My First Person Shooter History

I used to hate first person shooters.

I consider Bioshock Infinite to be the best game of all time.

These two statements are a shocking contrast, yet, they also perfectly describe my journey into the world of first person shooters.  Like many, my very first FPS was Wolfenstine 3D.  This very first experience was pretty much just me trying taking five minutes to walk through that first door.  After that, I powered down the game, never to return.  Having gotten off to such a bad start, it was surprising that I never game up on the genre, but subsequent attempts have not endeared me to the first person perspective.  Hexen, the fantasy FPS hybrid, nearly make me puke with motion sickness and Decent was a confusing jumble of corridors going up, down, sideways, inside and out.

For a very, very long time, I hated first person shooters.  Which explains why I've never played Doom or Duke Nukem.  Or got into Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament.  Not that these last two would have made much difference, since multiplayer was never my thing.  You really can't toss a dead cat around without hitting a FPS, however, so there comes a time when I just had to go back.  My very last PC experimentation with the genre was Vampire:  The Masquarade.  That's when I figured out one reason why I hated first person shooters in the first place.  I hated mouse and keyboard controls.  It doesn't matter how much more accurate a mouse is compared to a pad, or how many keys a keyboard has comparied to a Dual Shock, I can never, ever, play PC games with the default controls.  This applies double to first person shooters.

But my console forays were rocky also, no doubt about that.  There was a period of time when I joined a group of like minded fellas and we played (on LAN) Xbox games like Halo and Castle Wolfenstein.  These were very fun times.  Yet, when I tried Halo as a single player experience, the whole enterprise fell apart.  I just couldn’t get into it.  It's not just Halo either.  I detested games like Half Life and it's sequel for which I passed on the PC to play on consoles.  These three games were just oh, so boring in the single player sphere.  To this day, it mystifies me how peple think Master Chief is a 'badass'.  He's not.  He's an idiot who left Cortana alone so she can get abducted and have the location of Earth compromised.  And don't get me started on that lifeless shell we call Gordan Freeman.  Not even the gravity gun in Half Life 2 can rescue that pointless adventure.

Yes, I hated first person shooters.  Even on consoles.

But one day, the light dawned on me.  And the game that finally opened my eyes was a shocking one.  It was Halo 3.  Everything clicked in that game.  Halo 3 itself wasn't the greatest.  But it was the first game where I understood how much fun it is to go running and gunning with just a hand holding a gun.  Unfortunately, the exact reason why this game broke my mold still eludes me.  However, I will always remember how Master Chief lept from the top of a high building to the back of a giant mech for which he proceeded to blow up from the inside.  In any case, I'm glad the streak finally broke, because after that, I went on a rampage of FPS gaming.  Battlefield Bad Company, Modern Warfare, Singularity, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Bioshock, Bulletstorm, Dishonored, Portal and Portal 2; I've played them all.  Even the RPG spin offs like Fallout 3, New Vegas and of course, Oblivion and Skyrim. 

Now, finally, the story comes to a head.  This time, with Bioshock Infinite.  This is absolutely the most memorable game I have ever played, and is absolutely perfect.  This is the Citizen Kane of video games.  The Mona Lisa of gaming.  The 'War and Peace' of interactive storytelling.  Bioshock Infinite is at once a game and a work of art.  It's story is as much a blockbuster as it is a metaphor.  The whole experience itself is like peeling back an onion.  The more you play, the deeper you go, the more you play.  It is perfection. 

And where would I be now, had I not finally opened myself to first person shooters?  Stuck in parallel universe.  A twilight zone in which the best game of all time would have passed me by.