the first person shooter game thread (eew fps)

[Edmond Dantes]

Is Hidden that one game where one of you plays as an invisible monster and the others are all soldiers hunting you?

I've always wanted to play that. The concept sounds awesome in and of itself.

...

@lilmanjs: Since my above reply was unclear (I was distracted by babysitting last night), I'll answer again. I didn't know Wolf4SDL could record movies. I'll look into that. If "SDL" means something else though, then the problem is simply I don't know about it.

[lilmanjs]

I guess its a source port, but really just a way to make the code run on modern systems. So if you use a program to record already wolf4sdl should handle it. One youtube channel I follow plays through SDL mods.

[Some-Mist]

Is Hidden that one game where one of you plays as an invisible monster and the others are all soldiers hunting you?

I've always wanted to play that. The concept sounds awesome in and of itself.

...

you bet ya. If you ever want to play, feel free to add me on steam and I could show you a thing or two
Steam name: scaringthekids
www.hidden-source.com

[Some-Mist]

bump for anyone who wants to play hidden tonight.

my avi also broke 100 views which is pretty exciting (lol). thanks for anyone that checked it out.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

Has anyone here played the Serious Sam games? I haven't played a lot of FPSes, but I played through Serious Sam 3 recently on hard, and I thought it was pretty intense. It starts kind of slow, but once it gets going a couple of levels in, it is madness all the way up until the end. It does a lot of great stuff with destructible cover and dust clouds that can obscure your vision, and it has great weapon and enemy variety.

Right now I've gone backwards and am playing through Serious Sam: The First Encounter. I miss the solid checkpoint structure of the third game (only having quicksaves to rely on is kind of a downer), but the original is pretty great too so far.

[Damocles]

Skip #2. I played through the complete collection of the first one on X-Box entirely on Serious mode. That is some crazy stuff.

[XoPachi]

Aside from the crap art style (though the guns were kickass), personally I loved SS2. 3 is the hardest in my opinion.

----

I got back into Blacklight and Tribes Ascend. @w@

[Ed Oscuro]

Just blasted my way through Dread Portal of Dissolution of Eternity (Rogue Entertainment's Quake mission pack) on my first try, after having tried and died a bunch of times months back. Only thing I did wrong was hitting the left switch...cheated my way to that secret. When you've got corners, shambly can't touch you! Oh, I guess I handicapped myself a bit by not picking up the quad at the level start.

[drauch]

I dig Sam. Agreed on the art style, but it's got the frantic action and hordes of baddies that I know and love. Been quite a few years since I've played them. 'Bout time I revisit!

[Acid King]

I've yet to play 2 or 3 but both the First and Second Encounters are excellent. I love the trampoline rooms in the second and the really wide open areas. The "Ahhhhhhhh!!!!" Scream of the suicide bombers will forever be etched in my memory.

[Damocles]

I've yet to play 2 or 3 but both the First and Second Encounters are excellent. I love the trampoline rooms in the second and the really wide open areas. The "Ahhhhhhhh!!!!" Scream of the suicide bombers will forever be etched in my memory.

The doppler effect generated by kamikaze bombers on trampolines is both terrifying and fucking hilarious.

[Some-Mist]

my buddy who I used to play hidden with back in 2007 asked for another avi as a belated bday gift but I didn't have any clips ready. I compiled this over two weeks but I told him I'll give it to him in a month. that'll allow me to get some better clips

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGqSjouikIA

and just for those who haven't played the game. the "hidden" (subject 617) isn't completely invisible. it looks like it's invisible in my clips, but ingame it looks a little more like this:

the iris (swat team) can also see the objects I'm throwing at them when I'm the hidden.

[Edmond Dantes]

Early-morning groggy me: "Someone got drunk while painting that back wall."

... Then I realized this game used a Predator-like invisibility effect.

[Ed Oscuro]

It's starting to be long enough since I played the two Elite Force games that I might miss important points (horrors! the post length might suffer as a result), but I believe my first take was correct. I am not sure that I've ever sat through both games from start to finish before, which is a bad sign...

