you are not 'shooting' mechanically. you are opening portals. that it's called a portal gun doesn't mean that it functions like a gun within the game world, because it doesn't. it doesn't cause any damage to anything in the game. you cannot hurt the enemies with it directly.
Nonono, you don't hurt the enemies directly, granted, but the gun shoots the portals! The portals are literally shot, from inside the gun, towards things! Therefore the gun shoots, therefore Portal is a shooter, because all you do is shoot. Right?
Hell no. CoD is an FPS. Halo is an FPS. These games only share the viewpoint and controls to a degree with Portal. Use your brains people.
What can we say about Metroid Prime, then? I think we can all agree that Halo and COD and Doom and all them are shooters. But what makes them 'shooters'? Literally all you do is shoot. Shoot and walk. You have guns, and you use them to kill things by shooting at them. That is the entire draw of the game. In fact, we can look at games outside of the first-person perspective as well. Third-person shooters. Side-scrolling shooters, like Contra. All you do is shoot. Top-down shooters, like Galaga and Ikaruga and all those. The entire point is shooting at your enemies.
I don't think the camera perspective really matters. It doesn't matter for all those games I listed above; they're all shooters, but with a different camera angle. Similarly, I don't think it should matter for Metroid Prime. I would argue that Metroid is in the Adventure genre, with a first-person perspective. The hallmarks of the Adventure genre, as I know it, include exploring the world, solving puzzles, finding new tools, and using those tools to further explore the world and solve more puzzles. Metroid Prime does all of this. Granted, there is combat, but outside of forced encounters, much of it can be ignored if the player so chooses. If Metroid Prime was in third-person, I don't think there would be too much discussion as to whether it's a shooter or not, because it emphasizes those qualities which make it an adventure game, rather than the shooting aspect.
I think that making the argument, "Well, it's in first-person, and you shoot stuff, therefore it's a first-person shooter!" is a gross oversimplification of Metroid Prime's gameplay. It would be like saying Portal is a first-person shooter because you're in first-person and you shoot. The game isn't about that at all. The camera angle should be ignored.
Of course. Your definition is the true one, and everyone else is incorrect.
Let me try this again. The view in the game he mentioned is not from the characters perspective. It is told through the eyes of the character. Try holding a plastic gun in your hands, and aim. You will see the gun. As you type your comment on your keyboard, chances are you'll see your hands. In the game he mentioned, all you play as is a, well, aim. It is not, I repeat, not told through the main characters perspective. Clearly you don't know the definition of first-person. Furthermore, why are you lying? I was playing Syndicate just a few hours ago, and when I looked down I saw my legs. Accept your defeat.
Just so we're clear, what is your definition of first-person? What is and isn't first-person? The rest of us are arguing that if there is no visible character on screen, as there would be in a third-person game, the assumption is that we're playing as the main character, seeing it from their perspective, making the game first-person, regardless of whether or not we can see what they're holding.
The guy you're arguing with claims that seeing the gun isn't necessary in light-gun games, because we're holding the gun ourselves, so having it on the screen would be redundant and confusing. What we need to see on the screen is what we don't already see in real life, which in the case of Yoshi's Safari, would be Yoshi's head, and in the case of a non-light gun FPS, the gun, because we don't already see it in our real-life hands.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this post, however. Could you clarify? What's the difference between 'being told from the character's perspective' and 'told through the eyes of the character'? Both of those are first person to me, and most others in this thread.
