First Person Shooters... & Blood

Nedan on 18/5/2017 at 23:39

Recently, I've been having a nostalgic trip from organizing all my old boxed PC games. As a result, I've been getting back into playing a lot of these old shooters. As I was going over my small collection, I noticed one game was still sadly absent. The (http://www.mobygames.com/game/one-unit-whole-blood) One Unit Whole Blood boxed set. Unfortunately this set goes for ridiculous amounts due to being ultra rare. So I've been watching online stores for about over a year for a good original boxed copy of the set. Finally found one recently in a decent enough shape for a price that wasn't as bad as most others I've seen online so I purchased it.

Now as I have been organizing my computer room... a lot of the oldies have been getting a lot of play time. But since I didn't, for the longest time, have a boxed copy of Blood... it wasn't in that play list. I haven't sat down & played a session of Blood for so long that I forgot how brutally hard the beginning of the game can be at times. So when I finally organized my shelf, I noticed it was absent again. Don't get me wrong... I've always had a copy of the game but it was only the original 2cd version of the game (no expansions) & it was just in a regular cd case (no box or manual) which I found used a long time ago for under $10. Now I know it's easy to acquire a digital copy of this game from places like steam or gog but, when it comes to some of my favorites, those just can't replace the feeling of an original physical boxed game. I know that's a bit weird now but I still like a classic box on my shelf sometimes for the greats.

Since I finally found a boxed copy of OUWB, I fired it up & started playing it again. Sonofa... I don't remember getting my arse handed to me that quickly before. Especially in the first couple of levels too. One part in the second level, in the train station, there is this area with two stair cases on either side of you. One leads to the station guarded at first by two zombies (only two as I usually end up killing off the two cultists from down below when I enter the station). The other has a black robed cultist in the middle of the hallway leading to a room with a key. I swear I hate that black robed cultist, I keep getting hit by him regardless of how long he is on screen. The only way I've managed to kill him off without taking any damage is to toss some dynamite down the hallway. You see... I have this habit of playing FPS games in a completionist packrat style (years of playing looking glass games have had a considerable impact on my play style). So I usually save most big ammo for later during boss encounters & huge groups of enemies. I also like to end each level with full health so I instinctively hold off on grabbing health pickups until the very end (so I have a habit of backtracking a lot). But since it has been a long while... I forgot that you really can't play that way with Blood as it does get hard early until you really start finding weapons.

Since I was playing Blood again... I decided to check out the mod community to see if there was anything worth checking out. Blood Crossmatching came up first. An eduke version of Blood... I'll try it. Surprisingly, I hated it. It was just too easy & something felt really off about the gameplay. Even the HRP texture pack for it looked off. But I really couldn't put my finger on what it was that I didn't like. So I fired up the original once again & started playing that. From getting pushed out of my comfort zone to each level surprisingly well craft & difficult... I was having a blast.

But then I started thinking... what would I consider to be the best first person shooter ever made? What held my attention the most every time I fired it up? Even though I'm still in the middle of playing it once again, so my opinion currently might be a little biased, Blood still comes up very high on that list. I've played quite a great deal of FPS games... from id's catalog (wolfenstein 3d, doom, quake) to raven's catalog to unreal to duke nukem 3d to serious sam. And even though a lot of those are legendary in their own right, Blood keeps coming back to the forefront at least for me. So I was wondering what everyone else here considered to be their pick for best FPS of all time?

PigLick on 19/5/2017 at 04:08

not technically one game, but the Stalker series.

Sulphur on 19/5/2017 at 04:48

Blood, eh? It didn't set my world on fire like Duke did, but you only get to be a teenager for six strange years. It's always going to be Descent, because it was one of my earlier experiences and there'd never been anything as mind-expanding before or since in terms of level design (well, until Homeworld came along anyway) in my experience. Descent's uniqueness wasn't in how different its verbs were from the bog-standard FPS; it was in how it leveraged them. Movement had to be more granular - pitch, yaw, roll, strafe, and your viewport needed freelook, because you could complete the game flying through its levels upside down, and it wouldn't matter. Also important was the automap, because you had to memorise the path to the nearest exit from the reactor, else you'd be fucked once you blew it up. That sort of mad dash followed by a brief cutscene of flames licking at your Pyro GX just before you zoom out across the planet's surface, that was the kind of reward for the work you put in that setup the almost Pavlovian effort expenditure->reward cycle that's one of gaming's joys for me to this day.

