Care for ketchup?

Weapon Drops are short, sharp homilies to new, old and upcoming FPS weapons. If it blows shit away plenty good (and sometimes even if it doesn’t), you’ll find a corresponding entry here.

There’s a certain psychology to playing a survival horror game. It’s not enough merely to kill your foes – you have to truly butcher them, dispose of them in a manner vastly more unpleasant than the manner in which they might dispose of you, and thus in some way “cancel out” their scariness.

Good workmen shouldn’t blame their tools, but not every weapon is up to the task. Pistols are like little ice picks upon the alpine cliff of a zombie’s horribleness. Shotguns are agreeably messy, but it’s over in seconds. Sniper rifles are far too detached. Chainsaws though? Chainsaws fit the bill nicely…

Unlike most digital homages to Bruce Campbell’s spine-severer of choice, Left 4 Dead 2’s chainsaws actually have drawbacks. In a game which makes such tactical play of audio, brandishing a noisy internal combustion engine isn’t always the wisest move. You might have marginally more chance of taking down a Witch up close, but you’ll be less likely to detect the eerie little vocal sample which heralds her presence.

These home improvement tools cum massacring implements also take a few seconds to start up, so don’t swap to one when there’s a Charger inches from your nose. Although if you pay close (well, closer attention) you’ll notice that good old Valve has “accidentally” built in a work-around – melee attack while hefting the ’saw to skip the warm-up period.

Best used when defending a doorway or other chokepoint. Just hold down the trigger/button, sit back and watch the guts spatter till the fuel runs out.

Video tutorial below. Review this week.

Got a gun, machete, shark-crossbow hybrid or other weapon you’d like to see featured? Let us know. Thanks to John Walker over at RPB for the pic.

1. Weapon Drop: the sticky grenade Stick around....

The once populous combat arena of Winter 2009 is an echoing shell. A few notable action franchises still circle in the shadows, IPs like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Pandemic’s plucky original The Saboteur, but the vast majority have migrated to the over-subscribed stomping grounds of Spring 2010. There in the centre of the unspoiled, uncontested sand stands the usurper, M16 dangling absently from one hand. Despite contentious server support and pricing decisions, Modern Warfare 2 seems to have won the struggle for Christmas revenue before it even begins.

But has it? There are inhuman shrieks from the auditorium, a confused surge of rotting bodies against the barricades. Left 4 Dead 2 has had its own battles to fight on the road to release, against Australian ratings boards, disgruntled fans and over-sensitive US newspapers, and the Infected are in no mood for further upset.

The face-off between Valve’s necrotic B-movie homage and the military shooter’s military shooter turns on more than their simply being released a week apart: the two games are in most respects polar opposites. So which one should you be taking home with you (or at least, which one should you be taking home first) come mid-November? Let the tournament begin…

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Review It's the biggest release of the year. Will it get the biggest score? FPS Gamer's Kristan Reed takes on Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2....
2. Battlefield team play “has always been deeper”, says DICE producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson says other multiplayer shooters are "still actually in team deathmatch mode", fail to nurture real teamwork....
3. Opinion: MW2’s genius shouldn’t blind us to controversies Price hiking, airport massacres, Activision's miserly attitude to review code - Modern Warfare 2 has a fair few blotches on its mark sheet. FPS Gamer takes stock....

"Can you smell burning?"

As the title pretty bloody obviously implies, Weapon Drops are short, sharp homilies to new, old and upcoming FPS weapons. If it blows shit away plenty good (and sometimes even if it doesn’t), you’ll find a corresponding entry here.

Halo is remembered for a lot of reasons. FPS Gamer history buff Kristan Reed has been known to gibber about its “groundbreaking AI and dynamic combat system”, while others might talk fondly of upwardly curving vistas, chunky physics-enabled vehicles or the way Covenant buildings shatter like lumps of purple meringue when you fire a rocket at them.

For my part, it was all about the Covenant plasma grenade, or “sticky grenade”.

The sticky grenade’s triumphs are twofold. First off, this cloying variety of handheld explosive threw open the process of grenade-throwing to the unwashed masses. No longer would amateur grenadiers have to worry about accidentally lobbing the device straight between the victim’s legs, or glancing it off his shoulder, or bouncing it off the wall behind and straight back into their faces. By dousing the grenade in glowing alien glue, Bungie had “democratised” it, transforming the weapon from holy tool of the moderately autistic elite to something any damn fool could use if he was capable of leading a target.

