FPS NIGHTMARES

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

The thing I don't understand about that sort of FPS is why I'm so shit at them.

I used to have Unreal Tournament 2004, but internet speeds weren't good enough to bother playing online back then. We were limited to the occasional LAN match with only five or six of us, which meant we couldn't take full advantage of all the vehicles and whatnot.

New page gun.

[Lemming]

I'll be honest, seeing friends play this was the main thing that put me off FPS games for the longest time. I'll never understand the pleasure in literally just shooting other characters.

It's just pure competition, an even test of skill against other players (or bots). I suppose you have to be a competitive sort of person to find that appealing, though - which I was much, much moreso when I was younger than I am today. Used to spend ages yelling at the screen and treating a deathmatch like it was the Olympic games while supernaturally skilled Russian players wiped the floor with me.

I always liked Unreal Tournament more than competitors like Counter Strike and, later, Battlefield. It just somehow condenses the whole competitive experience down to its purest form. While Counter Strike is often about positioning and outwitting the enemy team and Battlefield is about teamwork, Unreal Tournament is purely about you, your skill, and whether or not you'll be able to hold your own against 16 other people all coming to kill you. Everything else feeds into that sort of high-octane experience - the thumping music, the frantic visuals, the physics and movement (as Old Thrashbag says) which allow you to pull off some serious athletics during combat, etc. And the combat mechanics themselves are so tight that it's just about the most fun you can have jumping around and shooting things.

[purlieu]

Yeah, I suppose I'm not really a competitive person. For me a huge part of computer games is about narrative and exploration. There are always examples of really good combat, but it's always been secondary to actually going somewhere and doing something for me, so directly combat-oriented gaming is a huge turnoff.

[Mister Six]

Same here. #TeamPurlieu

[St_Eddie]

I'll be honest, seeing friends play this was the main thing that put me off FPS games for the longest time. I'll never understand the pleasure in literally just shooting other characters.

For me a huge part of computer games is about narrative and exploration. There are always examples of really good combat, but it's always been secondary to actually going somewhere and doing something for me, so directly combat-oriented gaming is a huge turnoff.

I'm much the same.  I require my FPS games to have a little more going for them than just shooting other people in a game of reflexes, be it a narrative element (Half-Life), environmental puzzles (Dark Forces/Jedi Knight and Portal), or a strong tactical element (SWAT 3 and Counter-Strike).

It's just pure competition, an even test of skill against other players (or bots). I suppose you have to be a competitive sort of person to find that appealing, though...

I think there's something in that.  I'm not a very competitive person by nature.  I used to play a lot of WipeOut HD online on PS3 and if I was racing against a less skilled opponent, I'd purposefully slow down whenever I was in front of them (without making it obvious that I was doing so), to allow them to catch up with me and give them a fighting chance.  It's important to me that everyone has fun.  Winning isn't that high on my priority list when playing a game (and if it ever has been, it's been a case of wanting to win through brains over brawn).

[Bazooka]

Learn 2 Frag noobz.

[The Crumb]

Excellent review, as always. That bit about Friday nights was a pure hit of nostalgia. I absolutely loved UT, whether playing properly or spending hours pissing about with mods and mutators. I get what people say about wanting more than just pure shooting, but I found the maps to be so good looking and interestingly designed that they a pleasure to explore and learn.

[thelittlemango]

Bought Unreal Tournament when we had a shared family computer and use of the internet was fleeting (and not fast enough) so played it exclusively against bots. Somehow it was still very satisfying and I have many fond memories of it but it's one of those I put in the category of wishing I had it when internet was better and I was a grown up with my own computer, the closest I came was Quake 3 Arena on the Dreamcast, forking out for the keyboard which sat on my lap and a mouse which was placed on a book next to me on my bed, true dedication.

[Bazooka]

It was on Dreamcast too, but it couldn't match Quake 3's offering.

[kryton2.0]

I don't mind 'pure' FPS shooters like UT or TF2, I can see why observers would consider it boring, but for me it's all about honing your skills and just having a laugh. Much more fun when played with mates. Things get interesting when you throw crazy weapons in there and/or crazy classes in there.

