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A Look At Shooters

Blog written by Ichi2 on May 19, 2008 at 07:47 PM | 2 Comments

So my long weekends have seen the pile of games I need to play increase while my wallet grows thinner and thinner. Some of these purchases include the issues of GameInformer that talks about Gears 2. This isn't what inspired me to do this post (although god do I want that game!) but a letter to GameInformer where a disgruntled and very uneducated gamer went on a tangent about how shooters are the worst thing ever and there isn't such a thing as innovation. This is where I think that since I have covered RPGs I should cover shooters to be fair.

Now I will tell you that I am a little biased on this topic since my favorite genre is in fact shooters but I will do my best.

I bristled when I first saw how this reader had decried that there was no innovation in shooters and how Halo sucked. No this guy was no SONY fanboy, just obviously a little uninformed. When it comes to First Person Shooters, Halo is the pinnacle of innovation in a sense. For anyone who can think that far back can you remember a good console shooter before Halo came out? No, for me at least, the controls were clunky, why the hell is x the button to shoot? I mean looking back now it is pretty obvious that the control scheme now basically adopted by most shooters should have been pretty obvious. There's a trigger on the controller, maybe that could be the button for shooting? It just makes too much sense I guess that and Halo was the first real gamble for a shooter to be on a console if you ask me.

Moving past Halo, there have been plenty of shooters that innovated the genre. Gears of War perfected the cover system and really gave a new level to the third person shooter. For christ's sake the cover system has been adopted into a Grand Theft Auto game! Bioshock incorporated a whole new way of story telling and brought it into the public eye. Mass Effect had a great mixture of RPG leveling and third person shooter combat. I know I am mainly talking about recent games but this generation of consoles is the first one I have really paid attention to, even though I have been around since the N64 and Ocarina of Time remains my all time favorite game.

Anyway, shooters always seem to evolve in some way in my eyes, RPGs not so much (go brag about the ring system in Lost Odyssey some where else!)

-Ichi