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[zadokallen]

The Legendary was aptly named because alongside of the usual beefing up of stats/combatant numbers it actually improves their AI. Now, I admit my adoration is a bit nostalgia tinged, but for AD 2001 the resulting gameplay was just from another planet. The need for resource juggling, every weapon having different important qualities, trying to plan a defense against the next wave/drop, and above all the emergent chaos when you managed to turn the tide with that last plasma grenade that got stickied to a lil` gnome who then panicked and ran amongst the Elites blowing the lot up were truly 10/10.

When I played it some years later it was of course much easier, since I knew all the tricks. But still. I played the 2/3 too and combat was still great, but story and design sorely lacked. Then stopped paying attention after Reach, it all went too MP oriented and later on Bungie left anyway.

As for the OP, seems you guys already mentioned most of the old uns. One personal Holy Grail was Jaguar`s Alien vs Predator, when it came out it was looking unreal, but also hardware was too rare in my parts. Got it emulated now but still haven`t played it - hoping maybe to somehow build a proper CRT system one of these days :)

[Schoq]

can you coop Halo 3 on PC yet?

[Cobralad]

speaking of halo. section 8 may be the most underrated modern shooter. Campaign is lackluster and servers may be dead forever, but playing conquest with bots on hardest is where its at.
its probably has the coolest fps character ever. You are a predator space marine who respawns by jumping fro the sky and when you run you go into run faster mode.

[quantumpotato]

There's about 20 people still playing Tremulous 1.1 .. most of them are pretty bad, so have fun on the Pub

[eyeliner]

I'd add Lifeforce Tenka.

[s0]

There's about 20 people still playing Tremulous 1.1 .. most of them are pretty bad, so have fun on the Pub

damn, i had already forgotten tremulous existed. RIP the golden age of fps mods.

[Diabetes Forecast]

CnC Renegade was an absolute blast to play online, and by far the best aspect was the remote C4.

See, it could attach to people and vehicles, and made for a really effective way to demolish enemy vehicles or base buildings when you had a team dogpile C4 onto an APC or humvee/buggy. The whole thing often could make or break entire matches if used right, and that's not even considering all the other crazy shit going on in the general play.
Sometimes matches would be a dead heat to the last few minutes. I remember a story where both teams had been crippled and were at a stalemate, however one team had managed to keep their mammoth tank alive and parked out front in safety. with engineers. A random prize box dropped that had an APC in it. The other team got real quiet, then suddenly started chanting 'booma booma' over and over. Out comes the APC screaming at the mammoth tank, and on the front was 8 or so C4 bombs. Driver bails at the last moment and triggers the bombs, killing himself and the mammoth tank in the process.
The match ended in stalemate, but everyone knew who REALLY won that round.

I should really start playing Renegade X again. it was super fun.

[Magurp244]

I never had much of an opportunity to play C&C Renegade multiplayer, though that sounds remarkably faithful to its RTS roots. Nothing like loading a pack of Engineers into an APC and wiping out the players base with a blow-out sale.

Kinda wish Renegades single player campaign wasn't exclusively for GDI though..

[Raptor85]

Renegade was an interesting game, it came around marketed as a primarily single player game but it's single player game sucked hardcore, it's multiplayer was actually REALLY fun but lacked maps. So much wasted potential in that game....

I just thought of another game too, though it's not a FPS exactly, as there's no real shooting (all the attacks are melee) but it IS first person action...Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld 2, good lord those games are overlooked so much, they're FANTASTIC first person action games AND amazing rpgs at the same time..and the first game pre-dates doom by a full YEAR! (1992!)  They had platforming, puzzles, friendly npc's, etc, things you didn't really see again until system shock and many not until FAR later.  Even to this day I don't think i've played a first person game that gave me such a feeling as exploration and adventure, and if anything the games that feel the most like the ultima underworld games are FROMsoft's soul's games + king's field. (especially king's field).  The similarities in the games are actually uncanny to the point where i wouldn't be surprised the ultima underworld series is what inspired fromsoft.

[Magurp244]

UW was actually released 2 months before even Wolfenstein 3D [1][2]. Origin and Looking Glass Studio's were ahead of their time in so many ways.

The original Planetside (circa 2001) I think managed to capture a lot of the potential Renegade had, many fond memories of mowing people down in a Magrider, their impotent rage sweet music to my ears.. The many daring ANT Run's to bases under seige to keep the base fuelled, or all the great times running as an infiltrator cross country with a Surge implant, gently kissing the unwary in the back with a fully loaded AMP pistol.

Planetside 2 isn't bad, but the gameplay isn't quite the same. I think Sony put PS1 up as F2P with some sort of micro transactions, but it was never really the same after they put in the BFR's...

[s0]

ultima underworld and system shock 1 (which ran on the same engine) were so ahead of their time that it took other games years to catch up. SS1 had audio logs and placeable automap markers, how long until those became standard features in 3D action games? And ultima underworld is one of the foundations of modern real-time rpgs along with dungeon master. i mean, elder scrolls pretty much started out as a bigger UUW clone, same interface and all. and considering the series' core mechanics haven't changed all that much over the years, skyrim players are still enjoying the legacy of UUW.

i think the reason why these games are sometimes overlooked is because most computers back then couldn't handle them, or so ive heard. this is the same problem that magic carpet had (another totally unique and amazing early "FPS" btw).

