Plus XP

When it comes down to it there is always one genre I swear by when gaming wise. That genre is the first person shooter! Some people like myself adore them and cannot get enough, others either can’t get on with them or think strange things like, shooting games require no skill and blah blah blah, eventually remarks like that sound like white noise to me.

My love for the genre started back around 1994. I would of been about 6 years old. Yeah at the age of 6 I was murdering Nazi’s and zombie’s a plenty! What game am I talking about? Wolfenstein 3D of course.

This game was created by, who I love to call, the gods of FPS gaming, id, they created a game which by today’s standards is very simple. Point, shoot and walk along.

As well as killing you could collect treasure and watch your score go up. Wolfenstein was an innovation in gaming because it was the first game from a first person perspective. But, lets be honest here, the sound effects are still to this day truly amazing. Just the sound of ‘Guten Tag!’ coming from the mouth of a huge blond German guy with two machine guns who goes by the name of Hanns still cracks me up. Did I also mention Robot Hitler? This game still is awesome!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGnZKq4EipA]

Genius!

Then things for the FPS genre evolved slightly. With id spewing out another FPS gem called Doom! Now Doom for me is the FPS that brings back the most memories. To be honest my Dad kicks butt on it and has done for lord knows how long. I used to spend days trying to kill him over a LAN game but still to this day it can’t be done really!

Anyway Doom is where id took it all to the next level with more guns, better sounds and of course the all important enemies! Doom offered us the knuckle dusters, chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher and BFG. Doom 2 offered us all those with the addition of the double barrel shotgun. But the big change was the amount of enemies and variety of them. I mean who would blame id, they had hell demons from Mars to muck around with, and what they came out with was awesome. The story line was pretty engrossing too, but the beauty of the game still lies in the simple point, shoot run away design.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC3fOEcSAFQ]

Then there was a couple of years of me playing Doom 2. Until I came across something which was new, grimy, dirty, had an attitude so awesome you could not help nut smile and at one point had the main character literally ripping a space aliens head of and shitting down its neck.

I’m talking about Duke Nukem 3D. One of the best innovations in FPS gaming. It had a brilliant array of weapons for people to choose from, but not just your bog standard ballistics it also had shrink rays and freeze guns, which, to be honest I had hours of fun with. The squelching noises when you blew up an alien were fantastic and the ridiculousness of some of the ballistic weapons just made you want to cry tears of joy! To this day I still take much pleasure in killing a horde of Pig cops with a akimbo rocket launchers, which also fired like five rockets at a time. OWNAGE!

Duke himself was a great character. I have said this before in a previous article and I will say it again. If a guy has the attitude to say ‘this sucks’, or ‘damn’ after he has been blown to kingdom come he must be cool.

The mixture of enemies such as octo-brains and pig cops just to name a couple was great and the whole concept of aliens stealing women just to piss off a guy like duke, simple but damn effective.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksf8D1_1qtc]

Whilst the craziness of Duke 3D was happening on the side another FPS was grabbing my attention. Earlier I said id were the gods of FPS, so there is no wander that I would not skimp out on the Quake phenomenon!

I could go on for several centuries talking about Quake but the one that really got me and I still mark as one of the best FPS games is Quake 2. To this day I think the game the graphics, the attention to detail were fantastic for its time and still held the great, kill everything in sight game play which I love. Quake was the next generation from Doom so it still had some of Dooms‘ characteristics. It still had the BFG and the double barrel shot gun, but it brought to the table one of the single best weapons in FPS gaming. The Nail Gun! Shredding enemies apart this was pretty much and unstoppable giant of a weapon. Get in the firing line of this beasty and you would not last three seconds!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faHVZwvWAUo]

After Duke and quake I was at a bit of a loss for new FPS games. I tried Unreal Tornament at my mates house. Blinking awesome game I must say! I ended up owning UT 2004.

But this was kind of the end of my PC FPS gaming, I now turned to consoles and it was my mate over the road who had Halo: Combat Evolved. For me this game had it all, vehicles, good variety of guns. Everything! This is what kicked off indeed my love for Xbox and my love for console FPS games. The whole Halo series I can play time and time again and not tire of it. At the moment this is the pinnacle of the FPS gaming genre to me.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4ImlA_gvnE]

OK, I can hear you now, your screaming at the screen shouting WHAT ABOUT CALL OF DUTY YOU NOOB!!!! or words to that effect. To me Call of Duty is good and I have played it but its just the whole war thing that gets to me. Zombies and monsters I can quite happily kill no problem. Zombie Nazi’s on Call Of Duty: World At War. Awesome can do that for hours, but for me I am not too comfortable playing it as it seems to real. For me FPS games have to be unreal and that’s where you get the most wacky and awesome ideas.

Garv!