But ultimately I've not touched anything like that for a while. I tried PUB:G and it was fun for a few rounds, but it felt somewhere in the middle of being an arcadey SMUP and survivor game, and not really nailing the fun of either genre. I also think it was a bit clunky? Or maybe I just kept getting my arse kicked by better players. Or I'm getting too old for that style of game?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Hated Unreal when it came out. It was the epitome of a zero atmosphere, weightless late 90s "buy an expensive graphics card" FPS with beautiful technical effects and zero good design. You could read "five years of dev hell" into most aspects of it but the graphics. Bland levels and gimmicky weapons, aside from the moment where you step outside into the world for the first time all the narrative stuff was so bad compared to Half Life. At the time it felt so far removed from DOOM, Heretic, and all the good old shooters it barely felt like the same genre at all. Just like a console action game mapped over the skeleton of Quake clone. Hated it. Don't really relate to praise I see it get online sometimes. Nevermind Half Life, Quake 2 ran rings around it at the time.

Unreal Tournament was the same but multiplayer and I LOVED it. The first multiplayer FPS that really hooked me in, I played it before, after and during getting Quake 3 and fuck me I played Quake 3 a lot. I tried to get everyone I knew with a PC to play UT with me. A good chunk of my 6th Form years is just Unreal Tournament.

[Ferris]

Absolutely loved Unreal Tournament. It was all sci fi and mad, I liked that it didn't try and explain anything to you and just go and figure out or get fragged whatever we don't care.

Would love to play it again but I'm an emulator dunce and (by necessity) have a strict "laptop is for work only" policy so I'm probably snookered.

[Lemming]

Absolutely loved Unreal Tournament. It was all sci fi and mad, I liked that it didn't try and explain anything to you and just go and figure out or get fragged whatever we don't care.

This is a great point, and one which I totally failed to raise in the review. There's a lot of gentle worldbuilding in Unreal Tournament, and it's done totally non-intrusively, mostly just through visual design. Unreal very vaguely hinted at Earth being a planet of megacorporations and horrible conditions, and Unreal Tournament takes that and runs with it by portraying Earth as a collection of decaying factories and sprawling, hellish urban streets. Then you get to contrast that with a glimpse of more upmarket areas like DM-Morpheus. The little descriptions for the maps and opponents are all really cool too and help to hint at a larger picture, mentioning vast violent slums and merchant ships and all that. Sparks your imagination in the same way the flavour text on Magic: The Gathering cards does.

Then it gets even more interesting with the non-Earth maps, where there's all kinds of ancient temples, monasteries and castles, all of which have been taken over by Earth corporations, with no mention as to what's happened to the people who originally lived there. One of my favourite details is the Nali temple that's been repurposed into an arena - after all the effort you went to to save the Nali planet from the Skaarj in Unreal, it looks like humans might have come along and treated the Nali almost as badly as the Skaarj did. It's definitely nothing too deep, but as context for an otherwise totally plotless game, you really get a strong sense of how shit the future is, how violent and hopeless their culture is, and you can start to understand why a corporation-run interplanetary deathmatch would start to sound like a good idea to these people. And it does all that almost entirely through visuals!

[Chollis]

MUSIC: Maybe the best soundtrack ever made for a videogame. I still have it on in the background when I'm doing other stuff almost daily. Even if you're not interested in the game, I really recommend you check this out. Best track has to be Foregone Destruction.

god that's good

[Ferris]

Exactly, imagine where you'd be without old Ferris to remind you of things. I think you all should treat me with a bit more respect in future.

(I don't remember any of the points you raised - only that I didn't know what was going on with my rubbish child brain and I had to figure it out as I went which I found very satisfying, though it could because I missed incredibly obvious pointers or skipped "boring" instructional bits. I remember discovering alternate fire for weapons took weeks.)

[H-O-W-L]

This is a great point, and one which I totally failed to raise in the review. There's a lot of gentle worldbuilding in Unreal Tournament, and it's done totally non-intrusively, mostly just through visual design. Unreal very vaguely hinted at Earth being a planet of megacorporations and horrible conditions, and Unreal Tournament takes that and runs with it by portraying Earth as a collection of decaying factories and sprawling, hellish urban streets. Then you get to contrast that with a glimpse of more upmarket areas like DM-Morpheus. The little descriptions for the maps and opponents are all really cool too and help to hint at a larger picture, mentioning vast violent slums and merchant ships and all that. Sparks your imagination in the same way the flavour text on Magic: The Gathering cards does.

