FPS

Dreaming on E is a Cactus-inspired FPS platformer that's interesting, mostly in part to its ending. It's vague, frustrating, and has 3D graphics circa 1992. All five levels are ideas NAL had for FPSes that didn't have enough meat to make for full games, but stitched together produce a somewhat surreal experience -- which is no doubt why the title.

What's most remarkable about Gravity Bone is its sheer sense of style. From the bizarre cube-headed NPCs to the fuzzed-out interscene narrative with its "generic symbol" iconography to the cool bossa nova track of the first level, Gravity Bone is replete with well-conceived touches that reinforce its atmosphere, which is a strange combination of James Bond cool and sheer surrealism.

My problem with most cooperative FPS games is that they are not, well, cooperative. The mechanics of your average coop FPS are in fact setup to encourage players to act competitively. Infinite respawns and high-score lists mean most players are just charging ahead, trying to pick up all the ammo and shoot more monsters than everyone else, so that their name appears at the top of a list.

My idea of coop is taking your time before entering a room, communicating, and making sure no one on your team dies. I like to feel like I'm on an adventure with my buddies, overcoming challenges together. So imagine my joy when I stumbled upon a game that delivers just that, and gave me an excuse to play through Quake 2 again.

No, wait! Come back! I know its old, but Quake 2 is still a damn solid shooter from the good old days when a reload key was considered a bit flash. I'm not talking nostalgia here... go and dust off your old copy if you don't believe me. Thanks to freely available modern versions of the engine such as Quake2Max it's still pretty easy on the eyes too.

Vanilla Quake 2 coop has always been a blast. Back in 1998 I sat down with four other guys on a LAN and we tore through the entire game together in one five-hour sitting. Great stuff. We still look back on that Sunday afternoon with fond memories. Coop or Die is not whole new game. It just takes the same core gameplay and adds a bunch of new features that really tighten up the cooperative mode. Gone are infinite respawns, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit and wait until the next map if you screw up. If any player dies, you must restart the level. So suddenly there is a reason to protect your teammates and share resources. Gone too is the scoreboard. You get no extra recognition for storming ahead and getting all the kills. You succeed or fail as a team. Other neat features include the HUD upgrade that shows you the location and health of your teammates and a central server that stores a team's inventory and progress. Also worth mentioning is the death tracking, which creates corpses where players died in other sessions. Walk over them, and you get the players name and how they perished.

However, the feature that really sold me on this mod is challenge mode. As a masochistic gamer who likes to be, quite frankly, abused by Rogue-like games, I am always looking for new games to torture myself with. Put your Coop or Die profile into challenge mode and suddenly you have only one life, for the whole game. That’s right, Coop or Die doesn’t care if you and a friend have spent the last four hours playing; step on a grenade or fall off the wrong platform, and its back to Mission 1. N00b. Suddenly, this shit gets serious. Everyone is focused, even on the easy opening stages. As someone who worshiped at the altar of Quake in the nineties, doing Quake 2 without dying was something I knew I had to do before I could look myself in the mirror and call myself a gamer. And what would be the point of doing it without bragging rights? Thanks to the central server, players who prove themselves will be rewarded with recognition on the website and a number of shiny gold stars on their profile, depending on how many players they completed the game with.

I've watched the community grow steadily over the last year. Though the forums may seem quiet, there are plenty of active players. I've never had a problem finding a good team, and at least two Steam groups exist to help people organize sessions.

So, you think you are a Quake ninja? Think quicksave is what is making this great nation weak? Join me on Stroggos, I still have stars to collect.

N.B.: I have heard people having problems getting Coop or Die to work with the Steam version of Quake 2. So before you run off and purchase a Steam copy just to play this, check if it is going to work first!

Confronter is a little indie FPS developed, of all places, out of Pune, India. Using the Torque engine, it offers 3D graphics at a level of detail not often seen in indie projects, and reasonably smooth UI.

A polished elaboration of Narbaculur Drop, which was a 2006 IGF Student Showcase winner, as well as a finalist for the Slamdance Guerrilla Game Festival in the same year, Portal is a level-based puzzle game with the tropes of a conventional first-person shooter. The game is published by Valve as part of its "Orange Box," which also includes additional Half Life 2 material.

Sure, we all complain about the periodic gluts of movie licensed games that hit the market, but how often have you seen one based on a film by a director like Andrei Tarkovsky? This isn't exactly what you would call a mainstream inspiration or a quick cash-in opportunity. The film was made in 1979, and was in turn based on a short story by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

Playing Zombie Master I experienced an emotion I’d never felt before in a multiplayer game: Fear. Normally found exclusively in single-player games, fear requires a build up of atmosphere and level of immersion not normally found in the online FPS world. The game in question started like any other, a bunch of guys merrily laying into a horde of zombies with assorted firearms in a shooting gallery affair common to just about any online zombie game of the last ten years. There was even laughter as zombie ragdolls flew through the air. But slowly the humans went down, surrounded and outnumbered. Imperceptibly at first, things started getting claustrophobic. Ammunition became scarce. Finally, only two of us remained. We were surrounded. Then the guttural scream from the next room signified the death of my comrade who had 'just gone to look for ammo'. Suddenly I found myself alone in the darkness. A malignant intelligence was watching my every move, plotting my demise.... I felt scared.

When I was playing the original Command and Conquer, back in 1995, I remember thinking "wouldn't it be cool if all those tanks and soldiers that I'm controlling were real people, running round a 3D battlefield, playing in first person?" I wasn't the only one to think of this. Over the years a few other games have attempted to mix FPS with RTS, but they all seemed to be lacking something. None were on quite a big enough scale for me. Nobody tried to grab the idea and really run with it. But with Empires, after years of disappointment, I'm finally playing the game I dreamt of as a teenager.

Candy Mountain Massacre is interesting on two scores: Technology and imagery.

On the technology side, it's a Shockwave game, but it's true 3D, and remarkably good looking. Not Unreal-engine levels of "good looking," but maybe somewhere around the level of Quake II, which is actually pretty astonishing for a browser-playable game.

It's a first-person shooter, no bones about it; same verbs (run, jump, shoot), same powerups (health and ammo), same win conditions (blow up the bad guys real good). But what makes it different, and amusing, is the imagery.

Doing the Impossible

Today, first-person shooters take millions of dollars, years, and huge teams to develop, right? It's just impossible for a lone-wolf developer to create an FPS that's compelling.

Well, maybe not--if you concentrate on innovative gameplay instead of polygon count and particle effects. That's what Rune Trollebo has done.