Nov 25

Actually, this post would be better titled “Things I Hate about people in First Person Shooters” because in multiplayer FPS games it’s people that cause all of the problems. I can break this down into three broad categories:

1. Campers & Snipers.
2. Cowards.
3. People who are crap at objective games.

I really don’t understand campers, I mean how much fun can it be sitting in the same few spots for the entire round just waiting for people to walk past? It shows a complete lack of skill and a pathetic desire to win at all costs, disregarding the enjoyment of all others – especially those on the same team. Snipers are even worse, these guys hole themselves up miles away from the action in hard to reach places and just picking people off, they’re both a subset of campers and subset of my next group – cowards.

As an example, I’ve been playing team deathmatches and domination (a.k.a. king of the hill) all night and have spend so much time stuck behind idiots that are cowering in doors or taking pathetic little pot-shots at the opposition. So many times have I been running towards a doorway only to have one of my teammates stop dead and completely block my exit, in about 6 or 7 times this evening such behaviour was directly responsible for my death. As I happen to be playing COD4 there’s no friendly fire but if there were I promise that I’d be a very unpopular guy by now as I instinctively go to melee anyone in my way.

But depspite the bitterness caused by the above two irritants, nothing comes close to how annoyed I get with the fact that 95% of people are crap at objective games. This is a problem I first noticed in Halo 2 where almost every capture the flag game was full of people who were aiming purely for high kill counts and nothing else. This sort of behaviour completely screws over any serious players as nobody will provide any decent support when you end up being the flag carrier. Tonight’s COD4 session was also typical of this pattern (as is every other session I’ve played), you’ll find that out of a team of 8 you’re lucky if you’ve got two other players who actively seek out objectives and/or will provide cover/supressing fire whilst you’re capturing objectives. I’m not sure why these people are the way they are, some are just simple – they clearly don’t understand the game as you’ll see them run with you to an objective and just keep on running (even when it’s easy points). Other people though probably fall into my first two categories and the rest must not be team players – I can only hope that natural selection catches up with them at some point.

Well, that concludes my little rant – time for bed now to meditate on the evening’s deathmatching, sweet dreams people, sweet dreams.

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: , , , ,

Nov 12

I was just posting in the Call of Duty 4 thread over on Red Rant and mentioned that I think COD4 deserves a spot in my Top 5 First Person Shooter games, that lead me to start wondering - what are my Top 5 FPS games?  It’s a tough call as it’s my favourite genre of video games so it’s like choosing between children, to make life easier I’ve limited this to the multiplayer (deathmatching) aspects of the genre.  Here goes…

  1. Red Faction 1 (PS2) – the geomodding was great and the game had a wicked pace.
  2. Unreal Tournament (PS2) – the first uber-fast run & gun FPS that I played on a console (loved the PC version too), foe a while it was in class of it’s own.
  3. Halo 1 (Xbox) – I know the sequel had Xbox Live but nothing ever beats the System Link games I used to play with a bunch of friends at the regular mini LAN Party events we use to have.
  4. Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360) – a recent release but one that feels instantly familiar yet adds all sorts of cool features to the genre (the Perks are brilliant).
  5. Ghost Recon Series (Xbox, PS2 Xbox 360, PS3) – much more tactical than all of the above but these games gave an immense scope for teamwork in the co-op modes.

One game many would expect to see on this list (and many would feel is conspicuous by it’s absence) is Perfect Dark, I didn’t own an N64 until a couple of years ago and so never played Perfect Dark back in it’s glory days.  Consequently when I tried to play it I found the stubby single-analog control method to be extremely odd and impossibly frustrating so I couldn’t be bothered to play any more.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: , , , , ,