The FPS Kick

game

Entry posted by MagitekAngel April 30, 2010

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Like many of you (well, at least a few of you), I am of the opinion that there are way too many First Person Shooters coming out these days. Taken on their own, a fair amount of them are good games - hell, some are outright modern day classics. But I can't be alone in thinking we've played through World War II enough times already, be it literally (Medal of Honor, Call of Duty) or metaphorically (I'm looking at you, Halo).

The newest FPS I've given a fair shake is Half Life 2, and only in short, infrequent installments. I'll play for an hour, forget about the game for a few weeks, and pick it back up again and spend a few minutes wondering where the hell I am. I bought that game in the Orange Box almost a year ago, and as it so happens, I'm still working on my first playthrough.

So with that six-year-old title standing as my most recent foray into the FPS genre (assuming we don't count RPG hybrids like Fallout 3), I can say fairly decisively that I haven't bought into the last decade's FPS explosion. I'm a fairly versatile gamer; I play a bit of everything: RPG's, Platformers, schmups, you name it. But the oversaturation of the FPS market is what I can only call unappealing. For me, it's not unlike the videogame crash of 1984 when pre-internet consumers were presented with a shit ton of consoles, a never ending conveyor belt of shovelware titles, and responded by losing patience and nearly aborting the modern day videogame in the womb.

But in spite of appearances, I do like the occasional FPS from time to time. But for me, a good FPS is an old school FPS. In the last several months, I've loaded up my Xbox 360 library with Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Perfect Dark, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 3, and just the other day I went out and got Quake 4... mostly because it came with Quake II. And now I'm happily pounding away through all of them. When Dark Forces hits PSN, there's an outside chance I'll scoop that up too, depending on how crappy the PS1 port was.

But now it seems like I've oversaturated my own FPS library, doesn't it? Well, to that I say: yes and no. Yes, I've bought an assload of what Jack Thompson would call "murder simulators" (hmm... I wonder what he thinks of Portal?), but on the other hand, I've given myself the opportunity to handpick the very best examples of the genre over its initial ten years of existence. Maybe in 10 years I'll go back to this generation of shooters and pick myself another "best of" batch to keep me busy for a while. But in the meantime, I'm not waiting for the next CoD or Halo, I don't care what Bungie, Infinity Ward and now Respawn are cooking up, and I'm not going to dedicate eighteen hours a day to pwning n00bz.

I'm more interested in when Doom 2 hits Xbox Live Arcade.

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EricBall 241

Posted April 30, 2010

I really enjoyed Half-Life. There was something about the story which really dragged me in. I remember when I played the free Half-Life: Uplink demo and being terrified when I first saw a grenade arcing over my cover. The other thing which Half-Life brought were the preset encounters which would drop enemies into areas you had previously cleared.

I think I've gotten about halfway through Half-Life 2 (although I haven't played in ages). It's good, but doesn't quite get me going in the same way was HL1. I also really want to be able to use the gravity gun on enemies, like a Dark Jedi.

OTOH, I really liked Portal.