Playing as the girl Alexandria Munro is a decidedly second-class experience, with an averted lesbian coming out moment (which was obviously just meant to be the canonically straight love interest's lines being intended for the male version) and various other reminders here and there reminding you that you're supposed to be playing as a man. Man, watch those thick brows wobble on the bitmap-swapping facial expressions! Raven's original Elite Force has some neat stuff going on, but it's not all fleshed out nearly as well as you'd expect. The Virtual Voyager thing was neat (and had a fair amount of extra content) but definitely wasn't worth a separate purchase. The bonus minigame plays the same way every time, and the holodeck "missions" are laughable, just like half-assed HoloBoothby. I think there's even a case of Shifty Box Screenshots, as the Expansion jewel case shows the one and only Satan's Robot in a place it can't be. The entirety of the rest of that mission is just headshot sniping against goons - they're basically palette swaps of common Scavenger enemies from the main game. In short, the extras don't play very well and aren't worth going back to a second time. There's also no sense of completion for doing all the funny little tasks the game sets out for you (the game also is rather bad about signposting what to do next in the Virtual Voyager mission, and likes to spawn stuff into areas you've already painstakingly searched).

The actual game is somewhat better, but it's basically just a collection of generic sci-fi small rooms, sometimes with Trek themes and characters! Difficulty was, at times, pretty stiff (on the hardest difficulty setting - Very Hard) yet I found things much more tolerable when I was able to set aside the "big" guns and just hand-phasered my way through as much as possible. I'm not a fan of the recharge speed because the maps were not exactly meant for the kind of hide-and-seek gameplay that could make the hand phaser more fun to play with, but as it was I was already backtracking constantly for health and ammunition. Bosses were jokes, and the story was dumb. The main thing that drove me nuts was the game's focus on "quick time events;" we will here define QTEs as "those surprise moments that one single scripted shot hitting a comrade will get them killed instantly, so the only thing you can do is physically get in the way and hope you die slower than your idiot teammate." The running theme of the game had some promise: "How can you be a good leader in achieving the mission while keeping your teammates alive?" but everything every character says is subverted by the game's very map-triggers-based gaming experience. The plot points about "using good judgment" are very misplaced in a game that requires memorization and also reckless abandon to sort out sticky situations. Shooting everything in sight is an excellent idea.

The game really likes to pound home that Tuvok is a dick, and (appropriately enough) the game ends with a laugh track at his expense. Next time on Seinfeld!

Also, you must kill some dudes in this for no reason. They're totally helpless and you can sneak by them, except that the magic door won't open until you flood the compartment they're in to send them to a nasty, presumably bone-melting death. Starfleet: When only senseless death will do!

Elite Force II trades gender ambiguities for constantly begging the question about Starfleet's ethics and making the main character a huge jerk. Even though you don't randomly melt the flesh off of people (well, discounting all the hand phaser use still...) I found it impossible to avoid thinking about how idiotic the Prime Directive is and many other things besides. Also, now safely-straight MunroeMan has to make tough decisions about which of the women he will whisper angry sweet nothings to about revenge and whatnot. It's like the comical loudmouth Biessman from the first game actually is still alive and wearing Munro's face now. Sadly, some advertising material for the game showed not two but three Starfleet girlz in come-hither-with-phaserz poses, so I am greatly disappointed that you can only get your mack on with two (only one of those depicted). You don't feel good about any of it. If you go for the "exotic alien girl" (i.e.: no fish face like the other alien race, and totally awesome glowy blue eyes dude!1) you feel like a scummy cheater dropping the first woman who has obviously had a relationship with you since the first game - and if you go with her, Munro still finds rather childish things to say even when you choose the right options. I would rather not talk about this, but it's a big part of the game. It's not just that, though: Long-term relationships from the previous game aren't treated well here. Chell (the most memorable character in the original game aside from The Doctor and Neelix) not only loses his original, more-appropriate voice actor, but also much of his screen time. Austin Chang continues to be mysteriously akin to Tuvok despite supposedly being your best pal, and only Crazy Plant Lady, Klingon Chauvinist Korban, and Mysterious Sexy Romulan Spy Girl (Little Screen Time) give you any respite from the blandness. I just can't stop watching the bag of broken bricks that is Picard's moving mouth.

Good parts? Well, the Enterprise E is certainly uglier inside than Voyager was - It's got a very late '90s Chrysler PT Cruiser look about it, I think. I did find (with help) all the secrets - some of them are insane and you would have to be insane to guess them. Think "shoot the buttons in darkness in the right order," "deliberately go and try to open every door whose visual design marks it non-functional," or "stand on the transporter circles in the right order" insanity. I got to see the Enterprise's laundry room though!