Then it gets even more interesting with the non-Earth maps, where there's all kinds of ancient temples, monasteries and castles, all of which have been taken over by Earth corporations, with no mention as to what's happened to the people who originally lived there. One of my favourite details is the Nali temple that's been repurposed into an arena - after all the effort you went to to save the Nali planet from the Skaarj in Unreal, it looks like humans might have come along and treated the Nali almost as badly as the Skaarj did. It's definitely nothing too deep, but as context for an otherwise totally plotless game, you really get a strong sense of how shit the future is, how violent and hopeless their culture is, and you can start to understand why a corporation-run interplanetary deathmatch would start to sound like a good idea to these people. And it does all that almost entirely through visuals!

I wholesale stole the concept of Necris (a commodified life-beyond-death mechanism owned specifically by a handful of corporations) for one of the sci-fi RPGs I ran for mates last year. Unreal has some really great worldbuilding and is proof that you can have a plot for arena games without being inconsistent nonsensical toss that creates a ludonarrative fault line between the game and the supplements. (see: Overwatch)

[Jerzy Bondov]

I used to wank on about how Quake III is better than UT, and I still think it is, but I probably played a lot more UT. Mainly the skyscraper level from the demo. Morpheus isn't it? Great.

[St_Eddie]

I used to play the multiplayer mode of Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight on MSN Zone back in the day.  Load of fools lagging around a map, flailing their lightsabers about ineffectually.  Good times.

[druss]

I used to play the multiplayer mode of Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight on MSN Zone back in the day.  Load of fools lagging around a map, flailing their lightsabers about ineffectually.  Good times.

Ahhh same here, although I played Mysteries of the Sith more than JK. I was in a clan called "Clan 435". The 435 thing was never explained. Looking back, NF (no force) sabers was mental, don't know how anyone played it. I did love the big ass canyon map though, once had some mates over who had only played UT and Quake 3 and obliterated them by force speeding around the map with a concussion rifle. Don't think they were having as good a time as me.

Unreal Tournament was fucking amazing. I'd be tempted to fire it up for a bit of nostalgia but I struggle with competitive games as an adult. I don't know what happened to me but I get too anxious for any type of PVP game these days, my heart rate goes up and I take every kill personally to the point where it isn't an enjoyable experience. Polar opposite to me as a teenager where I would annihilate all comers with a flak canon (or rail gun in Quake) and if I was getting my ass handed to me I'd play until I figured out what I was doing wrong. Probably a realisation that I'll never be good at any game now as even if I practice loads there will be 12 year old kids with better skills and reaction times than me which isn't a fun thought. I could kick the shit out of them in real life though and that's what really matters.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I think there's something in that.  I'm not a very competitive person by nature.  I used to play a lot of WipeOut HD online on PS3 and if I was racing against a less skilled opponent, I'd purposefully slow down whenever I was in front of them (without making it obvious that I was doing so), to allow them to catch up with me and give them a fighting chance.  It's important to me that everyone has fun.  Winning isn't that high on my priority list when playing a game (and if it ever has been, it's been a case of wanting to win through brains over brawn).

I have the exact opposite problem. I'm too competitive to play online PVP. It's not important to me that everyone has fun. In fact I want everyone else to be absolutely fucking miserable and when I win I want to rub their faces in it. Unfortunately I'm shite at games so I just spend the whole time in a sulk. It's different playing local multiplayer or a board game or something, because I can pretend I'm just joking when I'm acting the cunt, but online there's nowhere to hide and I just become an obvious chippy prick. Luckily (as Lemming says) the bots in UT are really good.

[St_Eddie]

I did love the big ass canyon map though...

Ah, yes.  Best map in the multiplayer mode by a country mile.

[Lemming]

SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle (1999)





This game brought to you by dgvoodoo! Since I couldn't be bothered to turn the watermark off.

