So on a similar note, I've been playing through RE4: Wii edition recently, and while I'm really enjoying it, and can appreciate the obvious mechanical depth and design that's going on... why do people continually claim that this game is the starting point of modern TPS games? It controls nothing like them. Before playing, I assumed moving the Wii pointer would move the reticule along a bounding box, moving the screen as well (a la every other shooter), but nope. You have to use the movement analogue stick to move the screen, with the pointer just aiming the reticule within the screen. While I get that it's a pretty cool system for a horror shooter, this is completely different from every post-Gears shooter out there, and I don't see where the influence is supposed to be. Character movement is different, the aiming system is different, I just don't see this template that has supposed to have been passed on to all TPS games since. Not when Chaos Theory came out before RE4, and mechanically has all the composite elements of modern TPS games, despite being a stealth game (over the shoulder aim, left stick moves, right stick aims, reticule bloom, sticky cover, etc etc).
Am I missing something here. Because as much as I'm enjoying RE4, I'm enjoying it as an idiosyncratic game that plays completely uniquely from any other shooter, not as something that had a clear effect on the industry.