the first person shooter game thread (eew fps)

[Drum]

Been playing a bit of UT2004. Even playing alone this game is great.

Looking forward to Aliens vs Predator, hoping it isn't terrible.

[ColonelFatso]

Quake Live, tons of it.

More than 200 hours pumped in lifetime, still suck horribly. Don't suck as bad as I did at the start of those 200 hours though, so I'll keep at it. Reached the point where tier 2 players are pushovers but not the point where I can compete in tier 3 games.

[worstplayer]

How is Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising? I was very interested until the reviews came out and pointed out shoddy AI and whatnot. After checking out youtube vids I noticed they actually implemented bullet drop, so I'm slightly interested again.

Shoddy AI doesn't really describe how ridiculously stupid the bots are. They don't use grenades (or run away from them), don't use cover, medic refuses to heal anyone, etc. Also, enemies have x-ray vision and can see and shoot you through grass, smoke, and even bushes. Bullet drop is nice, but it doesn't do much for realism when it still takes 5-6 shots to kill an enemy.

[Damocles]

I rented OF2 and have, so far, found it quite fun. Basically, it plays like an updated Ghost Recon. The first ones, not GRAW. The AI is pretty bad, but still good for supressing fire. I'm not too thrilled about not being able to customize my loadout, but ACOGs and/or Chinese DM rifles are normally readily available.

My main gripe is how linear the stages actually are. You can flank to an extent, but there are often sub-objectives before the ones marked on your map. For instance: Hopping directly from one AT team to another is useless as there are unmarked AT teams along the main path. If you don't take them out, your allies are screwed.

They did improve upon the first GRs in that enemies with AK clones won't generally hit you at 300+ meters. ...at least if they're using irons.

[ExitPlanetDust]

I have obsessive bouts of Outtrigger (Dreamcast) madness about 3 or 4 times a year. Keyboard & Mouse are almost required. Damn, I wish I could find someone local to play.

[Ed Oscuro]

I still have yet to play some of the epic new mods out this year. I also forgot to vote in Moddb's yearly poll, damn. Research & Development is a classic that everybody with Ep 1 ought to play. Funny as hell at points too (though didn't like the endgame tons, as usual).

I tend to run through a lot of Half-Life mods on my laptop, and the 1920x1200 resolution is very nice for that. Things that come to mind:

After almost exactly one year, I picked up and finished the last games in the Timeline series. This is a trio of short mods by one guy encompass a story arc about time travel and alteration of timelines. The first one was very primitive and mazelike, but had a unique flair, as I remember. It introduced those pesky Nazis.

The next two are actually pretty good, with the second (Frozen or Iced Earth) being my favorite, and at points one of my favorite HL mods period. Though, as always, the original HL gameplay balance issues apply; there's not usually enough health to go around and this game didn't seem an exception. The puzzles are at points rather obtuse, and you're actually meant to take damage at points (my favorite was jumping into a pool that I knew would hurt me with only 1 hit point left - so I spent a half hour looking for anything I might have passed by earlier, only to discover that the way out was on the far side of a column in said pool, exactly where I suspected there might be an exit). It's a bit mindboggling to think about all I encountered in the second one. You start out in an outpost of a contemporary British Empire and lots of other stuff later on. You even get to play a bit on a luge track - thankfully, while it's hard to stay on the thing at points, it's not lethal. Rather ironic to think I was doing that around the time of the Olympics mess surrounding the Georgian luger's death. I didn't like the mod's use of slippery surfaces (if I'm thinking of the right one).

The third one has lots of mindfuck points; overall it's rather strange and some parts of it aren't great. It's got some good stuff but also quite a bit that didn't mesh with me, though there is an amazing homage to the classic George Pal 1960 classic "The Time Machine." Early on, I noticed that quite a few textures - notably posters - are from the old abandoned Quake III "Headhunters" project, which as far as I know was abandoned but whose textures have been available online for a long time at classic WAD (texture packs) sites like The Wadfather. It was good to see them being put to use. Anyway, on the whole this is a great series.