Gameplay was basically more hand phaser use. There are some neat moments here though, and for moments where you have to babysit characters, you've got more in your favor: lifebars for friendlies (no insta-death buzzkills) and also easy exploits against dumb enemies that will ignore your friendly NPCs and try to chase you by running under an elevator, or stand under a box you've jumped onto. There's actually some great shit in here, and I even shook things up a bit by going to stun mode on the hand phaser for most of the Klingon starbase mission. Wow! I also found myself uncharacteristically digging the Attrexian starbase (think a mix of DOOM metal and Star Wars: Jedi Knight II aesthetics), even the sewers (with the fun-for-a-change box monster hunting puzzle). Things got better later on, with some nice changes of scenery here and there, including a cloak-and-dagger section on a Romulan base.

Things kind of come to a grinding halt when you meet some rather unexplainable flying alien bug commander enemy, which is extremely fast and will toast you in seconds - I hesitate to talk about "dumb luck" but this thing is just not any fun to deal with. I managed to defeat him in more or less the "right" way, albeit resorting to cheats just to get it over with, by targeting him for an orbital strike - which itself wasn't much fun because matching up the aimpoint with his careening selection box was very difficult. Good luck if you get to that point after having used up all your orbital strikes! Oh, and I finished him off with the hand phaser, just because the hand phaser is truly so much more convenient than these games' useless collections of shitty animated toys. Classic Trek design, can't beat it~

Overall, neither of these games is the best outing from these rather second-tier developers. Raven's effort is commendable but feels underproduced; Ritual's effort is more solid at points but has its own share of frustrations - its own "extras" aren't worth the effort. I've got a bit more of the second game to get through until the ending, and there's more secret items to find, but there's no reward in it - laughably enough, the first of these super special Secret Maps involves shooting a grand total of five (maybe just four?) bugs in a swamp shack, one other is straight-up unplayable, and the last maps don't have any gameplay at all, just self-congratulatory art-and-character museums instead of some more sorely needed "arcade style" action. But you can make Picard say "That's why I'm the Captain" repeatedly, so I guess that's a plus.

As luck would have it, then, Deep Space 9 got a game which strikes me as better overall in The Fallen, even though its "properly implemented" multiple characters probably play through substantially the same areas, despite not having original voice cast for many characters, and also despite having not really cared about that marketing bullet point of "explore Voyager / The Enterprise E in real-time! WOW" - though you can run around Deep Space 9 a bit and even see a tiny Cap'n Sisko in a fishtank.

Also, Tuvok is still a dick, as far as I can tell. *cue laugh track*

[Some-Mist]

Early-morning groggy me: "Someone got drunk while painting that back wall."

... Then I realized this game used a Predator-like invisibility effect.

lol - I can see how it would first appear that way.

the concept is crazy even till this day even though it's been out for so long.. especially since the "hidden" bends light which makes it very difficult to see. if you learn how to play the hidden well, it becomes much more easier to see it as the IRIS since you can predict where he's going to go.

[Mortificator]

Difficulty was, at times, pretty stiff (on the hardest difficulty setting - Very Hard) yet I found things much more tolerable when I was able to set aside the "big" guns and just hand-phasered my way through as much as possible. I'm not a fan of the recharge speed because the maps were not exactly meant for the kind of hide-and-seek gameplay that could make the hand phaser more fun to play with, but as it was I was already backtracking constantly for health and ammunition.

The setting made me a little more forgiving of the weapon imbalance than I might otherwise be, since phasers are the go-to weapon throughout Star Trek, and it's hard to think up a gun that'll do more damage to an enemy's body than TOTAL DISINTEGRATION. I'd usually keep the hand phaser out and use it on the first couple of enemies in an encounter, then switch to the phaser rifle (or disruptor, after you pick that up).

Of course, you need to use the ipod against the Borg, which is a cop-out. Imagine a Borg level where you have to be frugal and make the most of your shots before they adapt; it'd be tough to design, but worth it.

Something that amused me for a while on virtual Voyager was seeing how many crew members I could kill on various decks before being brought down. If you hold out for two long, you either automatically give up or just suddenly end up (are transported to?) the brig, where a surviving character will scold you like a naughty dog. Even reducing Neelix to his component molecules isn't worth full price, though. I was fortunate to happen upon this compilation when I was looking for Armada II, and for all its faults I think Elite Force ended up a more respectable FPS than the Armadas did as RTS.