RELEASE DATE: November 30th, 1999

STORY: The world's most comically beleaguered SWAT team is called out to deal with mass airplane hijackings, terrorist uprisings, suitcase nukes, and other things that might be slightly beyond the capabilities of a local SWAT team.

MUSIC: It's meant to just blend into the background, but it's not bad! There's even a weird dramatic choir during one mission set in a church.

BREACH, BANG AND CLEAR: I'm a huge fan of SWAT 4, but I'd never played SWAT 3 properly before now. It took a bit of adjusting, but having just finished this game, I think it's a very strong game on its own.

Essentially, the game is Rainbow Six, but instead of making a plan before the mission, you issue commands while in action, and with a much more interesting enemy surrender mechanic. SWAT 3 and Rainbow Six are otherwise functionally identical - you plod around relatively slowly through maps featuring randomly-placed enemies. Both you and your enemies die in one or two hits. Often, there are hostages and civilians in the way, meaning that checking your fire is critically important. You've also got a team with you who will either blitz through everything and take out every enemy, or all get massacred by one guy with a pistol, depending on how lucky you are and how good your orders are.

There are only two real differences from Rainbow Six, and they're both enough to make SWAT 3 arguably the better game. As mentioned, first we have the surrender mechanic. As a SWAT bastard, it's your job to take people alive wherever possible. You're meant to announce your presence and offer enemies a chance to surrender before you enter a room. Naturally, this is unbelievably fucking dangerous, as most of the people you're up against will shoot you on sight, and the element of surprise is your only real hope, and you have to voluntarily give that up by loudly alerting everyone to your position and announcing, to the gunmen on the other side, that you're about to come through a door.

This almost never, ever works, of course, though there are the occasional enemies who really will drop their guns and surrender (don't turn your back on them, though, because as soon as you do they'll pull another gun out half the time). When the majority of foes inevitably don't surrender, you've got to return fire. But unlike in Rainbow Six, you have the ability to shoot to wound, and if you do, enemies can still be taken alive.

Cue all kinds of hilarious scenes in which you yell out your location to AK-47-wielding maniacs, slowly walk towards the door as they train their weapons on it, then bust through the door and wildly try to shoot them in the legs and feet while they effortlessly blow your skull apart. It sounds dumb when it's written down like that, but it's absolutely fantastic when you're playing it.

Luckily you've got flashbangs and CS gas which give you a small, remote hope of encouraging people to surrender - though plenty still refuse while choking on gas, and with you pointing your gun at their head and screaming at them to get down. You'll also inevitably throw your grenades at civilians a few times. Sorry for the flashbang to the face, Grandma In Toilet, I thought there might be some terrorists in here. Oh no, nevermind, they've just shot me in the back while I was screaming at you to get on the ground, now we're both fucked.

So, let's get onto the other other big difference from Rainbow Six, which is that you can actually command your team now! In Rainbow Six, you couldn't change the plan while it was in motion - your idiot teammates would religiously follow your pre-mission plan to the letter, even if it was pure unfiltered dogshit that would get them killed in seconds. In SWAT, a command menu allows you to dynamically alter your AI teammate's actions mid-mission. It's absolutely unreal how much of a step up this is from Rainbow Six. I appreciate that developing a water-tight plan before the mission even starts was intentionally part of the game in Rainbow Six, but it led to some truly absurd situations when unexpected challenges arose in the field and your team would just collectively shrug their shoulders and walk in front of a machine-gun nest because The Almighty Plan ordered them to do so.

Only other things I can think to talk about are the maps and the AI. The AI (which is adjustable) feels a little too good at times, with enemies scoring truly insane shots at you from great distances, but the challenge it presents is a lot of fun. Civilian AI is just fucking pathetic, though, they'll get up and walk around during gunfights, surprise you by swinging doors open into your face (resulting in you panic-shooting them in the head), ignore your commands to get down and instead choose to casually walk into a terrorist and die, and generally just make a huge fucking nuisance of themselves. Okay, I can accept that the game tries to simulate them panicking or whatever, and I get that they're meant to be scared people in a terrible situation so they end up doing stupid shit like running around and sneaking up on an armed SWAT team, but the way they act goes far beyond any kind of reason.