Secondly and most importantly, the sticky grenade is designed to encourage sadism.

Think of the many times you, dear reader, have been plugged by one. Worlds live and die in the second or two between contact and detonation. There’s the shock of the gaseous blue ball hurtling towards your torso, the frenzied instant of self-scrutiny, the horrible realisation that the other player is back-pedalling like mad, the desperate attempt to salvage a little honour by suicide-bombing the bastard, and the gloomy sight of your own corpse doing its very best Superman impression.

Now swap roles, and recall the satisfaction of seeing exactly this torturous thought process running through the eyes of another.

Good old Covenant know-how. Here’s some footage of a sticky grenade specialist in action.

Got an implement of warfare you’d like featured? Let us know.

1. Weapon Drop: Left 4 Dead 2’s Chainsaw I came, I saw, I chainsawed......
2. Halo 3: the best of Forge Manny dips into the cream of Halo 3's user creations....

It’s a painful admission, but I was a late recruit to the guns ‘n’ ammo brigade. A shameless fantasy buff, most of my juvenile computer time was devoted to classic Middle-Earthly shareware RPGs like Spiderweb’s Exile series. On the console side, it was all about Sega, Sonic and the platformer at large.

But one day I got my hands on a simple 3D flight shooter, homely ancestor to the likes of G-Police. Curiosity piqued, I proceeded to delve into LucasArts’ Dark Forces, died frequently, learned the importance of looking up and fell for the genre hook, line and sinker.

There was a lot I’d missed – my first stab at Doom was on the GBA, for crying out loud! And there still is. Which is why it’s fortunate we have devastatingly well-informed people like Kristan Reed knocking around.

What Kristan doesn’t know about machine-gunning Nazi demons in the face isn’t worth knowing, and you certainly won’t be reading about it in the following, formidable, five-part FPS retrospective…

Part 1 deals with the birth of the beast way back in 1974, the gradual bulking up of home gaming technology over ensuing decades, and the paradigm-fragging arrival of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom in the early nineties.

Part 2 tackles the period 1996-7, with 3D graphics acceleration finding its footing, the Duke kicking ass and Quake storming the online scene.

Part 3 casts an eye over 1998-2000, which saw Valve announce its existence in spectacular style, while Epic threw down the gauntlet to id in the form of Unreal.

Part 4 covers 2001-2005, Valve’s ability to make lightning strike twice, the increasing centrality of the console (largely on Bungie’s account) as FPS platform, and World War 2’s revival in the name of online multiplayer.

Part 5, finally, takes us from 2006 to the present day, with Crytek holding a candle for PC gamers while PlayStation and Xbox advocates debate the merits of Halo 3, Killzone 2 and co, EA pushing into the free-to-play market and the Wii fumbling for a straight aim.

Hope that coffee’s still hot. You may turn over your exam papers… now.

- Edwin

1. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 4 2001-2005. The war between console and PC reaches its height, Valve excels itself, World War 2 becomes the setting of choice and Bungie gives birth to a big, helmeted baby....
2. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 1 The origins of the genre. Maze War, Castle Wolfenstein and (of course) Doom....
3. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 3 1998-2000. Epic and Valve hit the scene, online multiplayer explodes and important sub-genres begin to establish themselves....

The fifth and final part of Kristan’s epic retrospective.

2006 was, to say the least, a strange year for the FPS, with Microsoft’s determination to get the jump on its rivals in the next generation leaving the market in a state of flux. The highly successful release of the Xbox 360 the previous December had brought development of Xbox 1 titles to a grinding halt, with most publishers flocking to the upscaled Promised Land of next generation gaming.

The PS2 era wrapped up with a healthy dose of gun porn.

Nevertheless, the first few months brought the FPS crowd a few interesting ‘last gen’ console shooters. Criterion’s Black was a particularly timely reminder that, actually, the last gen still had legs. It proved that PS2 and Xbox could produce fantastic-looking shooters in the hands of a supremely talented console developer.

Elsewhere, Commandos Strike Force demonstrated that RTS brands don’t translate particularly well to first person, while the ex-Argonaut crew at Rocksteady put a promising arcadey spin on the genre with their super-violent swear fest, Urban Chaos: Riot Response – but few would have bet that the same team would return with a game as amazing as Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Tazer to the nipple. Even Batman would have winced.

Normal service was resumed in June with the PC release of Half-Life: Episode One, a download-only experiment which Valve initially hoped would usher in a new episodic age where four-hour slices of content emerged every six months. Although it reviewed well on release, time has been less kind to it, with most preferring the pace of the previous epics to this more frantic chain of action flashpoints.

