So there was a lax in 1999 for me in the FPS catalog. Nothing interested me too much I was really into RPGS and platformers at the time as well. Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy you name it I was playing it on my SNES at the time. I didn’t own a Nintendo 64 or Playstation until around 2009 when you could buy them really cheap so I’m refraining from listing anything from those consoles.
2000 was a light year in the FPS department. We had the original Counter Strike come out that year a mod originally for Half-Life. While Basic compared to later entries in the series it was a fun game. It was a great foundation for games to come. Personally this was the first FPS I played that wasn’t really strictly Team Death Match or capture the Flag based competitive gameplay. So 2001 rolls around and things begin to pick back up. We got Half-Life Blue shift which was a fun side campaign to play in contrast to the original half life.(same with Opposing forces 1999 but it had additional new assets)
Later that year a game that still has Instalments coming out 20 years later premiered. You might have heard about it, Halo :Combat Evolved. When I was a kid I enjoyed the campaign but the real bread and butter was in the multiplayer. My brother and I spent hours playing this game. looking back Halo was the first FPS since Half-Life we enjoyed to that extent and for the most part every game in the series except for 4 and 5 kept roughly the same gameplay formula.( 4 & 5 just had a different pacing) Time Marches on.
2002 saw the return of a series that we mentioned in an earlier blog post. It is perhaps the first game I played that was an FPS and a 3rd Person shooter at the same time. We got a sequel to Star Wars: Dark Forces as Star War Jedi Knight II: jedi outcast. I failed to mention Star Wars Dark Forces II: Jedi knight because I found the game’s design lackluster and the gunplay and lightsaber combat clunky. But Jedi Outcast rectified all the issues I had with the previous game in the series. The visuals at the time were awesome getting to revisit locations from the movies, the force powers, gunplay and lightsaber combat were awesome and this game stands up to the test of time as a fun game to play up until this day.
As time rolled on there were more and more FPS’s being released but few were note worthy until 2004 I mainly played halo 2 or Jedi Academy. DOOM 3 came out that year. When it released it was truly an atmospheric game the tension and horror were noteworthy but a few gameplay discrepancies did pop up here and there. The original star wars Battlefront came out. Let me tell you at the time the team based combat was amazing you had the feeling that you were actually part of a bigger army for once not some lone wolf taking on the world. To cap off 2004 we had Half-Life 2 come out with it’s physics engine and stunning beauty at the time. It was one hell of a way for me and my brother to finish 2004.
In 2005 I recall 3 FPS’s sticking out in my mind Star Wars : Republic Commandoes, F.E.A.R., and Star Wars: Battlefront 2. Republic commandoes was different because of the ability to actually lead your squad and direct them when you didn’t split up, plot reasons, or because the game said no… OK it was kind of frustrating at times. Battlefront 2 did everything battlefront 1 did but better and added a decent story campaign to the mix as well.
Lets talk about F.E.A.R it was… how to put it scary as hell… When I first played it it gave my goosebumps goosebumps. The sound direction, lighting, voice acting, graphics were like a psychological minefield. After you got over the creepy stuff it was truly a fun FPS that reminded me of Max Payne but you know… First person. It was also the first FPS’s I played that had decent melee attacks. You could slide kick into enemies, launch bicycle kicks. It made for a more interesting cQc style of combat.
Were moving on down the line to 2007 mostly sequels to previously mentioned games. Now up until this point I have failed to mention any Rain Bow Six Games. I love Tom Clancy as a writer… that said never in the whole damn universe have I seen a series that had so many sequels, offshoots, prequels, side stories, or reimagining’s as anything the starts with the words Rainbow Six. They are good games, good stories, but I can’t play all of them and I don’t have enough spare time to even start playing them all… Where was I? oh yes 2007.
Team Fortress 2came out I paid real money to buy this game… That’s how old I am, enough said. I owned a Xbox 360 at this time when I bought Call of duty 4: Modern Warfare. At the time it was masterpiece the campaign was satisfying even if it felt like it was on rails. The multiplayer was fulfilling and the graphics were some of the most realistic we had seen at that point in time. It was solid… and then all of the sequels felt like DLC to me.
Same problem with Call of Duty World at War( 2008) and all of the black ops games they had great story Campaigns, but there was a simple game mode that changed the whole landscape of Call Of Duty for me… ZOMBIES wave after wave of the undead fell before our feet. We came up with strategies, tactics, and kill-zones of corradiated crossfire to mow down them zombified nazi bastards down. You would get 3 random people you had never talked to before in your entire life. Your 3 random teammates probably still have the same memory of epically going a 100 rounds without dying running in circles praying to the god’s for a decent random weapon to pop out of that box. This is where the squad culture started for me. You would get 2 or 3 friends in a lobby and pay for hours I digress… There was also Left 4 dead which was the same premise survive the hordes of zombies but it was more about traveling across levels and avoiding ambushes and the sound of random crying women…
2009 Proved to be an interesting year we got F.E.A.R 2 which was a slightly less scary and more rapey sequel to the first game. Later that year we got ARMA 2 which wasn’t a bad game by itself… but we got DayZ the mod(sometime later)… Less about killing zombies more about surviving the toxic player community that cropped up years later. Valve also gave us Left 4 Dead 2 which did everything the first one did but better… Time rolled on another decade of Games had come and gone. I skipped a few here and there because I could sit here and write 5 to 10 pages per entry. Which I might later on. I think Fallout 3 and New Vegas were note worthy but I’ll write about them at length later. I feel that from 2010 onward aren’t quite the yester years yet…
Dungeon Dudes Tryo 