DosFreak wrote:Can't really contribute on the unknown shooter front but ones I rarely see mentioned and they are all worth playing: […]
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Can't really contribute on the unknown shooter front but ones I rarely see mentioned and they are all worth playing:
Black Mesa
Corridor 7
Dead Island
Dying Light (Counting this and Dead Island on the list)
Painkiller series
Red Faction series
Rune (Sequel is coming!)
Soldier of Fortune
Strife
Tribes Series
Tron 2.0
Soldier of Fortune was a pretty big deal back in the day. It also got all the Anti-Video Games, Viloence in the Media and Parents Groups riled up due to its graphic nature. It was the first FPS that actually modeled realistic (though quite extreme and over the top) regional and varied hit damage on a body (if you shot someone in the arm with a shotgun, part of the arm would actually fly off and blood would spray everywhere, that sort of thing). The controversy got so bad the company ended up implementing a child lockout system so parents could disable the graphic violence; there was also a “Low Violence” version released (and sold retail) with the gore permanent disabled. They did this after Canada classified the game as a “Pornographic Film” in order to restrict the game to persons over the age of 18. (Yes, this actually happened.)
Tribes 2 though, wasn’t nearly as popular as it should have been. It’s still considered by many (myself included) to be the best “Open World Teamplay FPS” ever. It was a *very* ambitious game and way ahead of its time! It had huge sprawling maps, you could drive vehicles (tanks, fighters, troop transport flyers), you had a choice of character class (light, medium and heavy) that were well balanced with fair trade offs, you could choose a loadout for your character, including an invisibility cloaking device, vehicle creation stations, repair packs, automated turrets you could deploy, manual turrets you could deploy and be manned by players, motion sensors that would ping your teams map when an enemy passed it (good for protecting the flag in your base) and tons of other little neat things. Oh, did I mention the jet packs? Everyone had jet packs and could fly! The servers supported up to 128 players at a time on each map. When a server was full you could get some epic battles going!
It’s basically Battlefield II, only better, well balanced and actually fun! Sadly it came at a time when the majority of people were still on dialup internet (it really required broadband). It also didn’t have any integrated voice chat, which it desperately needed for real coordination. However, if you had broadband and got in a clan that ran a TeamSpeak server, it was an absolute blast. It provided the perfect balance of fast paced skirmishes, strategy and vehicle combat that was absolutely perfect.
Here’s my pick for a FPS series that’s not talked about enough: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Sex
The original game (and addons) provided a very realistic take on tactical combat. This wasn’t a game you could just hop into and start shooting people. You could spend more time in mission prep than actually carrying out the mission! Picking your team, their loadout and setting up the waypoints for your AI teammates to follow all took a lot of patience but man, pulling off a mission without ever alerting the enemy was a thrill!
This was all later streamlined in Rainbow Six: Raven Shield and Vegas, where you could give your AI squad commands on the fly (point your crosshairs at a point and send them there to hold, you could then command them to breach a door or take out a specific target on your command).
RS: Raven Shield is also one of my all time favorite Tactical FPS for online play. I loved the realism (you could only take one or two hits before you were dead; no med packs and if you got hit in the legs, you’d limp at half speed, a hit to the arms would affect your aim, a hit to the chest would stun you for a split second and blur your vision). Man, I spent hundreds of hours playing Raven Shield with my buddies back in the day. Good times.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (E.g., Cheez Whiz, RF, Hot Dogs)