Morning Vent, 3 April 2010 (Nostalgia Edition)

 Angelina Jolie concentrates...

    No gaming last night; I didn't want to disturb Reibo, who's trying to fight off a head cold. Today's agenda is the Westchester County computer show. I've a got a list of stuff to pick up for Reibo. Hopefully, I won't screw it up.
    I've been working on an op-ed piece on what I'd like to see in the next Call of Duty game, both in the single player campaign and in multiplayer. It'll be basically a stream of consciousness bullet list of stuff which developers should and shouldn't do in the next game.
    I've been on a quest for the perfect FPS for over 10 years. Though I dabbled with Quake back in the day, I really got heavily into shooters with Half-life and Unreal Tournament. I played Half-life deathmatch a lot, but I became an addict when Team Fortress Classic came out, once playing for 16 hours straight, with only bathroom and coffee breaks.
    What made those shooters so good? Well, Half-life had (and still has) one of the best single player campaigns I've ever played. (It's eclipsed, IMO, only by the single player of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.) The enemy AI is absolutely stunning, even today. The Marine grunts in Half-life have been described as being the Ph.D.s of enemy NPCs. They retreat and cover their withdrawal with grenades; fire and maneuver to flank you. And, frankly, it's a well written game. There are moments in it which are just terrifying. ("The Pit", with the horrible tentacle monster, was incredibly scary.)

Fighting the Tentacle Monster

    See what I mean? The game was chock full of terrifying monsters. The game kinda lost me with jumping puzzles, since I've never liked those, but it's the best FPS of the 20th Century. 
    Unreal Tournament had the very best run 'n' gun FPS ever. Back when all I had was dial up, I played UT against the bots endlessly. Once Reibo and I set up a 2 PC LAN so we could play against the bots. It was absolutely awesome. Here's a YouTube gameplay vid of the Unreal Tournament GOTY edition on Deck 17. (It's in Spanish, BTW. It's extra cool for me to hear "Suck it!" in Spanish. )

Unreal Tournament 1999 on Deck17 (in Spanish)

     The bots in Unreal Tournment are uncanny. At the higher skill levels, they'll bitchslap you from one end of the map to the other. But you could adjust the stock UT bots to play a whole range of skill levels. You could adjust their play style to make them super-agressive or campy. You could download custom skins (including R-rated nude and semi-nude skins) to play against a variety of different characters from real life, movies, cartoons and other video games. Weapon UMODs (special modifiers which could change weapon skins and attributes) could be written and plugged in. I played against bots dressed up as porn star Asia Carrera and Star Wars baddie Darth Vader. Even Gordon Freeman and the Half-life grunts made guest appearances in Unreal Tournament matches. 
    The follow-ups to Half-life and Unreal Tournament have their good points. But they don't have the raw, unfiltered energy of the originals.