Bang! The FPS Megathread

Are any of these Quake/Doom inspired games on Steam worth a shot? I am mostly a purist when it comes to these sort of retro shooters which means just playing Quake 1 and 2 ad inifitum....lol
 
UT99, the Half-Life series, Quake 2, the Bioshock games, DOOM Eternal, Wolfenstein The New Saga, and Halo MCC up to Reach are all games I go back to consistently. Doom as a whole but Eternal might be my favorite. I think these games are just perfect in design, story, atmosphere, everything. Always a good time to be had when I load these up. Especially Doom and Half-Life for the mod communities.
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Are any of these Quake/Doom inspired games on Steam worth a shot? I am mostly a purist when it comes to these sort of retro shooters which means just playing Quake 1 and 2 ad inifitum....lol
If you haven't already you gotta try out Dusk, HROT, and Cultic. I think you'd dig those. Also some favorites of mine lately are Turbo Overkill, Ion Fury, and Severed Steel. Really badass games. One more because it just came to me. If you ever try out the Warhammer 40k Space Marine games there is an in between game that came out called Boltgun. it's a retro FPS instead of a TPS and you play as a different marine but it ties in with Space Marine's story.
 
UT99, the Half-Life series, Quake 2, the Bioshock games, DOOM Eternal, Wolfenstein The New Saga, and Halo MCC up to Reach are all games I go back to consistently. Doom as a whole but Eternal might be my favorite. I think these games are just perfect in design, story, atmosphere, everything. Always a good time to be had when I load these up. Especially Doom and Half-Life for the mod communities.
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If you haven't already you gotta try out Dusk, HROT, and Cultic. I think you'd dig those. Also some favorites of mine lately are Turbo Overkill, Ion Fury, and Severed Steel. Really badass games. One more because it just came to me. If you ever try out the Warhammer 40k Space Marine games there is an in between game that came out called Boltgun. it's a retro FPS instead of a TPS and you play as a different marine but it ties in with Space Marine's story.
Cultic really really looks like a direct sequel to Blood, pretty crazy I wouldn't expect to see Build Engine style stuff. I'm gonna add these titles to my wishlist.
 
I kinda love fps's but I also fell out of love with the genre roughly 20 years ago.
I was pretty privileged growing up in the 90s with an older brother who had a suspicious amount of disposable income so I would always get his old hardware in regular intervals which was usually still miles ahead of whatever my friends had at home. Booting up Turok on a Voodoo 2 was mindblowing. So I'm a sucker for anything after and including Doom, especially Duke 3D, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Blood, Quake, Requiem, Star Trek Elite Force, Red Faction and the entire Jedi Knight series. Half-Life 1 felt like a huge step up for the genre (whereas Half-Life 2 never won me over) but UT99 is the one I still come back to the most. There's nothing quite like it. It's so frantic but also super relaxing and the atmosphere and music are just perfect. UT2004 was brilliant too though I didn't get it until a few years later. Another game I spent an unfathomable amount of time in was Timesplitters. I miss the series so bad.
I feel System Shock 2, Deus Ex, No one lives forever and Thief kind of deserve their own category but they certainly share a lot of space with the fps genre on the venn diagram.

Around the mid-2000s I started to fall out of love with first person shooters, because the games just started to become more linear and uglier. I seriously hope the hideous brown visuals of the PS3/360 era never become nostalgic and make a comeback in the indie realm.
I also mean uglier in a political sense. The dominance of military shooters that to a degree continues to this day drove me away. I just find them detestable on every level. I've worked a lot with refugees over the years. Some of the most amazing and traumatized people I've ever met, especially the Afghans. Turning their, their family's and home country's suffering and destruction into cheap entertainment just plain sickens me. For me one of the reasons why I felt games needed to be finally taken seriously as art, is the fact that otherwise we can't have any meaningful, mature criticism of the game industry's entanglement with the military entertainment complex.

