is that wolfenstein 3D?
I don't recall that guy from Wolfenstein 3D
The long-anticipated release of Halo 4 and the latest Call of Duty, November is shaping up to be a great month for first-person shooters. Halo 4 We've decided to look back at the great FPS games of the past, so here are what we think to be the 20 most notable titles from the last 30 years. During that time, there have been …
>deformable terrain
Something I was given the impression Halo 2 would deliver, but didn't. I would like to see deformable terrain in a FPS, but I can only imagine it would be hard to calculate and co-ordinate for a multiplayer session. If anyone knows for sure the reason, please let us know!
All these years I have been ignoring the Halo series because I thought it was one of those Mortal Kombat / Streetfighter style beat-'em-up games, then it turns out to be a FPS.
I don't know whether it is an advertising failure on the manufacturers part or a comprehension failure on mine.
Probably the latter.
It was very very close to being put in. Was a toss up between Deus Ex and Bioshock. I literally had the list down to 21 titles and it was only left out due to wanting a broader release date range. Both are hardly traditional shooters, though. Which genre would you say DE is most suited in? RPG?
That's a hard question...
RPG doesn't quite catch it for me. I really enjoyed Neverwinter Nights for that kind of thing.
I quite like the new (to me) term "sneak-em-up". Implies a few things about a game. I'm currently playing Dishonored (reviewed here: http://www.reghardware.com/2012/10/16/review_game_dishonored/), a great example of it.
Anyway, I accept your rationale for leaving DE out of this list! :-) Some wonderful nostalgia moments here.
Hmm, first thing i did on entering the comments here was find deus ex, i knew other people would be missing it.
Having read the rationale for ommiting it in the list i am slightly less annoyed. Aslong as we are agreeing it's genre defining for something then i'm happy.
I think we are missing some of the games that defined multiplayer FPS but i think that would be a different list.
Just on the point of dues ex, did anyone else notice that if you never level up pistol skill you can just outright sprint at single enemies and kill them in 1, unmissable, shot to the head because at point blank their head fills the huge crosshair? It's entirely possibly to do the first level (and more) only with the pistol and this tactic without taking a hit, hilarious stuff. Ahh, good times.
Wolf3D was fun back when it was current.
Crysis is the most recent I have played of that list and it is OK, a bit so so I think. I have has far more fun with other FPS games, in fact I would put Crysis qhite low for fun.
Currently I am playing the original Half Life on the PC. And a converted to PS3 with trophies PS2 game. As well as my normal multiplayer game.
There's a certain way to play Crysis that makes it a lot more fun; be gung ho as all hell, you'll soon get much better at quickly managing your suit, speed sprinting, switching to strength, shattering a guy's head with your gun butt, swiching to armour, shooting down his two squad mates, taking cover, going into stealth and picking off the last 2 guards before they know what's going on. It's fantastic fun when you learn to pull it off.
Sadly the fiddliness of the controls in Crysis makes it hard to learn to do this and and that just realdsto wandering around hiding in stealth mode, shooting 1 guy then going back to stealth for a while.
The Fallout series is very good and while it's also an adventure style game it is an FPS. Surely the GTA 3 and later series warrants a mention as many aspects of it are FPS. How many hours have been whiled away sitting on a rooftop with the rocket launcher just mangling the Police choppers and tanks. :-)
The one I enjoyed the most was probably Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny. Compared to what else was around (Commander Keen anyone) it was groundbreaking. Another good one was Shadow Warrior. Basically it was Duke Nukem 3D with a Chinese main character and different taglines like "Ah so, he fall in half"
My top 3 for fun would be;
1- Wolfenstein 3D
2- Fallout 3
3- Duke Nukem 3D
Really? Fallout can't be considered FPS. The first two games were isometric view anyway. Fallout 3 and beyond have an FPS angle included, but surely the game is far more RPG than anything else. Don't really know what you'd classify GTA as really, it doesn't fit here though that's for sure. Third person shooters, maybe?
This post has been deleted by its author
unreal tournament was the nuts, my first online MP game.
tacops, a special forces vs terrorists mod for UT that i played to DEATH. (silenced MP5 rules!)
BFV (EXCELLENT later battlefield mod to the franchise.)
BF2 (itself gleaned from the EXCELLENT desert combat mod for BF1942.)
now i play BF3 all the time and am looking fwd to the return of the commander in BF4! (est delivery autumn 2013)
:D
I offer you Mercenary by Novagen Software, circa 1985, which I remember on the C64 & Spectrum, and was on other systems too. 3d wireframe graphics, not too much shooting but there were underground bunkers that I spent hours trying to map, and flight above the planet to a space station, sometimes in a giant cheese, to deliver "Vital 12939 Supplies" (use a mirror on that)! I really enjoyed this game, despite never figuring out how to save my progress.
