what is the first FPS you have ever played?

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At the time I didn't even know there were shooters for the N64. I didn't have the same understanding of games I do now. I was just a kid. When my dad asked me if I wanted to rent Oracle of Seasons or Oracle of Ages for my handheld console I couldn't make a decision because I had such limited knowledge of games. I was only 8 when those games came out. I would've been 4 years old when goldeneye came out. I don't even think my parents would've let me play a shooter between the ages of 4 and 8 anyway.

The only reason I played frontline is that I bought it as a used game when I was a little bit older. I think I was 13. By that age I was more knowledgeable and/or more decisive and I could walk into a game store and pick out a new or used game.

There was some sort of D&D style game that was first-person... You'd move through the dungeon with the 4 members of your party and get close to your enemy, then click the weapon icons for each party member - the two front members could use melee while the back two use bows or spells.

Oh yeah - Eye of the Beholder!


I don't remember playing ANY 1st-person shooters with my Tandy1000, they all came in my 386/VGA days with SoundBlaster, Roland MT-32, Sound Canvas, then SC-88 Pro. I always had the best gaming music of all my friends.

Notable FPS experiences:
Wolf3D, Doom, Wing Commander 1 & 2, Mechwarrior2, Descent (1st live graphical multiplayer) Wing Commander 3 & 4 (which loaded so slowly I had to upgrade my hard drive controller to a caching one - it reduced level loading from ~30mins to only 2!)
the godly Unreal & Wing Commander Prophecy (with the amazing new 3DFX accelerator!) and the amazing Half-Life (nVidia TNT with amazing 32-bit colour!)

The original Medal of Honor. PS1. Was too young to get anywhere on it. Then Counter-Strike for Xbox, which was completely playable since there was no campaign or anything. If you consider Metal Gear one, (since an important part is aiming in first person) then MGS2 came 3rd. Then Medal of Honor: Frontline for PS2. Was still young when that came out, but I was pretty good at it actually. Somewhere between those 4 I also played some demos.

"Zero Tolerance" on sega genesis/megadrive. I cringe to think of how many hours I spent cutting down thousands of identical, poorly animated enemies.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2OsH4ZuAlI[/youtube]

Doom. I had been waiting for something like it ever since seeing a very basic wire frame 3D maze on a Sharp desktop computer in around 1981 in school. I had the far fetched (for the time) idea of somehow a using computer to create a world to explore.

does anyone remember 'corporation' on the megadrive/genesis? It was a brave early attempt at 3d graphics on the system.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SXMcTWo8OE[/youtube]

Ah, I wanted this so bad as a kid. I learned about it from gaming magazines, but it could never be found.

Wolfenstein 3D

I remember when those graphics were top-of-the-line, as well.

Wolfenstein 3D. I played many early first person shooter games such as Doom and Quake as well. But I didn't really like them much. The first FPS I played that I really enjoyed was Descent for PC, but that wasn't a traditional FPS as it had movement on multiple axes.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtgepMDikeU[/youtube]

Ah, Descent, what vertigo inducing fun that was. I remember messing around with guided missiles in 2, trying to clear entire levels from one spot. On the same note has anyone played Terminal Velocity? That was one of the first games I've ever played, and I don't think it counts as an FPS as much as it does a flight sim.

On topic: Blake Stone was my first 'traditional' FPS, and I barely have any memories of it. Only of cheating to find weapons and mess around with them. Second, and most favorite? Metroid Prime, for various reasons.

I still do not consider Metroid Prime to be a first person shooter, despite being a fantastic game. FPS implies a certain style of gameplay, Metroid Prime is as much a First-Person Shooter as Super Mario Bros. is an RPG. Metroid Prime falls closer in line with action-adventure games like The Legend of Zelda.

I get that approach, although I don't know how Super Mario Bros as an RPG makes a good comparison. I'd say more Metroid Prime is to the FPS genre as Legend of Zelda is to the hack-and-slash genre, both containing similarities in perspectives/mechanics to those genres, but entirely different intention/spirit of play which place them into action-adventure.

I suppose in that case Halo would be my second played FPS. (Big time gap between Blake Stone and Halo. I missed out on a large section of good FPSs early on, I know )

The argument is that people call Metroid Prime an FPS because its in first person and you shoot things, thus the counter argument of Super Mario Bros. has you play the role of Mario so is it a role-playing game? Not all genre names should be taken literally when they are that generic. Technically you could make a turn-based strategy game that is played entirely in first-person and features guns, but it wouldn't be an FPS even if the screenshots looked like it.

Metroid Prime follows closer to the Adventure formula of exploration, item collection, and puzzle solving as major gameplay elements for advancing rather than focusing on overcoming combat scenarios to advance the story. They are there however, but its not the main focus of the game. Plus with the lock-on aiming it doesn't feel like an FPS. Like I said though, still a fantastic game. One of my favorite games of all time right alongside Super Metroid.

Mine was Star Wars: Dark Forces.

return to castle wolfenstein on PC

It was Gloom, for the Amiga 1200.