-------

Then I fooled around with some other mods: HL Invasion, which I'm still playing, actually, and which is decent with new weapons that generally work pretty well. Doesn't seem to be a must-play though.

Then there's "Escape from the Darkness," which seems to have been made by Germans. It's...ahhhh...well, putting aside what they did to Gordon Freeman in this one, and the amusement I had from a German guy voice acting an American drill sergeant type character, this mod is one of the most unsettling I have ever played. I say "unsettling" because it feels wrong. This mod from 2002 used a popular-at-the-time tactic of making extra detail for maps out of models. The result is that there are lots of invisible boxes around things that you can't get through, and on top of that they fucked up the geometry, so almost every angle in the terrain catches you. I am left with the strange feeling that I would rather not have known about this one, even though obviously a lot of work went into it. The ending is hilarious.

-------

Then there's the classic Swiss Cheese 2002 Halloween mod, commissioned by some game hosting community or something, and recently (-ish) remade for the Source Engine (I've played that version a bit, got hung up somewhere as I recall though). Very primitive: You start out on a street filled with cookie-cutter houses (everybody has the same model of TV and a lot of them are tuned to Michael Myers...love the Halloween theme tune), bad map construction (shine the flashlight around inside some of those houses and see how the light beam reacts), and Halloween-themed graphics just sprayed around the place. But going trick-or-treating with reskinned versions of the Half-Life scientists has gotta be worth something. Soon enough (and just as predicted), bad stuff starts happening and suddenly you're plunged into a bunch of crappy maps.

This mod takes the award for the worst version ever, in any format or medium that I'm aware, of the famed ride through the river Styx, ever. It's basically a couple square tunnels with a bit of water and a Viking longboat-like canoe that floats down it. There are NO enemies, no items, not even any spooky text messages, and no boatman - in fact there's no reason not to just jump out of the boat and swim at least six times faster right to the end, which is a skull of rock and rather comic appearance carved out of the wall.

All that being said, the final map / scene of the mod was a good reward. Too bad they try to whisk you out of there immediately (fixed that with a manual map load). Other voices on the mod: this dude loved it; then again people are always starved for good HL mods (of which this is really not one).

There's more where all that came from, I'm sure. I have yet more HL mods to finish up, and a couple FPSes left in the pipe.

-------

I also recently completed No One Lives Forever 1 & 2. Great games, generally pretty highly recommended. Not as amazing as some had led me to think, but I generally enjoyed them - mainly the story, of course. Wouldn't mind seeing another game in that series at all. I was pretty impressed by how good NOLF1 looked for a Lithtech engine title, though I have to admit I'm losing my sense of historicla perspective after all these HL mods. NOLF 2's first area was jaw-dropping and reminded me why I love 3D games - too bad the whole game wasn't just like that, but I will say that I loved most of the forced non-combat missions here, which is almost a first in my experience. NOLF1 was basically stealth or combat only but it was too frustrating at points to try to sneak so you just blasted your way through and put up with an alarm blaring for the whole mission: on the other hand, NOLF2 lets you have a bit of fun experiencing both play styles and not making it impossible to do either. Though, that being said: those ninja babes really get over on me.

-------

It's not a first-person shooter, but I spent a bit of today going through Myst Online: Uru Live again (at least the third time) - because the game is finally back online, woohoo! If you haven't played this great adventure game, get it now. Nothing washes the taste of ugly and stupid from the brain like the intelligent and beautiful game design of Uru. Granted, I hate (a little) some parts of the storyline, but even those (in the boxed version, which you'll experience if you play what's online now) can provoke a thought or two. It's great just to officially see the content released during the GameTap time, though it also is showing what difficulties Cyan has had making the format work. Strip away the community effort part (doing puzzles - i.e. baking pellets to feed algae and so increase light in a cavern) and the storyline aspect, and people are just left with the raw content of the new areas - which is all I care about, but it's easy to breeze through it, especially when community puzzles mean that most of us can turn our brains off and just follow directions, unfortunately.