[Ed Oscuro]

Well, I already did the full complement of damage by KILLING EVERYONE. No brig scene for committing total genocide on the cast of Voyager, just a cheap load back to your last autosave!

Elite Force's opening does take a stab at the "keep your shots" gameplay against the Borg, because you don't get the iMod right away. I think the second game allows you to play that way a bit, too. Unfortunately, other gameplay design ideas (scripted sequences, especially the annoying "quick time decisions" I mentioned) mean that you will need to toast Borg sooner or later; even without it, I don't see how you'd get through a bunch of Borg scripted to open fire on you without shooting back, unless your teammates were all set to be indestructible (which also hurts the game's immersion, when you notice it and start taking advantage of it).

It was pretty rare that I used anything but the hand phaser. The early Scav onslaught in the original game probably can be hand-phasered through with ease; I wanted to run up to the opposition and also use different weapons, in the vain hope of trying to keep a couple Voyager crew alive. A really prolonged fight like that would've been terrible using just the phaser, with no time to recharge (usually that gets eaten up sprinting here and there).

[Some-Mist]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6TXjGdhxQs

finished up the hidden avi. kept most of what I had. I think that's the real PewDiePie (that youtube celeb that makes basically 50k/month doing dumb stuff on youtube) I killed around the 2 minute mark - he has a buncha hidden video's that he's made himself.

[Blinge]

New update to Brutal Doom soon

It's... It's just..beautiful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn2J4Loe57g#t=167

[Xyga]

New update to Brutal Doom soon

It's... It's just..beautiful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn2J4Loe57g#t=167

WTF did I just watch ?

[BIL]

Looking buttery smooth(er) as expected from BD updates... and presentation-wise, goddamn, some of those new critical damage animations (particularly the Imp's) are vicious. I'd like a suitably feral desperation attack to go along with them, like the rifle/zombiemen's random sidearm pull. v19 feels so wild with their and Revenants' frequent refusals to just fucking die already.

I mostly just hope he cleans up the more egregious bugs in v19, some of which have survived multiple updates (to be fair they're about the only ones I can still consistently find). The big one is the random, unnervingly explosive instagib for socking/booting zombies' and imps' heads off. The glitch that causes Barons to st-st-st-stutter their way towards an offending zombie before they can perform that glorious melee fatality sucks too. Other than that, as a vanilla DOOM horse steroid regimen it's damn near perfect as-is.

[Edmond Dantes]

I found a copy of TekWar at Goodwill. Haven't installed it yet. What can I look forward to (besides Shatner)?

[BIL]

I don't know but I'm 99.9% certain it won't be as FPS as this:

[Ed Oscuro]

BTW, I finished up Blood and Cryptic Passage. I got sick of caring about the game and just went into Explore With Cheatz mode. The shareware episode was great - Farewell to Arms has a pretty great opening. But by the end I didn't care, and Cryptic Passage has a really rough opening. Cryptic Passage has some cool stuff later on, but again I found it hard to care.

Speaking of things, I'm having trouble thinking of any FPSes with enemies as annoying as Blood's. Gargoyles? Super annoying. Flying rodents, fish that always swim under you and bite you in the jimmies, spiders making more spiders? Super annoying! Dogs that light you on fire? Annoying! Enemies that can go ethereal and take multiple double-barreled blasts to take down (and don't seem particularly vulnerable to any other damage forms)? Annoying.

Dismembered hands that can appear anywhere and which end your game if they manage to touch you? Well, I can't think of any enemy in a FPS that's more annoying than those. Those things are like headcrabs, if headcrabs didn't have tank turning speeds and could run across the floor at human speeds, and end your game immediately.

I found a copy of TekWar at Goodwill. Haven't installed it yet. What can I look forward to (besides Shatner)?

Oh, wow. There's a handful of pretty interesting takes on retro-futuristic (yes, 1990s style buildings aren't really futuristic anymore) cityscapes, and some cool details.

But everything else is either obtuse or just plain bad.

The main problem you'll run into is that the game is exceptionally bad at telling you which of the subway stops you need to get off at in order to find your next stop. If you want to play the game "seriously," I'd still recommend you take a peek at the videos on YouTube of somebody playing the game. Usually the game drops you off at a subway stop so that you just ride it to the next stop, but not always; additionally, sometimes you have to go to yet another stop.