Another that springs to mind was Driller, which used a 3d engine called Freescape, from 1987. I never played this because I found using the Spectrum to be such a hateful and rage-inducing experience that I gave up gaming at home till my parents bought us an Acon A3000 (I wanted an Amiga).
Where the heck is Team Fortress 2? Whine as much as you like about hats but the original vanilla Team Fortress 2 is for many people the first step into FPSes!
Unreal Tournament is another one, although I can appreciate it'd fall under "Unreal". You also missed Left 4 Dead as well. That's a more important inclusion because it actively forced players to work together.
TF2 is kind of a shame, it was so astonishingly well balanced and now it's just a bunch of random shit. I no longer can expect a soldier to have a rocket launcher, he probably has a laser rifle. Still good fun, but weird as fuck.
Left 4 Dead, why haven't I played that more? It's marvellous it really is.
Great shout on Scarabaeus. That was so ahead of it's time, and pretty spooky for my younger self.
And let's not forget TimeSplitters 2 by the UK's Free Radical Design. A great FPS on the PS2 made in Nottingham from the guys who gave us Golden Eye, and now known as Crytek UK.
So glad someone mentioned TS2. Great music, brilliant sense of humour, huge replay value - especially with the mapmaker functionality. Every five years or so it comes out of the box for a quick run through from noob to 100%, just like every 5 years or so I have to read all of Jane Austen again --- because nothing else comes close.
This post has been deleted by its author
When I was getting into computers and what-not, the common games were Doom and Duke Nukem, but when I was home I much preferred Redneck Rampage (designed by Xatrix Entertainment and published by Interplay).
HUGE levels, interesting concept, awesome hill-billy music and the additional cusspack .....
good ol' days.
Predictable
I agree we have a large gap in the 80's and more credit should be given to those which helped form the genre. In no particular order:
3D Monster maze, Battlezone, Robocop 3D, Hostages, Novagens Mercenary series, Hunter (despite being 3rd person), Ultima Underworld (no UU, no System Shock!), Commander Keen (giving Romero his break before going on to form ID Software), Alone in the Dark (showing that 3D had advanced enough for true 3D characters to be used, and for atmosphere).
I'd much rather read about the changes in game design that made FPS's possible on the whole than jumping simply from one FPS to the next. Boring!
Always overlooked, never bettered. Love that frickin' game.
I get that you were putting the firsts of each series in, but I'd have overridden that with Half Life, where the sequel is completely superior not only to its predecessor, but to everything else too.
And the inclusion of Halo is as predictable as it is dull. And Goldeneye? Come on.
There are so many FPS out there I remember playing, but I cannot remember the names of any of them. But then again I'm more of an RPG person. How long until an RPG list comes up?
I will admit I'm surprised I didn't see any Tom Clancy games (unless one of those was a tom clancy game and I'm a moron) I was quite a fan of raven shield, and I've heard good things about Vegas too.
Rainbow Six was in my shortlist but again was dropped due to a serious overload of FPS games released in the same era.
Half-Life, Unreal and Tribes all hit shelves in the same year as RS, which wasn't as significant imo. It's all subjective though I guess.
Hard to narrow things like this down to 20 titles with a fair spread of release dates.
Keep your eyes peeled for RPG sometime. ;-)
You lost me with the first sentence. Halo? Call of Duty?? These are the two series that more than any others have brought the FPS to an all-time low, and only seem acceptable because of the abysmal standards on consoles. (I played the original Halo all the way through on Windows, and could NOT believe anyone had made a fuss about it. Boring, repetitive, with uninteresting enemies and a dreary choice of weaponry...)
Also, your reservation about not including FPS games with RPG elements should have applied to Bioshock just as much as to Deus Ex. And when it comes to multiplayer, you lump together simple deathmatch games with more complex team-based ones like Battlefield. Tastes may be subjective, but clarity and consistency are not.
Out of curiosity, at the time you completed Halo CE on the PC, what was your favourite PC FPS? Personally, I'd played most of the games in this slideshow before Halo came out, and I liked Halo for the 'heavy' feeling of the protaganist (but appreciate some prefer faster movement), the balanced choice of weapons, instant access to grenades, being able to melee without switching weapon, being able to play with mates on the same machine, the vehicles, the plot, only being able to carry two weapons and not having to scroll through a list, and regenerating health- cos limping around on 11% health waiting to die, a la Doom, is no fun at all.
I have no doubt that each of these elements had been done before, but in Halo they were put together well. But as you say, tastes are subjective.
I also hated halo when it came out, it was just dull and soulless. I'm not a fan of games whose enemies take a ridiculous amount of shots to kill, I much prefer the realism of the ww2 games where a few shots max are all that's necessary, I get really, really bored otherwise.
I would add Spasim (1974) which was a bit like a proto multiplayer elite and Maze War (mid 70`s) which was a ground based multiplayer fps to the list of early fps`s as well.