If I had to rank everything in the thread by fun per dollar:

Uru (free, FREE!)
Timeline (again free and mostly fun, though requires Half-Life)
No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 (not free, at least not officially - ahem, but pretty fun - only lower than Timeline because at this point I'm counting HL as free).

[Jeneki]

Serious Sam HD is awesome.

I picked up the HD remake recently. Very nice. I'm remembering why I liked this game back in the day. In some of the later arena sections with wave attacks from all directions, it's sort of like a first-person Smash TV.

[Ed Oscuro]

Serious Sam HD is awesome.

I picked up the HD remake recently. Very nice. I'm remembering why I liked this game back in the day. In some of the later arena sections with wave attacks from all directions, it's sort of like a first-person Smash TV.

That reminds me that there's a mini-game in the Midway game "Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy" called "Gnomotron." It's not very good because you're trying to play Robotron from third person...with a weapon that you have to reload...ugh. Funny little poem that comes up beforehand though.

[John845]

Got MAG lately and I think the game is pretty brilliant. Defending as Valor on the 256 player mode Domination, feels like a war.

[KBZ]

92.5 hours into Killing Floor, oh jeebus.

[Ed Oscuro]

Recent stuff that I remember and which I really ought not to have played, but oh well I did:

Area 51: ~2005ish
Strong beginning (right up to the first elevator ride down) but then it turned into every other Midway Xbox-series-to-PC port (though it looks and plays better than the Suffering games, for whatever that's worth), and eventually forgot about all the characters after playing with the others for a while. There's only one gun useful for half the game, and as usual for a Midway game the collectibles bugged on me. Good writing on the conspiracy theory side though; obviously all baloney but there was just one spot where I knew I could prove it (they got some physics thing laughably wrong). I didn't realize how brave it was of the Air Force to sponsor this game a few years back...though I guess they justified it either for the lulz or because most of the military are fighting by their ideals and not part of a conspiracy.

BlackSite: Area 51: ~2007
This game seemed interesting because it promises to take you from Iraq to the US. The Unreal Engine 3 really makes it hard to believe this is only a couple years newer than the other game. This has the side effect of being nearly unplayable on my machine; for some reason there are these nice multiple-second pauses now and then in Unreal Engine 3 games, I find; in this case they seem to be more near the beginning of areas (possibly loading issues?) It uses that engine very well in spots, but obviously the budget and development time wasn't enough to stretch the content long enough. I got really sick of canyon walls being used as tile to box me in, and that starts at the very beginning of the game. There are a couple great moments, some humorous, a couple tense moments (the convenience store, of all things), a couple great-playing and looking battles, and lots of lousy ones, including the endgame.

I recall there are just six guns to carry:
*A surprisingly good pistol that should be ditched anyway (not powerful or fast enough to take on most enemies, and not enough ammo);
*Boring workhorse M4 that you quickly run out of ammo for, with ghetto 45 round taped magazines;
*a nearly worthless scattergun-like thing - more deadly than I thought but suffered from long between-shot times, reload, and not enough ammo, so probably actually equal with the pistol though you can kill a few more enemies with its 50 total shots than with the pistol's ~60;
*a sniper rifle with just 15 rounds total (i.e. you only get to take it when it's needed, though this isn't a bad thing as the zoom is a bit far for most situations and it's slow between shots);
*another worthless pulse rifle that you only get a couple places;
*a rocket launcher that you can only carry three rockets for and is useless most of the time;
*and then one generic model of machine gun used for everything: Iraqi sandbag positions / helicopter segments / HMMV (your squad members suck at shooting down homing projectiles so boot them out of the HMMV and take the gun over), a grenade; I think that covers it besides bashing things, which is very useful, or running them over with a Humvee, which often isn't). This game loves taking the gun and ammo you've hoarded and replacing it with a shit pistol at the beginning of the next area. You can only carry two weapons at a time, but as you often are about to run out of M4 ammunition this means that you won't want to carry something specialized. What use is there for a rocket launcher against ground-based foes, anyway? It's not bad weapon balance, to be sure, just a bit too "realistic." It would have been nice to always keep the pistol. Enemies tend to be fast alien types with nice imaginative models and texturing (a lot of them would feel pretty at home in Unreal Tournament 3), though there's not enough variety or really any semblance of AI or tactics with them; or boring human type enemies.