The second problem is that the areas themselves are mazelike, with essentially nothing of importance except one key or one target to take down. There's not a lot to do in the game but hunt for the objective.

Rent-a-cops are also great about joining in the fun with the bad guys, so it's very hard to please The Shat by not killing anyone, and I'm not sure that even using the stunner will placate him.

I also couldn't get the cutscenes to run with DosBox.

[BIL]

Sounds like... a shattered dream.



Wao, the hands are actually instant kills? I'd assumed back then (in my feral pre-internet youth) that there was some method I was overlooking. Tried a whole bunch of stuff to dislodge the buggers, up to and including auto-surgery via dynamite. It's probably due to some squirrely "save for later" reason that I've never FAQd it since. Awful if that's the case.

[Ed Oscuro]

According to this page, which appears to be reprinting the manual, you're supposed to "push it off."

I also tried a bunch of things. Nothing worked.

Fuck, Caleb's hands can go from blown-up and charred if he holds onto an aerosol can when it explodes, but survives, but he CAN'T kill the hands easily - which is nuts.

Now you've given me some ideas though.

Edit; OK, I'm foolish. Turns out it's pretty simple - sort of.

If a hand has just reached you (test this while crouching - you can find a hand in the first level of Dead Reckoning), pressing the Use key once will push it back.

If a hand has started chocking you for a while, you'll need to mash the button a bit. I'm not sure, but it seems kind of as if the amount the screen has dimmed influences how many button presses it takes to get it off.

Man, I almost liked it better having to treat them as run-ending obstacles. This is just a nuisance mechanic.

[drauch]

I love Blood's enemies. It's one game where you can never just chill the fuck out and always have to be on your toes. Can't even poke your head around the corner without some asshole shouting MIRRORMARKS AND SPEARBOOKS and taking you down 20 health from across the level. Love love loveeeeee it.

[BIL]

A mystery spanning decades of a man's life is now resolved ;-;7 Good to know there's some solution! Would be awful otherwise with how stealthy they are.

I think I tried drowning myself to shake 'em, too.

The monks' ravings and chantings are surpassed only by those diabolically gratifying howls of agony when you pop 'em. It's like *BOOM* "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Fuuuck, now I want to splice them into BDOOM. Well no I don't because classic DOOM zombie death sfx are sacrosanct, but I almost feel like it. And that's impressive!

edit: oh man... youtubed the first stage, and I'm still conditioned to expect a PC to crash whenever I hear the Monolith and GT splash sequences. >_< What other scars from the glory days of buying dollar CDRs from buddy at school may the darkness that lurks in our mind hold?! (np: THE DARKNESS THAT LURKS IN OUR MIND ♫)

[Ed Oscuro]

I love Blood's enemies. It's one game where you can never just chill the fuck out and always have to be on your toes. Can't even poke your head around the corner without some asshole shouting MIRRORMARKS AND SPEARBOOKS and taking you down 20 health from across the level. Love love loveeeeee it.

http://www.blood-wiki.org/index.php/Cultist_Language

But yeah, I wish more games ramped up the difficulty like this - or close to it. Nor much a fan of the dynamite physics, though...

I relied on the audio cue from the hands in order to get the jump on them. When you hear that, you'd better find something to climb up. Incidentally, when I just did my test on throwing off the choking hands (there, I spelled it right that time...sheesh) I noticed it run under and bounce a TNT barrel up into the air. Funny.

Zombies are no threat really - though it's tiring to try melee against the fat ones. The regular ones can just be jumped over most of the time.

The regular game really limits your ammo so that you must spend a fair amount of time picking up ammo and doling it out carefully. Cryptic Passage seemed to give lots of ammo, but playing on just the medium difficulty will do that. Playing seriously, I'd usually select the difficulty below Extra Crispy, though I am not sure if the highest difficulty level just increases enemy damage (OK) and enemy health (boring).

[Edmond Dantes]

Wao, the hands are actually instant kills?

No, they're not. I imagine Oscuro just didn't know you could force them off by repeatedly pressing the "Open Door/Interact with Object" key (spacebar by default, though I like to remap the keys).

I've never found the hands to be a major problem. One shotgun blast kills them, and also explosives are good for small things...

EDIT: Replied to this before reading the follow-up posts. Oh well.

But yeah, my solution has always been to blow the little fuckers to kingdom come, and there's usually a pattern to the kind of places they'll spawn from.