Apart from that, most people wouldn't count FEAR as one of the best FPSes of all time, but I will say it's probably my favourite, one I like to replay every few years, along with Stalker: SoC.

henke on 19/5/2017 at 06:30

The thing that impressed me most about Blood at the time was how each level would continue from the previous. The first one ended near the train tracks, the next one was at the train station, the next one was ON the train! Sounds obvious now but levels in previous FPSes had been quite disjointed, abstract affairs, and the way Blood did it greatly added to the sense of going on an adventure.

As for a favourite FPS, Quake is definitely the one I've played the most, so probably that.

Renzatic on 19/5/2017 at 06:39

The two FPSes that I squeezed the most love out of back in the day would've had to have been PSX Doom and Doom64. This is especially true of PSX Doom, which not only gave me months of singleplayer enjoyment, but also introduced me to the grand world of multiplayer. Those weekends spent playing link cable co-op and deathmatch were the absolute bees knee.

icemann on 19/5/2017 at 07:53

Best FPS of all time - Doom 1 & 2.

I've played more of that than any other FPS. Mostly due to how huge it's community was and still is, and how much continued content is released year to year.

Malf on 19/5/2017 at 08:24

Myself, I'm a Marathon man.

While Doom certainly gets more play time these days, and I'll always consider it one of the very best FPS games ever (closely followed by Quake), Marathon just holds a special place in my heart.

For one, it had (at the time) one of the best stories in gaming.
It's cliche now thanks to all sorts of other games exploring the same ideas since. But back then, it was incredibly compelling and imbued otherwise abstract levels with purpose and character. Plus, I always liked Durandal more than Shodan.

It had fantastic ideas about how guns should work as well, and I'd like to see a modern game implement the same restrictions. Weapons had clips, but there was no reload button. Weapons would only reload once the last bullet had been fired. This lead to you being very careful with ammo, and some incredibly tense combat situations.

Then there were the physics. Yes, it actually had some, such as forward momentum affecting punch damage, and even before Quake, the ability to grenade and rocket-jump. And unlike Quake, where it was kind of discovered kinda by accident, some secrets in the Marathon games were dependent on using those tricks. The designers knew they were possible and so made certain parts of the game reliant on the player using those tricks.

I was also fond of the save mechanism, although I'm not sure it has aged so well. It was kinda like Bioshock's Vita Chambers, but not as cheaty.
You'd find computer stations called Pattern Buffers littered throughout the levels, and these were the only places you could save your progress. If you died, when you reloaded, you'd be back at the Pattern Buffer, and progress past that point would be lost. Sure, it sounds familiar and simple now, but back then, certainly in FPSes, it was revolutionary.

And on top of all that, the Marathon games were the first FPSes I played that had friendly AI in the levels too. In the first game, the BOBs (Born-On-Board) were little more than helpless mooks running around that you could choose to save (or not), with the occasional exploding imposter ("FROG BLAST THE VENT CORE!").
But in Marathon 2, on the very first level, you're accompanied by pistol-packing BOBs. They're pretty useless compared to modern friendly AI, but they definitely help through sheer numbers, and don't have their damage artificially limited. And again, they were pretty damn revolutionary for the time.

Starker on 19/5/2017 at 15:01

There were some old FPS games that made me 3D motion sick when I played them more than an hour or so. The worst in that regard were Hexen and Heretic, then Redneck Rampage, then Blood. On the other hand, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom and Quake and Shadow Warrior I could play for hours. So, just by necessity it has to be Doom, but it also helps that I was quite a bit into heavy metal at the time. It was basically the FPS for me in the 90s.

From modern games, though, it has to be Painkiller. I like the frantic pace of the game that forces you to be on the move and aware of your surroundings. And I like the guns and the levels and the enemy variety. For me, it has the best bits of old games without the tedious keycard hunts. I really don't get why it's not more appreciated and so often seems to be left out from discussions and best of lists.

Oh, and if we were to count TPS games as well, my all time favourite shooter would be Max Payne 2, as I'm massively into film noir and this is the noir-iest of all the shooters.

Pyrian on 19/5/2017 at 17:11

Does Deus Ex count? Lol. Otherwise, while I've played Doom through a couple times, my most replayed FPS is Half-Life 1. I'm surprised to not see it mentioned yet. It was very smooth and had relatively realistic environments and coherent story for its time period.

Sulphur on 19/5/2017 at 17:22

HL1 is definitely one of the most influential shooters of all time, but there's a few things that pull it down. There was too much crawling around in vents, and then there's the whole Xen thing, which was a pretty tedious endcap to the brilliance that came before it.

I'm actually a bit more surprised to not see any HL2 mentions. I didn't go gaga over it as much as others, but it has a fair amount of cachet with most of us, I'd think. I guess the thing is that 'best' usually translates to 'earliest memory of game that blew your mind' -- speaking for myself, at least.