This game tries to be more subversive than the original Area 51 by being super serious and really criticizing the military - but it's not as great a social satire as the main dev, Harvey Smith, wanted to think (he was begging people to see how a particular scene was really "fucking subversive" - well okay, but please make the game not crap as well. This is the game that killed his career at Midway. A shame because there are some decent ideas floating around in here, but why do I feel Rainbow Six Vegas is more exciting?

Wolfenstein (3?) August 2009
I was very surprised how well it runs on my aging circa 2006 computer setup, while not looking completely dated (though I'm about done with the blotchy look of 360 generation bump mapping). 1600x1200 at 60fps very smoothly (except when triggering the shadow Veil world stuff, or recharging; I often think I notice a very slight slowdown when some full-screen effects occur, but the gameplay doesn't become jerky or unresponsive to me), and with decent physics. Unfortunately it meant that I must have spent 20 hours just bashing crates, chairs, tables, and wooden palettes mindlessly. The collecting marathon really wore me down; after spending a couple hours in areas just looking for shit I'd replay it and discover that each mission took only a few minutes to complete. The map and secrets design is very good in places; the rest of the game is unfortunately rather obnoxious.

Uneven difficulty is one problem: I like loading back into Downtown area and getting immediately blasted by a Scribe and tons of Nazis at close range, and then reloading to find them gone; there's also a guy with a rocket launcher that kept killing me because I forgot to look for him. Good for me that I liked using the MP40 and MP43 (especially scoped) well enough to carry me through the game. Since you have to pay for upgrades, you're scared to buy anything, but you have to wait to unlock most useful upgrades anyway. Lame as hell. Then most fun weapons either have ammunition found only rarely on heavy enemies, or in only one place in the "overworld," or only in the last handful of missions (like the Lamenfaust 44 or the Firething). Found all the Tomes of Power (which reminded me of happier days playing much better Raven Software games; they have literally been getting worse with each I've played), all the Intel, and close to all the gold though. Needed a bit of help on a couple Intel pieces and gold though. I didn't look at my final play time but it was probably slightly over 20 - without the collecting shit it would've been closer to five I think. You could add on another hour for boss battles, another two hours for futzing around in the multiplayer levels as much as is possible online (lame that there's no way to practice it; I wanted to blow up the vault door on Bank).

The multiplayer seems even more stripped down than Enemy Territory: The Medic and Engineer only get two choices of main weapon, which is ridiculous. There are Veil powers added, sure, but it seems to just be the Veil mode (looking around offline I didn't see how it was useful since there are no doors; I'm not sure how it works out) and just one "special" power you have to unlock. Blah. In this case the unlocks really do unbalance the game a bit because they make the weapons more effective. Why are these games getting worse every generation? Now if only we could get ahold of the code for Wolfenstein Classic on the iPhone...an automap sounds really good right now.

[Damocles]

I just finished up a Hardcore run in Dragon Rising. Overall, much more fun than on Normal. The end of mission 3 gave me issues as, even with an APC, the AI would almost always fall. Oddly enough, mission 9 wasn't the PITA I thought it would be. As it turns out you can drive a Hummer all the way to the spotters morter-free as long as they don't see you. Hummer flanking ftw.

Too bad about the stock loadouts.


