Borderlands was awesome for a good week or two and then it was over. it's not bad at all though, might be more replayability if you're playing with real friends as opposed to strangers on the net. it's the best mashup of Unreal Tournament and Diablo that i've ever had the fun of blasting my way through.

So, I need to check out the Orange Box and Bioshock.

Are there any other first person shooters (available for PC) that you guys think might appeal to my tastes?

if you don't mind going a little retro i'd very strongly suggest 'system shock 2' over Bioshock. the original SS is even better but at that point you'd have to get DOS working and be cool with the graphical middle ground between Duke Nukem 3d and Quake1.

i wouldn't necessarily call it a FPS necessarily but Fallout3 is also well worth playing.

also if you can get your hands on a copy of No One Lives Forever do it (part 1 over 2, but it doesn't really matter - they're both fantastic)

Yeah I've found that too. A lot of the reviews I've read have said that to truly enjoy the experience of the game is to play online with friends which leaves me with cold feet. The sheer amount of guns is staggering and watching a bandit slowly burn/ melt/ electrocute to death never loses its fun but it's definitely not the game I was expecting. I was hoping for more of a story to it and to not have to clear out the same bandit camps every five minutes. My biggest gripe is that to really get the full experience you must play it with other people. However multiplayer is where it's at and I can't change that, so maybe it's time I just shell out the 60 bucks and get Xbox live :/

I just bought Left 4 Dead and Dead Space on Ebay.
Should be getting those on wednesday. What did you guys think of them?

i watched my roommate play through Dead Space. that was enough for me, there's a reason they were selling it for $20. (short - REALLY short after the first go too)

haven't tried L4D but i really like the premise behind it and the relatively forced co-op. it's similar to Borderlands in a way where you have to chose between 4 pre-generated character types but working together is key to victory as opposed to a matter of efficiency.

@LP - it's too bad you were expecting depth in Borderlands. although i don't think they ever really tried to play it up as anything more than brainless action. i'll agree that the never ending bandit camps were getting really old by the end of it. even just retexturing some of the bad guys to some sort of paramilitary uniform and calling them mercenary camps instead would have been a welcome breath of fresh air. it's really crappy that you have to pay more than the game itself to play it online though.

Brilliant both of them :)

L4D is at it's best when I'm playing it online with friends. It's a sort of quick action fix for me, I usually play it for no more than half an hour-hour at a time, but it's a lot of fun.

Dead Space is one of the most memorable of the more recent games (say since 2007) for me, a real gem. You might not know it from the first half hour or so but just a little bit longer in and the game gets seriously addictive. Tons of spooks and lots of fun.


To Boo, how about the first Crysis game? It wasn't quite as brilliant as BioShock and the orange box games, but still fun and well worth the money and effort. Actually, I'd say most of the recent FPS games are rather good and enjoyable.

I'd argue that BioShock is more fun than System Shock 2. Maybe not more awe-inspiring and brilliant, but talking sheer entertainment value - I think it is.

I'm a fan of Far Cry 2 as well as the already mentioned Fallout 3 and Crysis. All three of those are definitely more open-world and sandbox than Bioshock or Half Life, but all of the games are great. You might want to start with Half Life 2, as I find it makes kind of an awesome introduction to the shooter genre because the guns are simplistic but awesome (except for the gravity gun which is just awesome) and the level design is fantastic. Bioshock is kind of just Half Life with special powers and more depth in that there weapon upgrades, plasmids and tonics, and other things to mess around with that Half Life doesn't have. I also haven't played System Shock 2 so I can't say which I prefer. I generally find older games to be slower, which might appeal to you.

Far Cry 2 is a good example of what I meant about most recent FPSes I've played as being good. FC2 is one of the weaker titles, but it was still good enough for me to play through which is actually a bit of a task because the game is rather long!

I loved the open world of it, but the reason it drops down on my list is that it's action is horribly repetitive. You drive around with cars a lot and meet human guard posts with enemies that attack you relentlessly every 100 metres in a huge world. Let's say you kill all of them, drive 50 metres down the road away from the guard post - and then drive back .. all the enemies you just killed have respawned. Gods dammit.

Also you fight the same kind of people throughout the game. It's just non-stop of the same stuff over and over .. the rest of the game intrigues though, the story and the setting and the characters. It's weird that they made it so repetitive really.

Red Faction Guerilla, although a 3rd person shooter, suffers from the same problem.

Haha I thought the exact same thing actually. Far Cry 2 (and Crysis also imo) both had a bit if a problem with repetitiveness which is probably why I never finished either of them. But they are great games, I just hardly ever finish any games unless they're really good and don't get boring at all (like Fallout 3:)) I guess I have high standards but it keeps me from spending too much money.

Also, I played the Batman: Arkham Asylum demo the other day and now I want to get it. Has anyone here played it and is it good?