Broadband & the console shooter

Thirty-seven mechanics, and an unusual number of them are still the default today. Halo: Combat Evolved ships Regenerating Health, Constrained Weapon Loadout, the Persistent Minimap / Radar, and Drop-In Co-op Campaign in one 2001 release; Halo 2 follows with Automated Skill Matchmaking, which deletes the server browser and makes ranked play a console-scale product. Grand Theft Auto III makes the city contiguous with Seamless Streaming Open World and then makes it navigable with the Waypoint Objective Marker. kill.switch introduces Over-the-Shoulder Aim and Snap-to-Cover Combat two years before Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War canonize them. Call of Duty 4 fuses the two lineages with Perk-Based Loadout Customization, Prestige Reset-for-Status, and Persistent Multiplayer Progression, where losing still pays. Elsewhere: Half-Life 2 makes physics a puzzle vocabulary, Nintendogs and Wii Sports remove the intermediary between hand and game, MapleStory imports free-to-play, and BioShock makes the player's compliance the subject of the story.