Okay theeeen. Not to be Debbie does downers too much here. There's been a couple of fun indie shooters that have piqued my interest in recent years like Lovely Planet, drunken robot pornography and Ion Fury. The latter also works as a staunch reminder that the universe has yet to grant us a gender-switched Duke Nukem game in the build engine named Duchess Nukem where she chows down on E and saves the Earth's twinks from the aliens.
 
Around the mid-2000s I started to fall out of love with first person shooters, because the games just started to become more linear and uglier. I seriously hope the hideous brown visuals of the PS3/360 era never become nostalgic and make a comeback in the indie realm.
I also mean uglier in a political sense. The dominance of military shooters that to a degree continues to this day drove me away. I just find them detestable on every level. I've worked a lot with refugees over the years. Some of the most amazing and traumatized people I've ever met, especially the Afghans. Turning their, their family's and home country's suffering and destruction into cheap entertainment just plain sickens me. For me one of the reasons why I felt games needed to be finally taken seriously as art, is the fact that otherwise we can't have any meaningful, mature criticism of the game industry's entanglement with the military entertainment complex.

Yeah, ngl, that is part of the reason FPS don't appeal to me that much. I can enjoy them more as multiplayer experiences with friends, but its not a genre I find particularly appealing from an aesthetic or conceptual point of view. The glorification of guns and the military industrial complex rubs me the wrong way. But not everyone reads that deeply into games. Some people just like exercising their twitch reflexes.
 
But not everyone reads that deeply into games.
It's kind of a professional habit of mine. I studied graphic design and interactive media systems and in both courses there was a big focus on the history of media, its semantics and in turn its marketing and ethics. It's hard to turn off the analyst in me sometimes, but considering how powerful mass media is I'd rather be alert.
 
Well, in the late eighties and early nineties, I remember playing the very first ms-dos fps games on my poor 386 PC: namely Ken's Labyrinth, Descent and Wolfenstein3d. Then Doom, Heretic and Hexen, Dark Forces, Terminator: F.S. and Quake. Finally Monolith's Blood, Shadow Warrior and Redneck Rampage: but here I had already moved on to 486 PC and ms-dos was now almost abandoned by the developers. 🤷‍♂️
 
I kinda love fps's but I also fell out of love with the genre roughly 20 years ago.
I was pretty privileged growing up in the 90s with an older brother who had a suspicious amount of disposable income so I would always get his old hardware in regular intervals which was usually still miles ahead of whatever my friends had at home. Booting up Turok on a Voodoo 2 was mindblowing. So I'm a sucker for anything after and including Doom, especially Duke 3D, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Blood, Quake, Requiem, Star Trek Elite Force, Red Faction and the entire Jedi Knight series. Half-Life 1 felt like a huge step up for the genre (whereas Half-Life 2 never won me over) but UT99 is the one I still come back to the most. There's nothing quite like it. It's so frantic but also super relaxing and the atmosphere and music are just perfect. UT2004 was brilliant too though I didn't get it until a few years later. Another game I spent an unfathomable amount of time in was Timesplitters. I miss the series so bad.
I feel System Shock 2, Deus Ex, No one lives forever and Thief kind of deserve their own category but they certainly share a lot of space with the fps genre on the venn diagram.

Around the mid-2000s I started to fall out of love with first person shooters, because the games just started to become more linear and uglier. I seriously hope the hideous brown visuals of the PS3/360 era never become nostalgic and make a comeback in the indie realm.
I also mean uglier in a political sense. The dominance of military shooters that to a degree continues to this day drove me away. I just find them detestable on every level. I've worked a lot with refugees over the years. Some of the most amazing and traumatized people I've ever met, especially the Afghans. Turning their, their family's and home country's suffering and destruction into cheap entertainment just plain sickens me. For me one of the reasons why I felt games needed to be finally taken seriously as art, is the fact that otherwise we can't have any meaningful, mature criticism of the game industry's entanglement with the military entertainment complex.