At this point, episodic gaming was undoubtedly the Big Thing – a point underlined by the arrival of Ritual’s SiN: Episodes over Steam. Sadly, rather than heralding a bold new digital era, it failed to excite critics and flopped badly. No further episodes were released, despite nine being planned.

Dimensional portals were among Prey's USPs, but the reality was a little bland.

Of the remaining FPS releases that year, none stand out as classics, even if most promised that they would be. After an on-off development period of almost a decade, 3D Realms (with the help of Human Head) finally released Prey to mild acclaim, while Techland debuted the intriguing if system-sapping Wild West romp Call of Juarez on PC.

Undoubtedly the most hyped release of the year was Insomniac’s PS3 launch title, Resistance: Fall of Man. Hugely popular in the States, many European critics were less bowled over by its ‘Call of Duty with aliens’ gameplay and slightly underwhelming visuals.

No Gears-killer, but a perfectly respectable shooter in its own right.

Even less interesting was the actual Call of Duty 3, which Treyarch dragged into formulaic mediocrity; the developer also riled PC owners by withholding a version for the platform the franchise originated on. PC gamers could, at least, be content with a steady supply of exclusives in the shape of the futuristic multiplayer-oriented Battlefield 2142 and the flawed action-RPG/FPS gem that was Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, but in general, these were fairly lean times for mouse and keyboard marksmen.

1. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 4 2001-2005. The war between console and PC reaches its height, Valve excels itself, World War 2 becomes the setting of choice and Bungie gives birth to a big, helmeted baby....
2. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 3 1998-2000. Epic and Valve hit the scene, online multiplayer explodes and important sub-genres begin to establish themselves....
3. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 1 The origins of the genre. Maze War, Castle Wolfenstein and (of course) Doom....

The fourth part of Kristan’s epic retrospective.

2001 was a real turning point in the evolution of the FPS, with major developers starting to devote serious attention to consoles for the first time.

While most publishers and developers were content to commission console ports of successful PC titles, others bucked the trend by debuting titles on the new wave of living room hardware. Volition’s Red Faction hit PS2 to sizeable critical and commercial success in May of 2001, fully four months ahead of the PC version – a release pattern PC gamers would have to get used to.

Microsoft went even further than THQ when it bought Bungie Studios and made Halo: Combat Evolved exclusive to Xbox, prompting massive outcry among desktop shooter enthusiasts.

Here's Chiefy!

The system’s killer app at launch in November 2001, Halo introduced an entire generation of gamers to the genre, as well as tempting over a significant proportion of the console’s detractors – chiefly PC gamers still cherishing the belief that the joypad was an unworkable substitute for keyboard and mouse.

Halo’s influence on the genre cannot be overstated, largely thanks to its groundbreaking AI and dynamic combat system. It genuinely felt less scripted and predictable than competing titles, with breathtaking visuals, compelling narrative hooks and hugely addictive split screen multiplayer in the bargain, and scooped top marks across the board. Combat Evolved, indeed.

The early days of Halo multiplayer.

Despite all the attention elsewhere, the PC was still very much the proving ground for most titles in the genre, with high profile titles such as Clive Barker’s Undying, Tribes 2, Alien Vs Predator 2, Command & Conquer: Renegade, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Unreal Tournament 2003 remaining exclusive to the PC.

The latter, in particular, demonstrated that the PC was also still very much the proving ground for new tech, with Epic Games’ delightful Unreal Engine 2 the first major next gen engine of the decade by late 2002, boasting superior texturing alongside new ragdoll techniques.

1. Feature: The History of First-Person Shooters As FPS Gamer clears leather, Kristan Reed turns in the ultimate retrospective: the evolution of first-person shooting from Maze War to Modern Warfare 2....
2. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 3 1998-2000. Epic and Valve hit the scene, online multiplayer explodes and important sub-genres begin to establish themselves....
3. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 1 The origins of the genre. Maze War, Castle Wolfenstein and (of course) Doom....

The third part of Kristan’s epic retrospective.

1998 proved to be a watershed year for the First Person Shooter, with several present-day heavyweights making their hugely impressive debuts and bringing about a genre-wide shift in power.

The release of Epic Games’ long-awaited Unreal on PC in May of that year dovetailed perfectly with the emergence of 3Dfx’s awesome Voodoo 2 3D accelerator. Suddenly PC gamers (with deep pockets) were being treated to the kind of super-smooth, high resolution visuals that rivalled anything the arcade could offer at the time.

"Unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn..."

Epic’s ground-breaking Unreal tech provided gamers with more of everything. More sophisticated enemies, bigger and more architecturally intricate environments, as well as vastly improved texturing, lighting and particle effects. Also significant was that Unreal delivered sprawling outdoor areas: exploring those opulent environments set the game aside from the claustrophobic corridor shooters we’d long grown accustomed to.

Another landmark title followed later that in 1998 in the shape of Valve Software’s Half-Life. Released in November after two years in development, it single-handedly changed the single player FPS landscape forever. One of the first games to license id’s Quake engine tech, this sci-fi masterpiece was a stupendous opening salvo for Valve, blending great action with subtle, scripted narrative. It sired a long line of cinematic, story-driven videogames.

When your first game's Half-Life, you needn't bother making a second, really.

As with Unreal, Half-Life’s focus was very much on the single player experience. It embroiled players in a narrative tour de force like nothing before. The game’s approach was more subtle, more enigmatic and far more convincing thanks to superb characterisation, excellent voiceovers and a compelling premise which made the game, at times, feel every bit as absorbing as a classic sci-fi blockbuster.

It had no cutscenes, and no traditional levels as such: the game’s ‘chapters’ unfolded end to end in front of you. The action itself was enhanced by naturalistic AI techniques and a variety of settings. Its Quake-powered visuals were a touch behind the times, but in every sense that mattered it was years ahead.

1. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 4 2001-2005. The war between console and PC reaches its height, Valve excels itself, World War 2 becomes the setting of choice and Bungie gives birth to a big, helmeted baby....
2. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 2 1996-1997. The 3D acceleration era gets underway, online gaming is born, the mod scene grows and console shooting hits gold....
3. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 5 2006 to present. The "real" next-gen arrives, Crysis blows retinas, Bioshock goes deep, Left 4 Dead reinvents the co-op mode and Infinity Ward washes its hands of the 1940s....

Kristan’s epic retrospective leaves the starting blocks.

Casting back to the origins of the First Person Shooter, it’d be easy to recount id Software’s seminal achievements in the early 1990s, shout about Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, and completely disregard all the effort and experimentation that preceded them.

For the very first examples of first-person shooting, you have to go right back to 1974 – an era when most people were only just getting their first taste of videogaming via Spacewar and Pong, and the idea of owning your own computer or gaming console was a distant dream.

Maze War. Anyone else expecting David Bowie in a leprechaun suit?

Early that year, two ambitious programmers – Steve Colley and Jim Bowery – independently came up with what are widely regarded as the original First Person Shooters: Maze War and Spasim, respectively. Although their wireframe graphics and slow frame rates make them look extremely primitive even by early videogame standards, they nevertheless provided a few lucky students with a glimpse into an entertainment future that would engross millions.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the masses were to get their first taste of first person shooters – and even then, they often came in unfamiliar forms that made the most of the technological limitations of the hardware. Atari’s 3D tank-shooter Battlezone (1980) was arguably the first commercially successful first person shooter, and was one of many titles to take advantage of the vector graphics techniques popular at the start of the decade.

The mighty Battlezone in action.

Another interesting evolution of the first person shooter was also taking place in the light gun arena, which became progressively more popular in arcades as the 80s wore on. Once 3D techniques became more sophisticated and the hardware caught up with developer ambition, it was only a matter of time before more games built on the idea.

But as ambitious as some of these early efforts were, the time wasn’t right for first person shooting to blossom just yet. For most of the 1980s, free-roaming 3D engines were beyond the capabilities of the dominant 8-bit systems. The best of the bunch was Incentive’s incredible Freescape engine, used memorably in Driller (1987). That said, back then you’d have been lucky to move around in more than two frames per second on the average ZX Spectrum. The truth was that the required tech was still a long way off.

1. Feature: The History of First-Person Shooters As FPS Gamer clears leather, Kristan Reed turns in the ultimate retrospective: the evolution of first-person shooting from Maze War to Modern Warfare 2....
2. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 4 2001-2005. The war between console and PC reaches its height, Valve excels itself, World War 2 becomes the setting of choice and Bungie gives birth to a big, helmeted baby....
3. The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 5 2006 to present. The "real" next-gen arrives, Crysis blows retinas, Bioshock goes deep, Left 4 Dead reinvents the co-op mode and Infinity Ward washes its hands of the 1940s....