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Picking The Top Ten FPS Titles Of All-Time
Thanks to GameSpot for its 'TenSpot' feature selecting picks for the top ten first-person shooter (FPS) games of all-time. The article argues: "So what makes a first-person shooter good? Is it a cohesive story and a well-designed campaign? A creative multiplayer mode? How about a devastating arsenal of weapons? Or fiendishly clever AI enemies? The games in this list exhibit one or more of these qualities and have all affected the way shooters are made in a tangible and lasting way." It goes on to identify top titles such as Duke Nukem 3D ("...good-natured attitude... great level design, and solid engine"), Battlefield 1942 ("...an excellent game made better by retail expansion packs"), and, naturally, Doom ("one of the true classics of computer gaming.")
Is anyone else getting tired of these monthly polls that rank the top games, FPS, strange NPCs, in-game music, text-based games, etc. etc. of all time? How many times must we slice and dice the past? Contemporize! :)
If so, then "Serious Sam" is undeniably the best shooter of all time. That's all you do in the game - run around and blow stuff up. Simplistic, but hellishly fun.
Goo goo g'joob.
mainly just posting this just in case someone from gamespot sees this. rendering in Gecko is completely fubared. "Don't miss out! Evolve!" --Bob
In Bob we trust.
I question the value of this poll. How many people can honestly say they have played most of the FPSs in existence (or at least most of the ones on the list) and are therefore in a position to judge which one is the best? People will vote for the only game on the list that they've played, so it'll simply boil down to "which game is currently the most popular?" and of course, the winner will be something that was released within the last year. This, in my opinion, is a subject best left to objective videogames reviewers.
Besides which, "best" is poorly defined. Are we talking the most fun games to play right NOW? Or the games that were the best at the time they came out? Or the games that were the most influential?
qntm.org
Wow, nice to see someone mention Skynet, much less say they enjoyed it! I could never figure that one out. For a game based off of a movie it was absolutely amazing at the time and completely sucked me in.
Sadly for me, my gaming timeline has a huge gap between the release of Quake and Q3A. I was stuck on a p100 with win3.1 until late 1999! I really missed out on alot, especially considering I was stuck with an aweful internet connection for years until I got broadband.
I have to agree with you on Duke Nukem 3D as well. While in Doom you were just kind of wondering around, Duke Nukem 3D had areas and a storyline that really pulled you in. And strippers. Oddly enough, I bought very few games at the time and was limited to shareware and demos. Duke Nukem 3D just happened to be one of the full games I had. (friend of a friend bought the PC version when he had a mac and never returned it, and somehow I got ahold of it.)
Instead of being called the top ten FPS titles, it should be called Ten Years of Doom Clones!
I was going to shoot someone if Goldeneye 007 was not on that list. I wasted many, many hours playing multiplayer Goldeneye against my friends. The AR, the RCP, rocket launchers, timed mines, proximity mines, grenades, all sorts of fun. Perfect Dark was just as amazing, with some even cooler weapons.
However, my friends now insist Halo is the best FPS ever. Halo is a fun multiplayer game. It looks nice, the controls are well thought out, the weapons are pretty balanced, and you can get the whole 16 player thing going on.
But for a game called Halo: Combat Evolved, it is lacking in the combat evolved part. I mean, they went to take over an alien planet with an assault rifle that has the firepower of an automatic Daisy Red Rider. They have an amazing pistol that works like a sniper rifle and the sniper rifle itself is quite nice. The vehicles are fun. But where are the jet packs or rocket boots or guns that fire through rock or around buildings or thermal vision or guns that don't need to reload or something evolved. Where are the bots? Would it have been that hard to add some AI to fight against in the multiplayer? I can play Halo a lot, but I never got bored of playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, there was always some new way to keep yourself entertained. Anyways, I just had to rant a little, maybe someone else here can sympathize with me.
I would have combined CS into HL.
