What are your favorite FPS games?

[Numbers]

Oh, I'm sure I'd blaze through vanilla Wolf3D right now. I was young and inexperienced when it first came out, and due to the aforementioned troubles I had, I distinctly remember episode 6 and Spear of Destiny being insanely difficult. Those mutants are annoying enough even when you have sound, since they're silent unless they're attacking, but when all the audio is muted and you're in a maze section and you start taking damage without knowing where the gunshots are coming from, they become very nerve-wracking.

I think Spear of Destiny's Death Knight level was the hardest in the series for me, with the Castle Ramparts level just before being the second hardest. The Angel of Death was kind of a letdown by comparison, though that level gave us our first taste of what would soon become Doom...

I think the reason I found Wolf3D hard was again because I refused to play at any difficulty setting other than the hardest one. I figured if I play a game, I might as well go all the way. Came back to bite me in the ass hard when I tried to beat that one secret level where it's nothing but a maze full of Officers. Took me forever to beat that one legitimately.

Another thing is that while the enemies in Wolf3D have very little health and drop like flies, you as the player character also have very little health, so you can't afford to take any more than three hits on the hardest difficulty. So many enemies in the game have hitscan weapons that not taking damage is simply impossible, so you have to make do with what you've got. In Doom 2 and most other subsequent FPS games, enemies tend to have a substantial amount of health, but you have a lot of health as well. Enemies with hitscan weapons also tended to be more rare, with most enemies being projectile shooters. This isn't always the case--there are quite a few hitscan enemies in the Build engine games that included Duke3D--but that's how it mostly worked.

On the bright side, every Wolfenstein game has at least one very memorable enemy that sticks out in my mind. In Wolf3D and Spear of Destiny, it was the Mutants, due to their Frankenstein's monster-esque appearance and firing animations. In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, it was the Lopers, thanks to their creepy appearance and fast speed. In Wolf2009, it was the Despoiled, who had great designs and a significant threat level. In The New Order, it was the Panzerhund, which should be obvious to anyone who's played the game, as the Panzerhunds are some of the most terrifying attack dogs you'll ever see in a game. It certainly doesn't help that even with how powerful you are in that game, you still can't go toe-to-toe with one until near the end, and the best you can do most of the time is just run like hell.