Funny...Modern Warfare 2 and Fallout 3 should be here tomorrow. Excellent timing.

[Ed Oscuro]

I saw that Dragon Rising was cheap on Steam. No money at the moment but it's good to hear it's not complete crap. Anything like the older games? How much has it changed to "match the times?"

[Damocles]

I heard it described best by someone online who said "It's an excellent system that deserves a better game". The fundamentals are there, but little things drag it down. The system works beautifully when you're doing the missions "correctly".

It actually bears little resemblance to the original. Since you're on PC you should probably check out the Arma series. It's done by the chaps who did Cold War Crisis.

[captpain]

Yeah, ARMA 2 with ACE 2 is the real game for that genre....

[Ruldra]

What's the overall opinion about MAG? Is it worth buying?

[KBZ]

Picked up L4D1 a few days ago. Not really impressed. I haven't played L4D2 beyond the demo so I can't compare. However in comparison to Killing Floor there's no competition in my mind. Killing Floor seems much more clutch to me which is key in any survival horror game.

The ability to push your way out of a mob takes away from the horror aspect in L4D.

Defending any area is just impossible and everyone just seems to prefer grouping to crouch in a corner to fend off the zombies. What fun is that?

But hey you get to kill zombies in it so that's pretty cool right?

The use of weapons feels lame as well. Maybe more geared to consoles since there's little opportunity or need to aim. I often just seem to be spraying endlessly everywhere whereas I'd rather have a chance to pop off heads before I can be touched.

I read that L4D2 is more open flat spaces with little to no vertical game happening. If that's so then I imagine I'd be unhappy with it. Some of the maps in L4D1 are well made and the style of the game works well with close quarters fighting.

Still, it just can't offer me the excitement of a Wave 6-7 of KF-Office and KF-Biotics Lab on Hard or Suicidal.


Has anyone given AVP a try?

[Rob]

Don't think of Left 4 Dead as a survival horror game because it isn't. The only real sense of dread you might feel is on expert with other inexperienced players. Otherwise it's just fun to run through quickly and blast enemies like an arcade shooter. Versus obviously offers a better challenge than a campaign on normal or advanced and it's also fun to play as the infected.

From what little I've played of Killing Floor (non-gaming laptop can barely run it), it is cool but most like my least favorite parts of L4D - the camping finales. Sealing doors and taking out enemies as they funnel in.

If you really want to play L4D where headshots on zombie swarms matter, I think realism in L4D2 works with that. I still haven't cleared a single of those campaigns in expert, so I haven't bothered. The maps in 2 are structured similar to the first. The differences are some very slight alterations in layouts between plays and more variety in the finales (more emphasis on speed to counter the corner camping).

[KBZ]

Makes sense. I guess KF would be more in the DOOM school of things than L4D. And yeah I should have mentioned that playing as a smoker is possibly the best part of the game. Getting owned by one being the worst :p

[Khan]

One of the biggest draw backs to crouch and shoot strategy is it gets boring to huddle up in a corner and shoot aimlessly, in versus its alot harder to do but its still possible however in l4d2 they created the charger to stop players from huddling into tight spots and let me tell you that insta killing somone on dead center first level on the ledges theres just no better feeling, you can also insta kill them in the mall and smokers seem alot more potent in draggin people off ledges hehe all in all I have to say I really dug the improvements over the original l4d theres alot more ways in which to kill the survivors.

I really wish they would add a lobby leader kick feature I cannot tell you the amount of times ive seen a lobby get full and the idiot lobby leader go afk causing players to quit in frustration.

[KBZ]

playing a bit more, and found it's much more fun to exploit glitches in survival mode than anything else in the game. Suddenly it's a fun co-op puzzle solving game!