Then with the leftover spot, I would have included Jedi Knight, somewhere between HL and Halo.
Some people do play games in order to do things that are absolutely impossible in the real world. Is it realistic to be floating, bodiless, over the field where the army you command is fighting? And yet, RTSes remain popular.
I hate to trot out this old argument, but sometimes a game and a person just don't "mesh" and the person will never be good at or enjoy the game. I'm like that with fighting games, which depend on combos and timing. I was able to grok Descent pretty quickly, but I could easily understand if someone doesn't.
Agree completely, Dark Forces was immensely atmospheric, and probably the best FPS next to Doom.
I didn't even think about NOLF until you mentioned it, and it's one of my favorite games ever. IIRC, I was truly surprised at how everything turned out, which almost never happens. The weapons were fun, the maps were good, and I liked Cate Archer.
Another one that was overlooked was Rise of the Triad. Back in the early days of multiplayer games, this was the one we fired up on the LAN most often.
..that can't find a way to get interested in the latest permuation of the FPS? I'm sure this will be an unpopular post here at Slashdot but here goes anyway..
I enjoyed playing Doom(/2), Duke3d & Quake(/2) when i was in highschool but since then there seems to be an infinity of FPS games that are only a slight variation on each other.
The latest drawing/physics engines may be amazing when compared to the grand daddies like Wolfenstein and Doom but it seems to me there is a real lack of innovation in the FPS genre - with game development companies content to just slap some new maps and a few cheezy video interludes on the latest gaming engine and release a new game.
Seriously, how many different ways can there be to walk around a 2D map from a first person perspective viewpoint and shoot things?
Is it good for gaming that a single genre is so dominant?
Am i missing the point? Probably.
I feel like a relic, missing the Amiga/Atari gaming days.. and worse, increasing find myself turning to Nintendo for my gaming needs!
I used to think Descent was the top dog before I was exposed to the almighty Unreal Tournament. But I still think it deserves to be on the list because it had an inventive concept that has since rarely been done with equal skill. Also, I would argue against the GameSpot article's claim that Quake had the best lighting effects of its time. One can hardly notice them compared to their use in Descent 2. You could destroy lights and areas would go dark. Most games today can't even do that.
It was hardly an average, run-of-the-mill FPS. Since its release, there have been a handful of clones. Some decent, like Forsaken. Others shoddy, like Terracide. But the idea hasn't been touched after the disaster that was Descent 3. One hopes that after Unreal Tournament 2004 and the upcoming Battlefield resurrect interest in flying vehicles that we'll see a mod that exploits this type of gameplay, and then maybe spur enough interest for a developer to build something like it.
Ideally, I would see a modern Descent clone utilizing a control arrangement like that of Freelancer. Use mouselook and WASD and merely don't restrict movement to the ground plane. Also, enable the ability to get out and walk around on foot, possibly to explore and find other ships to pilot.
Descent 3 was a disaster in the sense that it didn't sell very well. I think a key reason, aside from the lack of good marketing, was that it was too far divorced from Descent 1 and 2. Although they had a flashy new engine, it lost the gritty, dark corridors that the old games were notorious for. The robots weren't creepy, they were almost cartoon-like. And the whole appearance of the game had a plastic, strange look (it must be the textures or the lighting). The missions were also loaded with inane puzzles that had no place in a corridor shooter like this. It's unfortunate that because of Descent 3, no one has stepped up to the plate to try again. I hope someday, some developer will.
What games are missing ?
No One Lives Forever was game of the year, I think it should be included. Along with Star Trek Elite Force of course. Those were solid FPS adventure games.
Duke Nukem 3D was OK at the time, but only 2.5D when 3D was arriving. It also sucked at multiplayer, the levels were too big and multiplayer just wasn't any fun. I don't know why it is on the list, maybe because it's old and came after doom, but the list is the top 10 greatest FPS'es, not top 10 FPS corrected with a release date factor.