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Quite the hipster, aren't you? I bet you still think GoldenEye is a great game.
can't stand it. I hate James Bond with all my little black heart. I tried it, got bored, went back to Fallout 3. Plus, I can't stand any Nintendo games... with the glorious exception of 2D Castlevanias.
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You don't like that, you can keep on playing Doom all you want.
BUT I CAN'T! That's the problem! Every damn shooter is now a clone of Halo and it's "two guns means more tactical" nonsense, or GoW with its one-button-for-everything hideous controls/two full clips to drop a single enemy Mook.
The best shooters in my opinion:
Rainbow 6: Vegas 1 and 2 (but on "Realistic" difficulty) - best tactical shooters bar none. A cover mecahnic that works perfectly, guns that are effective, high enemy AI, lots of thinking needed to survive. Brilliant, brilliant games.
Splinter Cell: Conviction - meshes stealth and shooting perfectly. Lots of gadgets that are not game-winning in and of themselves, but fun and useful. Not one unnecessary gameplay feature.
Quake 2, 3 and 4 - perfectly balanced guns, imaginative enemies, relatively good-for-the-time AI (especially in 3), and stunning visuals. We can only render boxes? Fine: the enemies are all industrial cyborgs! The Strogg are still one of my favourite FPS enemies.
Doom 2 and 3 - like Quake but with more horror. Doom3 is less of a fun shooting game, but a really atmospheric experience.
Dead Space 2 - the precision shooting mechanic is superb, as well as the fact that the basic pistol/plasma cutter is the best gun in the game once you're good with it. Plus, the enemy AI is great in places.
Half-Life 2 - I'd have Half-Life on the list, but the Xen level is a turd that cannot be ignored. Half-Life 2 has the glory that is Ravenholm, a game sequence that is astonishing. There's also the antlion siege in Episode 2 which is the most awesome singe player experience I've ever had in a game ever. The music (Kelly bailey's "Vortal Combat") is the greatest song in any game ever.
Portal 1 and 2 - Both great games. Portal 1 funny. Portal 2 funny and horrifying, with a story that wouldn't work in any medium but gaming. The whole tragedy of GLADoS is just heratbreaking and sickening. Made more so when you find that Cave Johnson's actor (J.K. Simmons) wouldn't record some of the lines because they were too disturbing - and this is the man who played Vern Schillinger.
Hitman: all games after Contracts - perfect in every way. More guns than any other game, and the joy comes in completing every level without using one of them.
Mass Effect 2: loved the story of 1. game play was meh. Mass Effect 2 was a really solid shooting engine that happened to have a really interesting story attached to it.
Painkiller: because it's basically concentrated fun.
Star Wars: Battlefront 2 - If they made a 40K version of this, it would be The Greatest Game Ever. And you know I'm right.
Earth Defence Force: for the same reason as Painkiller.
There's a few others, but those are the big ones.
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The over arching story, the universe they've created, the ridiculous detail and the books are simply incredible.
Not for me. I have a tendency to skip cutscenes. If I want to watch a film, I'll watch a film. One of my big problems with GoW (aside from the one-button nonsense) was how utterly unsympathetic the "heroes" were. Marcus Fenix in particular is a big unlikable turd of a human being to me; I spent the whole game hoping they'd pull a COD4 and kill him, but no. I had to put up with his foul personality all the way through the game.
The books might be good, but the game universe just doesn;t interest me at all.
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If you want ridiculous shooters...I assume you played Bulletstorm last year?
Hated it. Ugly aesthetics, long, unskippable cutscenes, repellant main character whose defining trait of being an unlikable turd didn't endear him to me. Only able to carry a few guns, most of which weren't that interesting, "kill with skill" interesting concept, but used only to "unlock" ammunition, a companion (like that idiot Dom) who follows you around to do nothing more than block your path and insult you, a "sassy" (read: stupid, ugly, ignorant, unlikable female character), chldish swearing (the main villain's dialogue was the pits), the list goes on....
"Bulletstorm" was kind of a case study of Why I Hate Halo and Gears Of War.
Because of
[url]http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FollowTheLeader[/url]
what could have been a fun, silly, shooter, was instead po-faced, with a "gritty" (read: stupid, ugly, ignorant, unlikable) "hero". It had a single fun idea (the "kill with skill" system), but that was it.
I really, really hated that game.
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You know what the most fun I've ever had in a video game, ever, was? Four player co-op playthrough on Legendary in Halo. Five player Horde mode in GoW2.
I remember when gaming was four mates sat on a sofa, eating, drinking and laughing together at split screen action. Sat alone talking to disconnected voices? Not for me. I get why people like it. It just annoys me. I've tried the online games, and for me it holds as much appeal as... well, I can't even be bothered to finish that simile, because online gaming doesn't deserve it.