The top 10 best first-person shooters, in my opinion:
1. Metroid Prime
2. Half-Life 2
3. Perfect Dark
4. Goldeneye 007
5. Duke Nukem 3D
6. Team Fortress 2
7. BioShock
8. System Shock 2
9. Doom 2
10. Halo: Combat Evolved
What are your thoughts?
Oooh! Hard one. I'm going to say in no particular order:
Deus Ex
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
System Shock 2
Doom
Duke Nukem 3D
Halo
Halo 3
Fallout 3 (haven't played New Vegas yet)
Alien Vs. Predator
Alien Vs. Predator 2
Love your list by the way. I'd love to try the Metroid Prime games one day.
I love how we both discreetly left the Call of Duty games off of our lists.
Confession time: I have never played a Call of Duty game in my life. I didn't play the WW2 themed ones as I was tired of shooters from that period at the time.
And I generally don't care for shooters in a modern setting. Shooting "terrorists" doesn't really do anything for me. I'd rather shoot aliens or play a fantasy based FPS like Hexen and Heretic.
or better yet, give me an RPG/FPS mix
Heretic and Hexen are badass. Even Hexen 2 was good, if a little obtuse. Hexen 2's expansion pack was fantastic. Heretic 2, though...not so good. The shift from first-person to third-person was unnecessary, to put it politely.
There are quite a few games out there that use the Doom engine; Heretic and Hexen were just the first. Chex Quest, a bizarre little game where you play as a walking piece of cereal who electrocutes snot monsters, served as my gateway drug to Doom-engine games. I was a bit unprepared for the goriness of the Doom games initially, but the shock quickly wore off once I realized how much fun I was having. Heretic and Hexen both keep up the violence, too; Heretic in particular has enemies dying quite messily. There's another game called Strife that used the engine but came out much later and was given little attention. It had probably the most primitive RPG system ever, and is now considered abandonware. At least there were multiple endings.
Finally, there was another obscure game called Hacx that also ended up becoming abandonware, and I honestly think Hacx sucked big time. The weapons were almost exactly the same as the Doom weapons, the enemies looked more strange than they did intimidating, the level design was atrocious, and the game as a whole was blatantly unfinished, with no bosses or anything. The game literally ends with the player character dying in a pit. Thankfully, some people have decided to dust it off after many years, and are working on Hacx 2.0, with more unique weapons, better level design, more enemies, a proper finale, you name it.
Frankly, I think Call of Duty sucks. You'd think a game set during WW2 would have some nuance to it, but the Nazis are just there to give you somebody to shoot at. I think Wolfenstein: The New Order is a far better depiction of WW2-era violence and Nazi war crimes, and the game is actually set years after that time period, with walkers, prison camps on the moon, robot attack dogs and everything. It's like The New Order's company said to the company behind the Call of Duty franchise, "You want a dumb shooter with Nazis in it? We can make one even dumber and much, much more entertaining."
I haven't played CoD either. Or Halo. Heck, I wasn't even aware that Halo even had a plot until I watched a making of video of Halo 3 (or was it 4?) for my college Game Design class and saw all those characters and worlds and the overarching plot... yet everyone I know guns straight for the multiplayer and just doesn't care about the story.
The one shooter I would LOVE to play however is the Mass Effect series. Yes, even 3. With all the DLC.
...Extended Cut version of Synthesis for the win. *hides*
The multiplayer portion in Halo is the main draw, but the singe player campaign is actually quite fun too. The story and characters are nothing noteworthy mind you, but there was effort put into it. I did end up caring for some of the characters.
My big complaint with the Halo franchise is actually the single player stuff in general. It may not have been the first game to do so, but it started the whole trend of "realism=only two guns to carry" and the variety of enemies is rather small. Also, that whole regenerating health business which negates the difficulty. If you get hurt in Halo, all you have to do is get behind some cover for a few seconds and you'll be okay again. In most games leading up to that point, the ideal you strove towards was not getting hit by enemy fire at all, and if you had to be, keep it to a minimum. In other words, much more skill was required. Wolfenstein 3D is one of the hardest FPSs I've ever played, though there are a number of factors contributing to it (staunchly refusing to lower the difficulty setting, playing with an unresponsive keyboard, having incorrect sound requirements which meant that I played the whole game while the audio was completely silent, and so on).
