In this series, I will try to document some of my various videogame phases (a la Daniel here), roughly in chronological order. I'll try to keep them pretty short, because Daniel and I got some complaints about our older videogame posts being too long.
Okay, so--at least for the moment--I'm not covering anything pre-Nintendo 64, because although I did play plenty of videogames, I wasn't really "into them," per se, just because I was too young to really fully take in and work hard at a game. Daniel and I got Nintendo 64's a year after everyone else did, because our parents were from the humble working class and were poor. That was a tough year to wait with our increasingly shoddy looking SEGA Geneses. We played a lot of Mario Kart at Josh's house to get our fix, as Daniel has mentioned before.
As the next Christmas came around, we greedily unwrapped our presents, I'm sure both of us knowing that we were getting a 64. Sure enough, there it was. I got I believe five games that first year, but easily the biggest of the lot was Goldeneye, which had just come out recently, and was the absolute shit for kids our age. Everyone played this game. It was just a given that if you went to someone's house, you were going to start up some multiplayer and blast each other with Dostoevskys and remote mines and other "eye-opening" weapons.
I don't know, for some reason I was never one to play that many FPS deathmatches. I guess I just always hated losing, so, although I played a shit-ton, I never played as much multiplayer as stalwarts like Greg Rickert and others. I do think I played a lot with Conor Duggan at this point, though.
I had a lot of respect for the single-player campaign in this game, which I always felt was unfairly neglected. The Facility topped Daniel's list of greatest videogame levels, which is a fair assessment. God, I should do a top videogame level list sometime. I don't know exactly why I loved one-player so much, because it seems pretty primitive even when compared to the original Half-Life, which came out the next year, but I had a lot of fun with it. Goldeneye should be honored as the forefather of such modern console shooter mainstays as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the Halo series, both of which borrow quite a bit from Goldeneye when it comes to multiplayer deathmatching. I ultimately think that Goldeneye had the most influential shooter multiplayer of all time (you could make a case for the early Quakes here, but I will let someone more knowledgable argue their case), while Half-Life had the most influential single-player mode for a shooter. Those are just my thoughts.
--Edward
did Quake come before Doom? which was better?
ReplyDeleteQuake came after Doom. Doom is perhaps the more influential/"greater" shooter, but I would say Quake/Quake II were probably the most influential games for PC FPS multiplayer. The only reason I listed Goldeneye as having more influential multiplayer is that console multiplayer seems to be becoming the norm, instead of PC multiplayer (which used to be the only way you could play online multiplayer). I'm not sure if Goldeneye or Quake is represented more in the current crop of shooters, but I would tend to say Goldeneye (I could be wrong). It should be noted that the original Halo is also incredibly influential in its use of recharging health, its control scheme, the use of dual-wielding/vehicles, and (this is Halo 2) the way the online multiplayer is set up.
ReplyDeleteDoom is perhaps the most legendary of all shooters. The only really big shooter I can think of that came out before it was Castle Wolfenstein, but Doom had a lot bigger audience and was more influential (having only played a little of the original Wolfenstein, I can't say which is more fun to play). In terms of shooters, I would say the next really huge leap after Doom was the original Half-Life, because even games like Goldeneye and the Quakes were merely offspring of Doom. Half-Life introduced the shooter as a vehicle for a more involving single-player, which can be seen in the single player modes of something like CoD4 (and of course, Red Faction).
What was the first FPS to take advantage of dual control sticks? I'm guess it had to have been on PS2? Unless it was something more obscure like some sort of atari, arcade, or computer controller.
ReplyDeleteIf the dual-stick controller did indeed debut on the PS2, then let's go with TimeSplitters, because I believe that was a release game for the PS2. Was the dual stick ever released for later PS1 games? I think it might've debuted pre-PS2, but I'm not so sure of this.
ReplyDeleteHaha remote mines in goldeneye at all the respawn points so when you killed someone you just watched their screen to see when they started then pushed the trigger for the detonator.. That always made me laugh.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is why Greg is an evil bastard.
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