Okay theeeen. Not to be Debbie does downers too much here. There's been a couple of fun indie shooters that have piqued my interest in recent years like Lovely Planet, drunken robot pornography and Ion Fury. The latter also works as a staunch reminder that the universe has yet to grant us a gender-switched Duke Nukem game in the build engine named Duchess Nukem where she chows down on E and saves the Earth's twinks from the aliens.
I kinda get what you are saying there. Call of Duty at that time went from a game portraying war in a semi realistic light to transitioning fully into the multiplayer arcade aspect so the campaigns started to suffer starting with Ghosts. You had a lot of others like Army of Two that is just america simulator. I think the military shooters I tend to really like are ones that try to portray it in a more realistic light. I've recently bought Ready or Not after getting into SWAT. I think the way they handle the scenarios you can play really capture how it can be for law enforcement in scary situations. You can tell that the dev team really cares about portraying it respectfully while still having an engaging product. I still think one of my guilty pleasure FPS games is Call of Duty: World at War. They did a good job of representing what WWII really was like for those men and women. But stuff like that can be visceral as well and can be quite uncomfortable for a lot of people as well. I just wish devs had more respect for those wars and situations in our world.
 
Never been interested in FPS at all but I've been into the genre a bit more for a few months now.

I loved Darkwatch, too bad the Xbox version crashed on my laptop, had to settle for the inferior PS2 version, but I still had a lot of fun

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Next ones will be Timesplitters 2 and Perfect Dark.
 
duke nukem doesn't hold a candle to BLOOD
Hands Down to the DN3D killer, eg BLOOD. This game for me is perfect. Balanced weapons. Good Enemies and Humour.

Unfortunately Blood 2 is exactly opposite to Blood 1, and is dull, with stoopid enemies and uninspiring weapons and mechanics.

Blood 4 EVER.
 
Hands Down to the DN3D killer, eg BLOOD. This game for me is perfect. Balanced weapons. Good Enemies and Humour.

Unfortunately Blood 2 is exactly opposite to Blood 1, and is dull, with stoopid enemies and uninspiring weapons and mechanics.

Blood 4 EVER.
You're forgetting the best fps protagonist of all time
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I could listen to Caleb read the phone book he's so goddamn cool ::banana

Also the atmosphere my god its superb, not a boring level, the music is also excellent even if some of it gets reused which is a shame (the train level and circus level themes are Exquisite)
Fantastic enemy sprites and locations the train level is the most memorable lv Ive ever played in an old school fps, its creative atmospheric And mechanically rock solid. Every modern boomer shooter should take inspiration from it, developers should study it religiously.

It looks cool and graphically complex with the moving stage illusion, its got a sountrack that compliments it with its leitmotif, it takes advantage of the fact its a train with the way you progress and unlock different cabinets and go outside to take shortcuts and it having stuff like a restaurant and a bar and that bloody cool ending quote by caleb

"End of the line."
 
I got too much to say that I cannot even make up my text in my own mind so I'd get laconic:

I loved playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark on the 64 and Half-Life on PS2 despite not being good at them (and being easily scared by monsters in the later) so I was more often playing the former with cheats than actually playing it legit.

I still ended up finally beating legitimately all of these games but much later in my life (especially when some parts were tricky).

Half-Life² is basically why I got on Steam (thanks to the Orange Box) because I loved the first that I've found in a garage sales so I asked for it (and how I got to play Portal and TF2).

Fast forward several years and I got the The Ultimate Doom Trilogy: Collector's Edition for merely two bucks in another garage sales (it was still wrapped) and fell in love with Doom, its extensions, sequels and sourceports/mods before 2016 came out (especially thanks to Brutal Doom despite the glaring flaws).

Then followed many other FPS (especially classic ones) like Serious Sam, Duke Nukem, Quake (the collection I got in sales) and many others I forgot.

I'm mostly an old school kind of FPS enjoyer but I'm still interested on older military game like the first CoD, MoH and even the firsts Battlefields. I'm also not the "only on PC with KB+M" kind of guy even if it's more convenient to me.

PS: I still kinda miss the ambience of old school multiplayer FPS like CS 1.6/CS:S or TF2's earlier days instead of the matchmaking, online ranking, casual server only era.
 
