A look back on a sad FPS history...

Have I always been playing the wrong games? Did I always come in at the tail end of a gaming fad? Were FPS' always this hard? Or did I just grow way to accustomed to auto-aiming?

I, like so many other people I'm sure, was introduced to the FPS genre through a little game called, DOOM. The game...not the crappy movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. (Let's just keep calling him "The Rock", by the way, you're not going to be the credible actor you always hoped to be Dwayne.) Doom was pretty amazing at the time, taking what worked best in Wolfenstein and amping it up by adding demons... Blasting a zombie/demon in the head at close range? UNHEARD of!

Sure, Doom was great. But it didn't have the all important multiplayer aspect. We would all have to wait a few years for that to finally happen. Playing FPS by yourself was alright, though. We'd all walk around a dimly lit hallway. Flying skull! Blast it! We open a pixelated door. Attack dog! Fragged. We enter a poorly designed lab. Nazis! No problem.

Many surefire hits(clones) followed. Quake, Duke Nukem, Half-Life...etc, etc... But for every Quake, there was a Heretic (which, to be fair, gave us all the option to look up and down in a FPS and control our inventory.) For every Half-Life, there was a Daikatana. Unfortunately, these were the games I was playing. Heretic took alot of my life... at least the AWFUL N64 sequel (Hexen) of it did.

I suffered for years, not having a computer of my own that would run such powerful games. Going to my friend's house to play Quake online (over dial-up!) was a common sight. In 1997, I finally got an N64. N64 was doing FPS! This was my ticket in! Doom 64? YES! Playing Doom 64.... not so great... The aforementioned Hexen? I can't even believe how much time I put into that game. It hurts my head when I think about it.

So here I am. In the prime years of the growing FPS genre. Playing Hexen. Playing Doom 64. By myself.

And then Goldeneye 007 on the N64 came out.

Talk about a revelation. This game took the FPS genre on home consoles and finally delivered something to talk about. Or to trash talk about as it were. Goldeneye parties in 1997 were standard. 10-12 people sitting a basement taking turns. Who has the Golden Gun this time? Time for a proximity mine game. (One step in the wrong direction with 20 proximities all around always made for a good time.) The single player mode was great, too. Adding stealth to a genre that usually depended on shooting first, asking questions later.

I don't think I played another FPS until 2000 when Perfect Dark was released. Taking Goldeneye and adding new weapons functions was all they needed. My love of FPS was reborn.

XIII was an underperforming, yet engrossing FPS that added a comic book feeling with cel-shading. Metroid Prime 1 & 2 took Metroid to a whole new level. Metroid Prime Hunters on Nintendo DS even had robust single player/multiplayer modes on a handheld. And, of course, Halo. Oh, Halo. Never owned you. But you sure added to my nerdiness.

I never played alot online. But recently, I acquired a 360. And I just had to have Perfect Dark Zero, even if it was almost 5 years old now (being a 360 launch title and all...) And I suddenly remembered why I don't BEAT FPS games usually.

I'm terrible at them. I was awesome on Goldeneye and Perfect Dark 64. But they had that all important AUTO-AIM. When I'm out in the field during an online Killcount level. I'm screwed. 5 Headshots in a row does no good to a man's ego.

But I can't stop. I know I'm bad, but with games like Modern Warfare 2, and Halo:Reach out or coming out, I just keep coming back. All I want is to not be last in a deathmatch. That's it. Is that too much to ask these days?

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