I'm not sure I agree with the lack of enemy variety. If anything that's one of Halo's main draw. Especially when compared to "realistic" shooters where your enemy variety amounts to enemies with machine guns and enemies without them
Attack dogs occasionally pop up too.
I don't know, it just doesn't seem like there are too many enemy varieties in Halo. I remember the bestiary of Doom 2 well, and every enemy had its place. There were cannon fodder enemies (former humans, imps), enemies that were dangerous up close (former sergeants, mancubi), enemies that were dangerous from afar (chaingunners, arachnotrons) and enemies that simply existed because the game developers hated you (pain elementals, archviles). In Halo, there are...I don't know, maybe nine different varieties of enemy if you include the Flood, not including enemy vehicles, which don't count unless there's someone driving them. Most of the variety is just different types of grunts, jackals, elites and hunters.
In any given Call of Duty knock-off, most of the enemy variety is sparing as well. Every enemy army, no matter the nationality, will have guys with assault rifles, guys with rocket launchers, guys who specialize in explosives/engineering, guys who have sniper rifles, and guys who heal other soldiers. And as stated before, enemy vehicles don't count because there has to be someone inside of it, and hijacking enemy vehicles happens all the time.
I know there's 6 or 7 races in Halo 2 if I'm not mistaken, but then each race also has 2-3 sub-type variations and that's not even counting the weapons. An elite wielding a needler is very different from one equiped with a plasma sword.
With that said, I'll admit I haven't played games like the newer Wolfenstein series which I hear is amazing. Yet another game on my wishlist.
Just watch a playthrough of the first level of Wolfenstein 3D on YouTube...and then watch the first level of Wolfenstein: The New Order. No comparison. FPSs have come a long, long way.
Oh I know. I still remember the days when I'd play Wolf 3D, wishing it were Doom. Alas, I didn't have enough RAM for Doom
Fortunately there were other great FPSs that came out in the 90s too. Rise of the Triad, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage, Blood...and then the not-so-good sequels/expansion packs/reboots came out.
Well, I guess Shadow Warrior 2013 was pretty good. Rise of the Triad's reboot and Blood 2...not so much.
I'm not sure if I am really that big on FPS anymore, but I think Blake Stone may have been one of my favorites. Along with it, I used to play Wolfenstein 3D and the first two Doom games. I had a friend with which I would play Halo whenever I visited him. I always pressed the jump button constantly to make it look as if my character was frolicing through the flowers ;D It would be interesting to see like a FPS fangame of Graham armed with the custard pie like in that picture that was posted somewhere around here.
That picture was actually a Doom parody that Stika himself put together.
Oh, actually that one wasn't me. I THINK it was a Duke Nukem 3D mod, hard to remember. If you have Pinterest you can find all the images here (https://pt.pinterest.com/postudios/caption-images/). I did about 80% of those.
(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b8/c8/bc/b8c8bc1c87df488785519db9f823f97c.jpg)
and here's the image :P
Graham looks pretty good for 61% health, he must eat his veggies.
0% armor, huh? I guess that adventuring gear and cloak just isn't going to cut it. Maybe he could strap Cedric to the front of him as a living shield. Then it would go up to 1% armor.
Yep, Cedric is useless even as a shield.
Quote from: Numbers on January 27, 2015, 11:56:24 AM
Wolfenstein 3D is one of the hardest FPSs I've ever played, though there are a number of factors contributing to it (staunchly refusing to lower the difficulty setting, playing with an unresponsive keyboard, having incorrect sound requirements which meant that I played the whole game while the audio was completely silent, and so on).
Do you mean the original Wolf3D levels?
The original Wolf3D levels are actually very easy. Remember, it was the first popular FPS.
But some fans have created very challenging levels. Check out the classic Wolf3D mapset
Temporary Insanity (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ey0c40rgv43ra34/insanity.zip); it is an epic Wolf3D adventure with advanced tricks and puzzles which are too complex to explain here.
Oh, and I've created a modified version of Wolf4SDL (http://diehardwolfers.areyep.com/viewtopic.php?t=6881) with advanced AI. :) Wolf4SDL is a fan-made port of Wolf3D to SDL (the Wolf3D source code was released in 1995.)
If you think vanilla Wolf3D is difficult, you haven't seen anything. :)
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.