The original Unreal Tournament is still one of my favorite FPS games of all time. Capture the Flag mode was the best.
But did you know that Unreal Tournament started as an addon for the original Unreal that came out more than a year before UT?
It had like three phases, a multiplayer oriented addon pack, an "upgrade" to Unreal to speak of (they even toyed with the idea of making a combined package called Unreal: Tournament Edition, similar to how Unreal Gold got released later with unreal and the missionpack as one game/executable) and then the reboot version which at one point even lost the "Unreal" title but got it back (except for some obscure french release on the cover where they actually printed the reboot version title graphic so it was a stylized "Tournament").

We don't really have anything of the real addon version (except for leftovers in sources and older maps), but the "upgrade" version we do have as leaks (one partial, one full beta on version 221 right past when they decided it won't be shipped as the tournament edition so more work was being done). It was originally kind of like Doom 2 in that sense (people forget that doom2 brought some improvements that materialized with the patches for original doom). With the upgrade version there was a huge upgrade to version 220 of the engine which brought MAJOR overhauls and improved the network code (which was one of the worst factors with Unreal on release, the game was only playable over cable or lan in practice), you got new sounds that were fully 16 bit for most of the weapons and effects, the new sounds were made by Sonic Mayhem (known for the Quake 2 soundtrack), new options, the 220 engine is also where they wanted to release the "proper" shareware version although it got cancelled for unknown reasons possibly to do with GT Interactive meddling (there was also a pre-release shareware version that got cancelled so the only shareware version that fully survived is the OEM one called Special Ediiton).

Ultimately that version was almost released on version 221 of the engine but got pushed back due to feedback by reviewers that it was still just "more Unreal" and not a new game like Quake III was shaping out to be. This caused Epic to push back UT's release from very early 1999 to late 1999 in order to compete better with Quake III. Even though in my opinion it had more depth when it was just an upgrade and the "retcon and reboot" introduced some problems to the games timelines/sense making. I know...the story didn't matter that much because it was a multiplayer game for the most part but come on.

My favorite is the leaked and recently rediscovered 221 version due to gameplay balancing and all. It feels like an expansion pack plus some. You can use all the Unreal player models plus you had at least three new ones (including the Nali). The Nali got added back to Unreal as a hidden player model from version 222 onwards. But originally the NaliPlayer class was exclusive to BotPack (the codename and main file for Unreal Tournament as it was originally started as a pack featuring better mods and team game modes).

Of course, most people will know the commercially released version known as Unreal Tournament that already shipped with engine 400 while the demo versions were in the 300 range. It was a split from the Unreal engine versions that happened during 1999. Because they did want to upgrade the engine a little more, even "overoptimize" the network code for low end connections (which also brought some problems years later).
So when it forked off, it was no longer synced with Unreal while older UT versions were synced with Unreal and licensees often got unreal tournament sources with sources past 220 as well. It was included with the license for the engine despite the game not being released. This synchronous versioning was indeed the Doom 2 model at that point. The engine was being updated together with UT's developement in the form of patches for Unreal. So you can see all Unreal versions past and including 220 to be already the UT engine in its "lite" form.

edit: the funny thing is that the naliplayer only got added back to UT proper in form of a bonuspack which was more Unreal themed (and even contained a map originally from a lost OEM version of Unreal), the first bonuspack has it and is part of the UT GOTY version too. With the first bonuspack they backtracked on the decision of distancing themselves from the original game lol.
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Sorry I realize that could perhaps go to a different thread and might be too in-depth. The funny thing is, Unreal was the first FPS I ever tried and on a beta version that remained lost for many years and still is lost though its similar to a recently found one in a way.

Like it was on a computer of a guy who ran a shop with games and all that.
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And if you guys remember the funky WarCows in the UT BonusPack as player models...those have interesting history too. I mean they were friendly creatures in the original Unreal, the full name "Nali Cow", as in herded by the Nali aliens, two-legged lizard-like cows. There was a special variant called the sacred cow that played a role in a capture the flag variant that got cut from the original game. It was called Kill the Cow and each team had a shrine/altar with the sacred cow in front of it and the opposite team would have to sacrifice the other team's cow and bring it to their altar, at least its head....its implementation/partial implementation existed in some pre-release versions of the game. But it wasn't ready for prime-time yet. Particularly the last thing developed was the bots understanding team games. This is why BotPack happened as such to "fix" that issue...and thus Unreal Tournament was born in the end LOL
 
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They're not retro, but Zortch and The Citadel are two FPS games I adore. They're both pretty cheap and have punchy moment to moment gameplay and ooze with mood.
I'd try The Citadel someday but the gameplay is not quite like a Doomlike.


