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I don't think they're overrated largely because of how they seem to occasionally move the whole industry forward once in a while.
Just in the Halo series, Halo was the first game I remember becoming popular for system link games. I don't remember people lugging those big old black brick xboxes around for too many other games, and LANs became primitive, nomadic Halo "communities", some of which would occasionally communicate about the game online together.
Then Halo 2 brought XBox Live's matchmaking into its own, and a lot that followed for Bungie, Microsoft, and a ton of other companies was based on information gleaned from that game. The Halo community started to emerge more in its current form. Players not only talked about the game together, but played the game together easily.
Halo 3's file share, forge, and theater took a big step forward in integrating the game and that community. Not only did a lot of players talk about and play the game together, many of them also in some ways made the game together with all of the customization available to them.
I don't think that ODST and Reach really moved the chains as much, but they did add new features and refine some of those earlier developments. I'm interested to see what the next step in that direction is, because I can't imagine it myself.
Or, if you want to reach even further back, Marathon was the first big release for a computer to implement free look successfully. Now, we just take it for granted that we'll be able to use a mouse to look around in computer game. I'd say that was pretty important.
Really, to me their being highly-rated isn't as much about the games as it is about the symbiotic relationship with the community aspect of gaming as a whole. With each release, it feels kind of like the community moved Bungie in a certain direction, or that Bungie moved the community in a certain direction, but it's all integrated so well with most - though not all - of their releases, that it becomes one of those "chicken/egg" questions.