disposal. Nobody can take that away from Doom or Quake, but when you are rolling up a narrative involving galaxy-cleansing discworlds, having a reality anchor like being able to only carry two weapons is helpful. The Master Chief may be the greatest soldier ever engineered, but even he runs out of hands.However, one benefit of being a super soldier like the Master Chief, though, is the ability to regenerate shields on the fly. This central feature in Halo – the sweet mercy of no longer having to spend time prowling crates and corners for armor packs – has been assimilated by not just most shooters, but most games. Even Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions employs regeneration to take the edge off trial-and-error discovery. Now, though regeneration is well on its way to becoming universal – I half-expect to see it in Super Mario Galaxy 3 – that does not mean it is universally loved. Many gamers compare regeneration to a "win button," that levels the playing field. What good is skill if you just need to find a quiet spot and wait until nanobots (or whatever) undo your inability to duck a rocket?But this feature exists for two excellent reasons. One, what detractors hate about regeneration, less-than-ultrahardcore gamers love. The line between challenging and frustrating is thin enough as it is in videogames, and regeneration makes sure that more people are not turned off – which is turn means more folks are playing. Two, it inspires risk-taking. Who wants to have their warrior instinct dulled with worries that one false move will zero out 15 minutes of progress? With regeneration, you can experiment with solutions to possible scenarios (can I really take this Brute?) and then fall back to regroup if your bright idea turns out to be a bad strategy.Plus, regeneration made you a little more likely to use the Energy Sword, the greatest of melee weapons. Yes, you can smack an alien in the chops with your assault rifle, but it is ultimately more satisfying to run them through with the Halo equivalent of the lightsaber. This reintroduction of melee tactics into the shooter is one of Halo 2's greatest influences on the genre. Whether melee is used as a desperation tactic or just to prove you don't need a gun to rack up 50 straight kills in deathmatch, the intimacy of close-quarters combat prevented the first-person shooter from devolving into a light gun/shooting gallery.If you picked up Halo: Reach last week, there was a 99.9-percent chance you didn't even need to glance at the manual before you were perforating Convenant as a member of Noble. In fact, when is the last time you needed a tutorial (much less a manual) to play a console first-person shooter? This is because Halo defined the default control scheme for the console shooter. Even though it was hardly the first of its kind, the way a shooter is mapped to a dual stick controller was pretty much cemented into place by Halo. Even shooters on the PlayStation 3 like Resistance do not deviate from the near-canonical controls of Halo. Grenades? Left trigger. Change weapon? Top-most face button (Y on Xbox 360, triangle on PS3). Typically, the only time you need a tutorial for a console shooter is when a new mechanic is introduced, such as Singularity's time manipulation. Otherwise, call upon your Halo memories.This is no accident. Microsoft purposefully shared Halo technology and design details in hopes of setting standards as well as courting developers to work on Xbox platforms. "We call them white papers. Early on in Xbox 1 we wrote one about how Halo aiming works -- it has a bit of a sticky reticle. We gave people the code. We said here's how this works. We think this is great aiming technique. Not everybody chose to use it, or they took it and made it better," says Phil Spencer, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Game Studios. That last part is critical. You may think Microsoft has a serious case of hubris, but the willingness to share tech in hopes of making other games for the Xbox better is pretty amazing. Is it entirely altruistic? Well, no. Making Halo controls or settings a standard serves Microsoft well, too, as it makes Halo a touchstone.Though the majority of console shooters have adopted Halo's controls and pacing, there is one area in which everybody is still playing catch-up: online multiplayer. Yes, I know there are a bunch of online modes for Modern Warfare and it has a busy community that somehow manages to overlook glitches and other frustrating bugaboos. But nothing remotely measures up to Bungie.net and the developer's incredible efforts for pushing the definition of what online console gaming can be. Breezy matchmaking in Halo 2 over Xbox Live was only the start (and it's worth noting that without a central, unified online service like Live, this may have never taken off).Bungie keeps adding. Halo 3's Forge for map creation as well as sharable movies of matches and kills. ODST's firefight. And now Halo: Reach's scalable co-op campaign and game mode tweaks. Plus, there is now a serious connection between single-player and online with a persistent warrior that far out-strips Call of Duty's perks. Expect this to be one of Halo: Reach's lasting impacts.Bungie's constant drive to build not just a killing field, but a community where Halo fans feel both welcome and appreciated should be a gold standard that other developers strive to achieve. There are efforts. But every time somebody starts to play a little catch-up, such as Killzone 2 or Modern Warfare 2, Bungie strides ahead like a giant. And it doesn't even turn around to look at who has been left behind.But admittedly, Halo stands on the shoulders of other games, too. Halo's sprawling narrative is undoubtedly inspired by Valve's risk-taking (and subsequent success) with giving Half-Life a plot greater than "now go shoot those dudes before they kill your dudes." Without the defined character of Gordon Freeman, there would be no cult of personality surrounding the Master Chief; Valve proved that even though you spend the majority of the game not seeing the main character, you have to give the player somebody worth fighting for as well as being.Halo also adopted Goldeneye's penchant for set-pieces. Rare recognized that corridors and arenas were exhausted when it built its ground-breaking Nintendo 64 shooter, and when you see big moments in a Halo game, remember that Goldeneye was there first.But influencing and being influenced by are natural components of the videogame ecosystem. There is no reason to needlessly reinvent the wheel each and every time a new game comes out. Whereas nobody likes a shameless clone, everybody appreciates the discovery and adoption of something that just works. It's why we have patterns in boss battles. It's why we have power-ups in platformers. It's why we have collectibles and tokens. So whether or not you like Halo – and judging by the $200 million opening day for Halo: Reach, some of you do – you cannot deny its positive effects on game design. Not any more than you can deny the belly of a Grunt the crackling blade of the Energy Sword.