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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3101 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 16, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm really looking for a good FPS. Preferably single player, and I'll accept multiplayer PvE, but if it's PvP it's gotta be perfect.

My problems with most shooters these days is very hard to define. Some of them have a floaty characteristic where all the guns feel like laser pointers that magically kill things. Some of them are boring because enemies are bullet sponges (and somehow game designers don't know that this ruins the whole point of shooters?) Many games just lack a soul, and it's hard to even say what's wrong with them.

I've been playing starship troopers and I really enjoy it as a shooter. There are lots of enemies, situational awareness matters, positioning matters, twitch skills switching between targets matters, and the shooting feels weighty when your powerful rifles can stun an enemy bug.

I just tried hell divers today and was very disappointed. It's not a shooter. It's a grenade throwing game with sidearms to get you in to grenade throwing positions. Most of the "grenades" are not called grenades they are called ordinance and are explained by you having a floating artillery ship in orbit. But you call in all this ordinance by throwing a tracking beacon with a countdown timer. And throwing the beacons is exactly the same as throwing grenades. The progression is all about unlocking grenades/ordinance.

It's frustrating to see the relative popularity of the two games. Starship troopers will probably be dead before it gets out of early access. Hell divers might get game of the year.

Edit: thanks for all the many suggestions. It has allowed me to figure out what I'm actually interested in. Which is longer range engagements. I describe it in another comment, but the 0-15 meter engagement distance of most shooters turns me off. To me that is just a melee game masquerading as a shooter.

Some of my favourite FPSes:

  • Condemned: Criminal Origins - shooting only makes up maybe one-fifth of the combat and the rest is melee. The melee combat is the most realistic I've ever seen from a first-person perspective in a game. Also one of the top ten scariest games I've ever played. I play it once a year.
  • F.E.A.R. - you've probably played this one. From Monolith, the same people as Condemned, and it's a shame that Condemned doesn't get as much love as F.E.A.R. when it's better in almost every way. Unlike Condemned, F.E.A.R. doesn't really work as a horror game, but the gunplay is satisfyingly weighty thanks to the excellent, visceral sound design. I've only played the original and can't comment on the sequels.
  • No One Lives Forever - a Monolith hat-trick! Made in the era in which shooters could have vibrant palettes and weren't limited to brown, grey and magenta. Endearingly goofy (with flashes of wit) Bond parody that mixes up the formula with stealth and gadgetry. Apparently it's abandonware now, so mods to make it run on modern PCs are a must.
  • Prey - not the 2017 "reboot", the original from 2005. My single hottest take in gaming is that this is a better FPS than Half-Life 2, which loses momentum after the airboat mission. Fight me. The weapons are creative, the gravity puzzles are brainteasing, the villains are creepy. Apparently it owes a debt of influence to Sphere, which I've never seen.
  • Far Cry 3 - my favourite in the franchise (it's a self-contained story, no need to play the previous). People love gushing about how arty and confrontational 2 is, but for my money 3 does everything better than 2: it's both more fun and absorbing to play than 2 and tells a better story, which manages to actually get across the points that it seemed 2 was trying to convey but failed. My understanding is that the subsequent games in the franchise became increasingly homogenous and subsumed under the "Ubisoft sandbox" formula, but the elements work here.
  • SWAT 4 - an excellently designed game but it is haaard. I've tried to play it a bunch of times and invariably have to give up around the fifth or sixth mission.
  • Tribes Vengeance - I feel like this game doesn't get talked about nearly enough. I'm very biased because I have a recurring dream in which I'm not exactly flying but sort of... "skipping", jumping huge horizontal distances and floating back to the ground gently as a feather. When I played this game for the first time in 2022 I was just like "wow. The jetpack mechanics feel exactly like how it feels when I'm having that one recurring dream". But even aside from the jetpack mechanics it's a very tightly designed shooter and the anachronic love story is surprisingly engaging (even in spite of the PS2-era graphics). IIRC the story was written by Ken Levine. It's also abandonware.

Far Cry 3

I am a complete simp for 2, but 3 is definitely a better video game. Although the end choice was ironically preachy against video games - iirc you can either save your friends and decide to be a better man as you sail away from the island (put vidya away and engage the real world) or you can stay on the island and "Win" as that crazy chick sexes you and stabs your heart (continue playing vidya leading to hyper stimulation then death).

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