I fell in love with Zortch from the first sight simply because it looked like a lost late 90's N64 game that got ported on PC. I'd love to see a sequel or even another FPS of the same kind.
 
What kind of 90's N64 shooter do you have in mind specificaly? What does it remind you most of?

edit: I looked up those games. They might not be "old" but they are certainly more retro-style. Especially Zortch indeed. But yea I didn't like the bluryness of most n64 titles.
There was a cancelled N64 Port of Unreal (I could never recover it), but it was for N64DD which had more disk capacity so the textures were reportedly not that bad there and you could write saves on the disc. That port was only cancelled because N64DD commercial release got delayed and only for Japan. There was no point in them continuing and plus there were several changes with ownership and publishers so it couldn't survive. The main reason Unreal for the playstation was cancelled was because it was a relatively late port (the true developement only starting in early 1999) and at the same time the rights went to infogrames, who didn't want to support the project at early 2000 anymore. It was going to be released slightly after Alien Resurrection which was already seen as a very late FPS for the system. It makes sense, besides while not ALL BLURRY, it was all PIXEL mess on the actual hardware with tearing as usual and Epic themselves felt like its not doing their engine a justice (but they didn't say outright no, it was Infogrames sacking it).
edit2: Well Alien Resurrection got delayed in 2000 too(I was talking about original plans for that year), so originally Unreal PSX would still release before, but maybe not given they said they will want to re-do some stuff so maybe it would release at the same time, who knows.
So very late 2000.

Either way I do like the Alien Resurrection game, it just gets a bit too difficult at one point and I honestly gave up playing in the underwater section.
 
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If Boomer shooters are Doom and maybe Quake then I'd love to see more "Gen Xer shooters" a la Quake II, Turok (especially 2), Half-Life and Goldeneye where you had objectives to follow rather than searching keys in mazes. Zortch is almost in that aspect by being like Unreal and Turok Dinosaur Hunter.

I'd argue that Halo Combat Evolved was the last FPS of that gen (with some classic remnants) before the landscape shifted into Military Shooters like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and Battlefield.
 
If Boomer shooters are Doom and maybe Quake then I'd love to see more "Gen Xer shooters" a la Quake II, Turok (especially 2), Half-Life and Goldeneye where you had objectives to follow rather than searching keys in mazes. Zortch is almost in that aspect by being like Unreal and Turok Dinosaur Hunter.

I'd argue that Halo Combat Evolved was the last FPS of that gen (with some classic remnants) before the landscape shifted into Military Shooters like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and Battlefield.
Someone said that Metroid Prime was like a eulogy to first person shooters.
Speaking of that game, I had played it extensively with my partner. I couldn't help but notice some links to Unreal, even with the engine to the "warfare" branches of the engine. Also with the Nintendo DS game, that looked like it was running a version of the original Unreal engine, I noticed some similarities with the late 1996 leak including some graphical errors that were similar. In the end it looked like a hybrid version and I even saw traces of internal Unreal stuff like words like meshes and movers from the developement screenshots and some data-mining. What I think happened is that someone at Retro had access to the N64DD Unreal developement or that they even previously licensed the engine before being hired by Nintendo. And that it was all kept secret. I spoke to one of the developers and after some prying questions he went silent on the matter, I mean he even showed screenshots of their editor and it looked just like a modified UnrealED from around the time. One guy at assembler games even claimed it was a modified Unreal engine 2 even though iniitally I disputed that but that was before I even played it. If its not the engine then it at least took a lot from it.

Also the developers of the N64 port were essentially the same ones as the cancelled hired guns sequel/remake...it was DMA/Psygnosis.