[Khan]

I just started playing Killing Floor myself, im not really enjoying it as much as I should be reason being its waaaaay to dark to see anything. I like to kill things but I really want to be see what im shooting at lol although that said the game does pull you in I was up till 3am playing it last night and have so far managed my char to level 2 sharp shooter and level 2 medic

the music is pretty sick its definantly gets me in the mood for some specimen killing! oh and the weapons do feel pretty nice however they need to fix that damn loading screen bug its getting annoying having to alt tab close progam then reload the game when you switch maps/servers.

[KBZ]

what bug is this? haven't run into it myself. I turned up the brightness a bit on my end. I think it's moreso the map designs

just noticed on Steam today that it costs about $2 more to buy Batman Arkham Aylum without Just Cause bundled with it. Can't I do without this crap?

[mesh control]

just downloaded the patch 1.01 for Battlefield Bad Company 2. It deleted my VIP status and my new code won't work either, what a disaster. I wish games didn't have to tack on all this DLC and give us a nice solid game.

*goes and plays Battlefield 1943*

[Ed Oscuro]

Oh god, Bet on Soldier is so bad. Even patched to 1.03 it's bad. Looks (mostly) nice, with competent character models and some very nice level looks and detail, but otherwise it's bad, bad, bad bad. I played Iron Storm a while back, and I can't believe they managed to make it even worse: same preachy bullshit as before but more of it, and add in too many horrible new things to list (from stupid "boss fights" to having to make constant trips to stations throughout the level to BUY YOUR AMMO to pretty crap gunplay. Enemies weave about but still seem pretty dumb, either rushing you with a horrible lackadaisical upright running animation, or standing in place while you plant some sniper rifle rounds in their head - any AI stuff just prolongs the pain, and while Engineers let you repair your ammo for free, they're not smart enough to repair themselves (or each other, I bet), but they also like running out from cover to engage enemies at range with a pistol (pistols can kill stuff in this game, but it's pretty inexcusable). I finished off two tanks (that had already been altered to my presence) in the third level by just going back up the cliff path above them and planting rocket after rocket (expensive) in them while they sat there completely immobile. I have the two expansions but I'm so very close to deleting everything. It's been a while since I played something so bad I couldn't bear to finish it...did I mention the game makes you BUY YOUR AMMO?

p.s. Just like Iron Storm, the game will kill off the protagonist at the very end; I don't know what the purpose of making a kill-everything shooter is and then say 'haha war is bad (except the making games about it part) also BUY YOUR AMMO'

A single shotgun shell: $7

[Enhasa]

I need some help please. I'm looking to get a new computer soon-ish, but for years I've only been able to play FPS on 360 so I'm mostly out of the loop. I used to be an FPS junkie, playing anything I could find, but gradually lost interest after Half-Life and the advent of the modern cinematic BS. The worst part now is integrating the story into the gameplay is actually far more annoying than cutscenes because you can't skip them. Watching FPS speedruns have to sit there through dialogue is just excruciating. I think this is the genre that has been most ruined by modern gaming actually.

So the question is what FPS in the last 10 years or what upcoming games would you recommend to someone whose favorite games are Descent, Serious Sam, and Quake? I don't care about realism or plot or whatever, just balanced and challenging shooting action. Old school stuff, like deathmatch instead of this team BS. (I heard some modern games don't even have deathmatch or circle strafing, wtf?) Thanks!

Oh yeah, there's some outer space game by the Future Crew benchmarking guys? Looks cool but I heard there's only one weapon or something? Don't know anything about it really. Sorry if this post comes off as trolling (I dunno if people here like modern style but it's really popular so odds are good) but I am pretty damn ignorant right now so forgive me.

[KBZ]

Good questions.

I'm more familiar with quake style play, and that seems to have left the mainstream some time ago. Oldskool deathmatch gameplay was made popular by its own community and is really kept alive to progress by the community. I'm thinking of twitch gameplay here, and I have to give it to warsow, nexuiz, and sauerbraten for the best modern representation of oldskool pc fps action. Unreal Tournament and Quake series seem to keep things going but you probably already know about them. Twitch gameplay has no place on the console it seems, so the market is moving further and further away from that. No worries though, the community seems to do a better job with the genre anyway.