[Türbo Bröther]

There are many reasons why System Shock wasn't a breakaway hit but the most important one is that Doom had a shotgun, a mod based on the film Aliens and it ran on a 386. How can anything compete with that.

[Slowminder]

CnC Renegade was an absolute blast to play online, and by far the best aspect was the remote C4.

I've been playing it for a long time alone with bots. Very cool - especially when it comes to vehicles (NOD).
----
My TOP2 are from the same studio - PeopleCanFly. Painkiller (1st one) and Bulletstorm. Perfect violent shooters with almost no story, perfect graphics and awesome metal soundtrack.

[Raptor85]

i think the reason why these games are sometimes overlooked is because most computers back then couldn't handle them, or so ive heard. this is the same problem that magic carpet had (another totally unique and amazing early "FPS" btw).

oh man, i played the SHIT out of magic carpet back then, playing it in recent years i now know that the game was probably playing at about 80% speed for me but it didn't detract from the fun (you couldn't even really tell).  I don't really remember performance problems in UUW but then i didn't really play it until around 93/94

[s0]

magic carpet is one of the reasons why i will never hate peter molyneux despite his various blunders over the last 10+ years.

[Raptor85]

magic carpet is one of the reasons why i will never hate peter molyneux despite his various blunders over the last 10+ years.

are the other two dungeon keeper and theme park   Hell 5 years older or not i STILL like theme park more than rollercoaster tycoon.

though i have to say i thoroughly enjoyed black & white also after i figured the game out and realized how to skip cutscenes.

[Tuba]

There are many reasons why System Shock wasn't a breakaway hit but the most important one is that Doom had a shotgun, a mod based on the film Aliens and it ran on a 386. How can anything compete with that.

Let's not go there, truly can't compare anything to DOOM. Still playing Strife and trying to figure out why it feels so bland when compared to something like DOOM and it's pretty much just the level design. You never feel really lost in DOOM, Romero had 2 level design rules: Never make symmetric levels and always change the textures when you change heights. Strife doesn't follow those and you feel lost all the time, also, the pacing in DOOM is so good, the enemies are placed in a way that you never feel too overwhelmed or too bored. Can't say the same for Strife, you go from one extreme to the other very quickly.

Sorry, I get carried away when talking about DOOM...

As for System Shock, I tried to play SS2 recently and the game feels very complex. There's so much stuff to learn, so many different types of points that you have to manage, inventory management, hacking... it's very complex for an FPS. Not a bad game by all means but if you're looking just to have fun shooting stuff, not recommended. Bioshock streamlined most of that stuff and it's a much more "entertaining" game.

[Türbo Bröther]

I took the time to play through the Aliens mod after I posted yesterday. It's aged terribly but it still scratches the itch. It didn't matter back in nineteen ninety three or whenever, all we really wanted was a bunch of shitty maze levels that looked enough like the film that we could suspend our disbelief and blast a few monster closets worth of xenomorphs. It's definitely better than the one for Quake which looks primitive beyond belief which is the real reason that it got shut down, not because it was infringing on an ip but because it was shit. Fox saved us all.

As for System Shock, I tried to play SS2 recently and the game feels very complex. There's so much stuff to learn, so many different types of points that you have to manage, inventory management, hacking... it's very complex for an FPS. Not a bad game by all means but if you're looking just to have fun shooting stuff, not recommended. Bioshock streamlined most of that stuff and it's a much more "entertaining" game.

You can consider SS2 the "entertaining" game since even that isn't as complex as its forbearer. Even though in that there's no skill points, inventory management is easier and hacking is almost non-existent. You should consider it next time it goes on sale for dirt cheap and if it's too unwieldy to play you can just turn the combat difficulty all the way down which should leave you free to play it as a straight adventure game and not have to worry about getting ambushed by cyborgs. Or turn the puzzle difficulty right down and combat right up to play it as almost a pure first person shooter (an fps that controls like an old dungeon crawler that is).

[Magurp244]

I think another reason for Dooms success compared to UW and SS1 may have been due to the tight controls. Both UW and SS1's engine used a mouse cursor system that limited overall mobility in favor of better object interaction and inventory management, whereas Doom had straight reactive keyboard controls that allowed you to quite literally dodge bullets, strafe, and run circles around enemies. SS2 helped improve that abit with a mouse look mode, but clunky inventory management still hindered the action abit by having to switch between the two.

As for System Shock, I tried to play SS2 recently and the game feels very complex. There's so much stuff to learn, so many different types of points that you have to manage, inventory management, hacking... it's very complex for an FPS. Not a bad game by all means but if you're looking just to have fun shooting stuff, not recommended. Bioshock streamlined most of that stuff and it's a much more "entertaining" game.

The same developers who made Bioshock are the same ones who made SS2, which is fitting because Bioshock seems like a reskinned clone of SS2 in a lot of ways. Their not the developers of the original System Shock however, so if you get a chance you should check it out, or you could try waiting for the all too smexy remastered version.

[roxon]

Hi there,
Speaking about old FPS.. maybe it's now a old FPS shooter but it looks like Check the Project Warlock if you want to feel like playing hexen for the first time!