I think Retro was somehow connected at some point. I mean honestly even the N64DD engine was often called its own engine because of the changes they had to make to it. And Nintendo DS was a lot like the N64....
so we got Metroid Prime Hunters to remind us what this N64DD Unreal could have been lol....

But even the story and game structure of Metroid Prime, if you'd have ever read the design document called the Unreal Bible from the game period around late 1996 to early 1997, one of the leaked documents (but with missing mainmap pictures) you would notice how similar it is to the premise of Metroid Prime itself. It revolved around finding artifacts and delivering them to skaarj altars in order to proceed to the next mainmap(hub) and also this would be required to powerup the mothership at the end too. Originally Unreal II was supposed to be a direct sequel where you'd end up on the Skaarj planet. (note also that the location of the skaarj ship is called the Demon Crater similar to the Impact Crater in Metroid Prime and also tarydium is kind of similar to phazon and all that) When they rebooted the game in 1997 the plans had changed. Though initially they still retained the idea of the artifacts but it was gonna play differently. It gained a detailed backstory but the structure of the game became much looser and up to individual designers to craft their own little worlds and stories. It got streamlined into the game that released, but the backstory was dropped and the prisoner characters got split into a character that you could yourself give identity thus the backstory was no longer set in stone. The novels retained most of the original backstory in its two main characters though, Zofia and Gerrick, who got captured and imprisoned together originally. In the game they are most close to the skins Kurgan and Gina and even those skins used to be different in fact the first female1 skin was never recovered as it was already made in early 1997 and only one screenshot exists of her head though she reminded a bit of the Drace skin. And before that it was just mainly the amazonian-like woman as the protagonist so Unreal actually started with a female protagonist in mind.
 
My grandma doesnt allow me to play them
It depends really what kind of a shooter you play. Maybe she'd accept a more atmosphere/story oriented shooter rather than mindless action or a soldier simulator?
But either way...I only got that kind of talk before I was 12 or 11 even. Hell I got to play the stuff technically before that but with some caution/warning.

I suppose they don't want you too rebelious but come on its ridiculous.
 
It depends really what kind of a shooter you play. Maybe she'd accept a more atmosphere/story oriented shooter rather than mindless action or a soldier simulator?
She doesnt like any violent ones, the least violent one I can think of is chex quest
 
Anyways I did play fully through Turok 2, not really the original Turok. It is also a bit open-ended just like Unreal was once planned or Metroid Prime. That insect world was very Metroidy on itself. I didn't like how Turok 2 started entirely but the game gets better as it progresses.

As for N64 games I did play through Quake 2 port fully, Daikatana (two versions, for testing purposes/research mostly, I don't like the game itself at all and prefer the patched up PC version) and that's about it, I tried Turok 3 but didn't get far. I honestly never played Goldeneye 64 and its not my kind of game anyways.

I think the quake 2 remaster is great btw despite never played it, my only gripe is the control scheme and the compass thing for wussies, but otherwise I think its one of the rare examples where it makes the original game better. Really, I never had that much liking of the original Quake 2. I also don't necessarily need objective based games, I prefer more free roaming figure it out approach, but games with atmosphere is what I like the best. This is why I love the original Unreal, it has depth and a lot of hidden/unseen depth. Lots of love and creativity went into creating individual content pieces and it has one of the most dynamic and interesting developement histories ever in my opinion.
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She doesnt like any violent ones, the least violent one I can think of is chex quest
chex quest...lmao...did she accept that one? Though imo its just a "bad" doom mod. Doom also had much more story and depth that was cut. Carmack was a dick who fired Tom Hall. He even stripped him from the credits initially. Despite most maps being his work to begin with. Like Sandy peterson reworked most of his stuff afterwards and got the full credit. Even though some of the maps were just shitty retextures of tom's originals LOL.

Okay show her the 90s german censored version of games LOL

Like half life had soldiers replaced by robots and such stuff!
Unreal only had censorship in the first level though the rest of the game just has blood replaced with green blood and no other changes.
So I suppose the censored german versions is DA WAE for you when it comes to her...haha
 
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