[Ed Oscuro]

Well, there's Alien Arena, which runs on the Quake II engine! Free download so you ought to give it a shot. You should probably check out Unreal Tournament 3, Enhasa. It has a dumb story in SP, but you ought to try that mode anyway. Even if you don't try Half-Life 2 (whaa?) you ought to see if you can get a free copy of Half-Life 2 Deathmatch with a qualifying videocard or something (there was a long-running deal for that anyway); otherwise, all you need is some Source-engine game to be eligible to get that (so it wouldn't be a bad idea to finally plunk down a handful of dollars to see what all that noise about Half-Life 2 is about). Similarly you can get Deathmatch Classic, which does NOT look as impressive now as it did in 2003, but it's still a nice refresh of classic Quake deathmatch. Again you need Half-Life or something similar to qualify, I think. Left 4 Dead 1 was pretty fun, but I mainly played it offline (and that seems to be straying outside your "it has to be dumb" rules). Other than that, almost everything I've played lately has been "20 hours and done forever" so I probably won't be handing out many recommendations.

And that brings me to what I wasted time on this weekend.

Two well-known gaming titles, what can possibly go wrong?!

Well, there was Timeshift, which totally didn't live up to the original vision, or even what I had expected from playing the demo a couple years ago. I don't really blame the designers for it; there is a great interview on 1up which explains things a bit further. I would've enjoyed it a lot more without the "three weapons at a time" garbage that is all the rage these days, and they ought not to have bothered with the warehouse / munitions plant levels. Other than that, there's some real brilliance peeking through here; Sabre Interactive definitely had progressed a long way from Will Rock and I'm hopeful for their current project. Took a few days to complete, though it still ended up feeling short. Some really nice touches here and there, with some great set pieces that occasionally make fun playing, and the game has a somewhat unique take on the whole retro-futurism shtick. An appropriate choice after I had watched the 1995 version of Richard III which is very vaguely thematically similar (alternate-feeling 1930s, fascism in what we know as democratic societies, etc.) I think the futility of the game can be summed up with the multiplayer, which despite having oodles of options still feels tacked-on and uninspired due to the odd way the time powers are handled, and the 14 maps don't offer any variety over the game (they're all recognizable from the game). Unlike Duke Nukem Forever, the game didn't feel graphically dated by the time it came out despite having been made over from scratch, which is an achievement.

Another game I played the demo of a couple years ago (and had been waiting for since the late 90s) - Prey. Too much focus on the story (which I found insulting, at various points, to anybody and everybody) and not enough on the gameplay. The portals quickly became a way to make the usual "hunt the switch" gameplay make me crane my (virtual) neck all the time, too. Including time for dinner and who knows what else, this game took less than 8 hours start to finish (on the default difficulty, all that's available at the start). I had to look up a walkthrough at precisely one point, because even though I knew what to do I wasn't seeing the visual clue (actually, similar stuff happened in Timeshift). At least it's done. Nice spoken reference to DOOM in there though.

Edit: A bit in line with what Enhasa was talking about; I checked out the HeadHunters 3 mod for Quake III finally. Seems pretty good, though need to do something about that Quake III ugliness.

[Ruldra]

I borrowed MAG from a friend of mine and I'm enjoying it a lot. What's more surprising is that there's no lag at all, even though my connection sucks. Looks like this is what I'll play for the next couple of months.

[Mortificator]

So the question is what FPS in the last 10 years or what upcoming games would you recommend to someone whose favorite games are Descent, Serious Sam, and Quake?

This is a week late, but you might like Painkiller. There's a pretty detailed discussion of it earlier in the thread. If you put stock in Ed's and worstplayer's opinions (and you should), stay far away from the expansions/sequels/spin-offs, however.