anticipation

what makes a good fps = amphetamines?

keith!

Have you played Bioshock?
cause it is the best FPS I have ever played.

It basically changed the way I thought of games,
story telling wise and atmosphere wise.

if you haven't played it yet please buy it especially if you are a fan of FPS games.

Freebase Dali

I could have sworn I was replying to someone who was talking about "Left 4 Dead".
Weird.

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LoathsomePete

What Makes a Good FPS: Good Ol' Fashioned Genocide

It seems that as games have evolved over the years, the focus has been more on showing off the designer's friendly A.I. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, I mean I loved traveling with Alyx through the ruins of City-17 and White Forest in the Half-Life Episodes, but at the same time, newer FPS's haven't been that great at feeding my primal need to just kill everything on the screen. Gone are the days of being totally alone on a level with a bunch of guns and the population of a small European village between you and the exit. Since the mid to late '90's, games have begun to focus more on team based tactics, the installment of a friendly A.I. partner, and multiplayer. There are a few games however, that continue my love of carnage and endless and mindless murder, two of which are Painkiller and Postal II.

Painkiller is a game developed by Polish Developers "People Can Fly" which is pretty amazing as it's their first game they've ever done. The story is a steaming pile of shit and essentially reads like "Guy has sexy wife, he and sexy wife get killed in a car accident caused by Guy, sexy wife goes to heaven and Guy is tasked with killing four of Satan's generals". You're not really given much of a choice in the matter and then you're given the titular "Painkiller", a bladed rotational device thingy that can sever enemies into several bloodied limbs. Next to the Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2, it's probably my second favourite melee weapon. The game also includes a gun that shoots small logs that impale enemies to walls and a gun that shoots shirukens and lighting. Other than that I'm not sure what there is to say, you're given an arsenal of some truly impressive weaponry and a lot of things to kill. The game may be primitive, but sometimes we need to be reminded that we are too. If stripped of our luxuries like electricity, food, and sex, we'll revert to our primal urges, and this game lets me do it with out consequence.


I will do a write up for Postal II tomorrow as I am not feeling particularly well tonight.

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Fruitonica

You forgot to mention that the stake-gun also shoots grenades. It's beautiful.

LoathsomePete

Alright after a week of procrastination the guilt has finally caught up with me and I'm hopefully going to breath life back into this potentially dead thread.

In my last post I stated that I was going to do a write up for Running With Scissor's 2003 controversial game Postal 2. However after playing for a good day and a half I found that I really didn't have much to say. I'm even questioning whether or not this is a game that encourages genocide (by genocide I mean enemy genocide, not the real life kind). I mean yes, the residents of Paradise Arizona do everything within their power to make me kill them, but it's technically not required. The other two games I mentioned in my last post, DOOM and Painkiller, not only encourage but almost force you to kill all the bad guys on the screen. I mean with weapons like the titular painkiller (a kind of swivel death blade thingy that quickly reduces enemies to piles of mush) and the stake gun, it seems kind of like a waste of time to create such unique weapons without the incentive to use them. Other than that, the only thing I can really say about Postal 2 is that it's a great way to blow off steam, even better than doing rampages in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Anyhow my next entry into this series is one that I can't say I've been looking forward to, but it needs to be said so without further ado here's the next entry on:


Like it or not online gaming is pretty much the direction that all first person shooters are going. I for one am not a big fan of online gaming for a number of reasons, which I will name. Firstly I find a majority of the gamers to be loud, annoying douche bags with the intelligence and maturity of a doorknob. Secondly, I never really felt like I was getting any better at the games no matter how long I played, I always just felt like a running target only to fall prey to some AWP using pussy. Lastly I feel that the online multiplayer gaming is starting to subtract from the single player game, with more effort going into tarting the multiplayer up, whereas the single player is just plonked on for antisocial rejects like myself with very little effort actually put into it.

Now that I've got that out of the way, I can talk about some of the good things I've found in multiplayer games, one in particular, EA's 2002 World War II entry Battlefield 1942. Battlefield 1942 (BF1942 as it will now be known) does just about everything differently from my other online game, Counter-Strike. Instead of a small map that focuses more on intense and adrenaline oriented left mouse clicking, BF1942 focuses more on map exploration and ambushing, as well as the use of it's many many different vehicles. You get a friend that can actually fly a plane while you man the gun turret, you can do some incredible damage. Some people say that it's the equivalent of AWP users in Counter-Strike, however I disagree. AWPing requires you to stay in one place looking through a scope while striking down enemies in one shot. Using a vehicle in BF1942 requires you to hone in on your accuracy while in a moving vehicle. There is also the possibility of getting shot down by anti-aircraft guns or a well placed RPG. The other major selling point for me is the fact that you respawn after 15 seconds, rather than waiting for the last person on your team to either be killed or be triumphant. I often found myself rooting for the enemy to kill the player on my team just so I could actually start playing the game instead of reading Playboy (For the articles of course). Then when I somehow managed to survive whilst all my teammates were slaughtered I became very self-conscious about my playing ability, much like when we played baseball in P.E. and all eyes were on me. When video games bring back the same feelings that P.E. use to bestow on me, something has gone very wrong.