Maps are varied, some brilliant and some a bit of a pain in the dick. The construction site one was absolutely awful, easily the worst of the pack. The best ones, I thought, were the ones that force you into very enclosed spaces where there's lots of opportunities for enemies to ambush you. Any level involving a residential house is a guaranteed winner, and I loved the bank mission (after I spent 15 minutes lost in the roof).

It's interesting to see all the ways devs in this period were trying to shake up the FPS formula. The genre was built on games in which you play as an exceptional and tough character who can take on hundreds of enemies and win - Doom, Duke, Blood, Unreal, etc. Games like Half-Life tried to get around that by making it feel as though you're fighting a desperate losing battle, even if in practice the gameplay is more or less identical to those earlier games. Rainbow Six and SWAT are the only games (that I can think of) so far that make it so you actually are at a hopeless disadvantage against enemies who are exactly as fragile as you are.

And SWAT takes it a step up - at least in Rainbow Six, you could sneak around like a big fat coward and shoot people in the head with your sad little silenced guns. SWAT takes that away from you (unless you want to play it all WRONG and go for a crap score), and it's all the better for it. I think SWAT 4 definitely has the edge, from my very fond memories of it, but this is a great step towards that. Rainbow Six with a bit more realism and a bit more of a realisation of just how terrifying it would be to be in a gunfight in real life.

FINAL RATING: Torn between 3.5 and 4, the half-point being lost only due to the inconsistent quality of missions. But fuck it, let's go for 4 Fucking Goddamn Idiot Hostages out of 5. To compare it to Rainbow Six one last time, the thing I really like about R6 above SWAT 3 is that the former has so many varied locations to visit, while SWAT 3 just has you trotting around LA. Which makes sense, of course, you're a local SWAT team, but I miss the jungles and snowy mountains and deserts of Rainbow Six.



THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM QUOTE:

[St_Eddie]

I have fond memories of playing SWAT 3 as a teenager.  Having said that, I seem to recall packing the game in during a later level, where you were going around a sewer map, diffusing bombs.  Fucking sewer levels, man.

Oh, by the way, I heatedly recommend Spoony's playthrough of SWAT 4.  "You fool!"  Comedy gold.

[Lemming]

Played two games which I don't think I could write full reviews for, so here's two mini reviews:

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear (August 31st, 1999) - essentially more of the first game, which is why I can't really write a review that doesn't just repeat everything I said for the first Rainbow Six. It did feel oddly like a step down after playing SWAT 3, but they're different games going for different things. The lack of a mid-mission commands menu is the big fuckup here, you have essentially no control over your teammates. Plenty of good missions with the usual unintentional comedy gold you find in any Tom Clancy game - British neo-nazis have overtaken a TV station during a debate on EU fiscal policy! Japanese ENVIRO-LOONS have overtaken an oil tanker - and they're going to blow it up with themselves on board!! A member of the "middle-eastern oil mafia" is "launching his own personal war against the West" and only you can stop him! These are all real missions.

Delta Force 2 (November 3, 1999) - again, the reason I can't write a review is because this is virtually identical to Delta Force 1, so the review would say nothing new. However, it is a step up from the first game. Rather than just dumping you in a field like DF1 did, this game tries to mix in a few setpieces - the main one I remember being where you have to leap onto a moving train from a helicopter, which goes as predictably tits up as you'd expect on a janky engine like this (crouching at any point during the helicopter ride will cause you to be pushed through the floor and fall to your death). Not a bad game, and if you really have to play Delta Force for some reason, you can skip the first one and go right to this.

[popcorn]

In school I got into a massive argument with two boys who insisted it was pronounced "Rouge Spear".

[St_Eddie]

Rouge One: A Star Wars Story

Moulin Rogue

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

In school I got into a massive argument with two boys who insisted it was pronounced "Rouge Spear".

Stop going into schools, you're a grown up now

[Jerzy Bondov]

Yeah I thought the sexy jewel thief bat off Sonic was called Rogue but she's actually called Rouge. And she's got a massive pair of breasts.

[Lemming]

Same re: the Sonic character. Still say "Rogue the Bat" in my head, "Rouge" just sounds insane.

[Lemming]

Quake 3 Arena (1999)



 

RELEASE DATE: 2nd December, 1999

STORY: Literally none.