I know what some people are going to say, "What? a post on Online Gaming and no mention of Halo! WTF mate?" Let me say this, I HATE the Halo series. My first exposure to it was on PC back in 2003 when it was ported by Gearbox (makers of Half-Life: Opposing Force and Blue Shift) so I thought it would be good, however I was sadly disappointed (and out 20 bucks). The story was fairly uninteresting and gave me no real insight as to why the Covenant wanted to kill us. I found the game to be a little schizophrenic, especially with their enemies. You had the little enemy midgets running around with their pathetic weapons and dialogue, then the tougher enemies who still managed to succumb to a single rifle butt to the back. On the levels where you did have friendly A.I. I never really noticed them helping at all, except when they died and I could pick up their ammo and/or health kits. After reading some reviews on the PC version I saw that most sites gave it a rather mediocre review, so of course I just assumed all the issues I had with it were just because it was PC. So when I got my 360 in 2006 one of the first games I picked up for it was the original Halo because it was 10 bucks and still found the same problems. I did play it a little further than I did on the PC, but when I got to the part where you're being chased by the Flood while following Guilty Spark 343 going through the same fucking room again and again in what is one of the most blatant uses of copy and paste I've ever seen that I just said "fuck it" and turned it off.

With an experience like that, it is pretty understandable as to why I never bothered with playing it online. The game did do things right, I'll admit that, I like the fact that it was one of the few to introduce the limited arsenal which is more realistic than carrying a melee weapon, pistol, stronger pistol, shotgun, machine gun, grenades, some kind of exotic weapon that you never use till the boss, and rocket launcher. Actually that's about the only nice thing I can say about it, so yeah that's where I'm going to end this. I've watched people play it online and to be honest it looked just like Counter-Strike but with different guns, locales, and skins and seeing as how I only played Counter-Strike to try and keep my distancing friendships with people back in Vancouver in tact, but eve that didn't work and instead I lost three years of my life getting killed a lot and never getting better.

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Freebase Dali

Pete... get all the BF games. They're all teh kewlz.

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Kamikazi Kat

The controls really bother me in that game as well. Luckily they are much better in Timesplitters 3. The controls are much more similar to what you would expect from a FPS (I'm assuming what bothers you is the way your aiming reticule gets sucked back to the center of your screen while trying to aim...)

Kamikazi Kat

The Halo series has always been known for its lackluster single player. The only time I find it fun is to play it co-op, and even still other games that focus more on single player such as the Half Life series do it much better and offer a much more rewarding experience. Halo 2 and Halo 3's co-op campaign is basically a fancy way to fight bots when you are bored of the online. I'm a huge Halo fan (mostly Halo 2 and 3), its annoying when people judge the game based on the single player alone, or by Halo 1's multiplayer, which can be fun but lacks the better support in the other 2 titles. If you have a 360 and if you are going to get a Halo game, get either Halo 2 or Halo 3 (I'd recommend Halo 3, its online support is much better and its still being updated), and get the game for the online multiplayer.

What I like is Halo 3's multiplayer has tons of variety that appeals to everything from casual gamers to those annoying hardcore players that yell at you. You can either go into ranked matchmaking where it pairs you up with a team based on your global rank and all of that stuff, or you can go into the casual matchmaking playlists where rank isn't tracked and the game variants and maps are much less casual and more focused on casual fun then competition. When people think of online gaming, they think of that hardcore trigger finger that "pwnz all t3h n00bz," while Halo3's multiplayer is designed for both casual and hardcore gamers.

Also, since you have a 360 I'd suggest checking out the new Battlefield games on it. Battlefield: Bad Company is great and has been about for about 2 years, so you can find it for about $20 in most stores. Battlefield 1943 is also good, its somewhat of a sequal to 1942, although it has less maps and weapons (hence the lower price for a game that just came out). Battlefield 1943 might be best because its cheap and you would probably be more familier with it since you played 1942. Both games have destructible environments as well.

someonecompletelyrandom

The Halo series, multiplayer and single player has innovated the genre in tons of subtle ways. Play an average pre-Halo era game like JK: Outcast and you'll know what I mean. The single player has always been fun (aside from some of the flood moments) and the appeal of the game isn't simply in the multiplayer, that's the most common, overused argument I hear when people talk about Halo.

Even if you don't like the game, pay your respects to it.

Also, I've got to agree the Battlefield series has some fantastic online. Also if you want something with a slightly higher learning curve, I'd recommend WWII Online: Battleground Europe.