MUSIC: Another great soundtrack - many of the same industrial and dnb sort of influences that Unreal Tournament has, but a "heavier" feel.

NICE GIBS, HONEY: Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament are natural competitors, releasing so close to each other. There's eternal debate, which has gone on for over two decades now, as to which is better. So, in this post I'll take a look at Quake 3, and then compare it with UT99 for the ULTIMATE DEATHMATCH.

The review will be very short, as UT's was, because there's not a lot to say beyond "play it yourself". The arsenal of weapons is wonderfully balanced and all are fun to use, the singleplayer bot AI is great, and the thrill of running around firing rockets into your friends' faces is still unsurpassed by most modern multiplayer FPS games.

Gameplay often leads to the same sort of state as Unreal Tournament, where combat becomes rhythmic and almost instinctive. Being Quake, the game also has rocket-jumping and strafe jumping, both of which will give you the edge if you master them. Rocket-strafe-jump your way around a corner at 120mph and obliterate your enemies. Unless someone else is also rocket jumping at the same time, in which case DIE.

So, when compared with Unreal Tournament... I have to give it to UT, no question. Here's a few very arbitrarily-selected points of comparison:

Weapons: UT99's selection of weapons is incredible and unconventional, while Quake sticks you with the usuals - rocket launcher, shotgun, minigun, plasma gun, the only more exotic one being the electric thingy. The tradeoff is that UT's weapons are less balanced. Every weapon in Q3 feels perfectly tweaked, while UT has shit like the fucking BioRifle, which nobody uses. Regardless, Q3 never matches the highs of the Flak Cannon. But Q3's BFG is ace.

Level Design: Q3's maps are designed with fast-paced combat in mind. They're small, they're often just a couple of symmetrical corridors leading into big rooms, and many of them are quite flat. The plus side of this is that the maps are intended to have players constantly in combat with each other with nowhere to hide or flee, but the downside is that the maps can oftentimes feel like they're a relic from an earlier age of FPS games, when flat corridors were all we had. UT on the other hand has many big maps with a lot of verticality and layouts that take a bit of time to get to grips with. UT wins on this one for me, not least because it does still have some very small, very tight maps that give you a Q3-esque experience of getting constantly fucking shot.

Visuals: The Unreal engine and the Quake 3 engine both look amazing, and we'll be seeing a shitton more of the Quake 3 engine later in the thread. Q3, much like the first two Quake games, tends to have a very dull, industrial art style, with levels being an unending parade of browns and greys representing abstract rooms. UT, on the other hand, has a pretty amazing amount of visual variety, taking you from ancient castles to outer space to ocean-floor bases to high-speed trains, all with vibrant and striking colours.

Music: Unreal Tournament absolutely runs away with it. This isn't even my opinion, it's objectively true. Both soundtracks are great, but UT's is next level.

Gunplay: Both absolutely excellent. It's essentially down to taste - UT's weapons are more esoteric and take a while to learn, while Q3's weapons will feel immediately familiar to anyone who's played basically any 90s FPS. Either way, both games offer a first-rate combat experience.

Movement: Both games have very satisfying movement systems with fair rules, but Quake 3 has rocket jumping and strafe jumping that lets you go at half the speed of light, so Quake 3 wins this one.

Bot AI: Again, both top of the range. UT might just edge it out slightly.

Also worth mentioning that UT has a much wider selection of gamemodes, including the then-unique Assault mode. Another point is that Unreal Tournament has a little bit of cool worldbuilding and setting to dig into, while Quake 3 has quite literally no story at all - not a weakness of Quake 3, since no story is necessary, but rather the icing on the cake for Unreal Tournament.

On balance, while the games are very obviously begging to be pitted against each other, it's not quite that clear - Quake 3 aims to offer a much tighter deathmatch-focused experience, while UT has a bit of a broader scope with a different style of gameplay thanks to the weapons. If we have to make them fight, though, UT is my pick for the winner.

FINAL RATING: Unreal Tournament might be my favourite of the two, but Quake 3 Arena is still another blast of insane fast-paced fun. Anyone who bought both games back in 1999 couldn't go wrong. 4 Gib Clouds out of 5.



THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM QUOTE: