Where in the world is Adrian Shephard? Chell recently escaped into the surface world (and a thousand fan-fictions), Gordon Freeman’s return is more anticipated than Christ’s because gravity guns are more useful than divine grace, and Alyx Vance has now appeared in more internet fanart than the color purple, but Opposing Force’s marine hasn’t been seen since the G-Man stored him away like a half-eaten lunch. Despite a dozen years on the bench, he has a lot to teach these modern shooting whippersnappers. Starring in one of the best expansion packs ever made gives you authority. Even over men whose sole definition is “Has a gun and uses it.”

For a man with no voice, or face, he has a lot to say

Outsource the Expansequels

Valve make fantastic games because they know when not to do so. They handed Half-Life over to Gearbox Software and told them “Make an expansion pack for that.” Why? Because they were busy upgrading official versions of Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike. Oh, and making Half-Life 2. It turns out that when a company can make breakthrough games, they should make breakthrough games instead of sitting around milking past successes like a nostalgic farmer. So they let someone else make the guaranteed expansion while they got on with revolutionizing the genre.

Which took a very, very long time but was worth it

This may be the most important strategy in gaming development, so it’s a pity that other companies pretend it didn’t happen. Companies like Bungie are rewarded for brilliant games like Halo by being forced to make expansequels forever. Inventive geniuses restricted to “new” games which would barely count as DLC for the original. Protip: when your second sequel’s biggest selling point is five new abilities for the exact same game, that’s barely a new level. But it could be worse: with Modern Warfare Infinity Ward made most incredible war shooter in existence, twice, and got fired, sued, and sued again.

Tough Guys Can Shut Up

Alan Shephard continued the Valve trend of utterly silent protagonists, and it’s brilliant. Bespectacled physicist Gordon Freeman was a reaction against the blood-soaked marine stereotype, Chell keeps quiet because GlaDOS and Wheatley are busy being the best voice-work in any game ever, but Shephard is simply a guy with a gun out to kill things. A marine deployed in a fubared situation full of alien horrors? Back then he couldn’t have been more stereotypical of shooters if he was a bullet.

Nowadays he’d need steroids and a dose of gamma radiation to even count as average

Which made his silence golden. Because we would actually pay gold in order to shut some modern “heroes” up. Halo let its characters speak, and in Halo 3 it ended up literally interrupting the game with stupid annoying bursts of dialogue, reminding you that hey, maybe you as the tough man were meant to save the naked woman held hostage by the bad guys. In case that complicated motivation was beyond your understanding. Gears of War’s Dom redefined whining as more painful than being chainsawed in half, because that part of the game happens in multiplayer, is fun, and doesn’t make you wish for the death of spoken communication.

The head:neck ratio of unity really contributes to his emotional range

Shephard doesn’t feel the need to shout Plot Motivation For Dummies at us. He’s alive, he’s in a base which will change that, so he kills his way out. Done! In fact, anyone who doesn’t get that without the characters explaining it probably shouldn’t be allowed even pretend guns.

Love The Original

We really shouldn’t have to explain this one. Gearbox understood, embraced, and enjoyed everything that was good about the original. Even the changes were those of true fans instead of employed hirelings. They removed the Xen sections, because anyone who played the first game would do that, but included a cheeky corridor long section where you teleport to the horrible alien jumpy-world of infinite enemies, thinking “Damn,” then teleport right back to the complex!

Proof that even the best make mistakes, and First Person Jumping doesn’t work

The other change was one of respect to the Half-Life universe: the ill-fated Race X. Gearbox wanted to add new enemies without messing up the Valve continuity, and it turns out there’s a really easy way to do that in a plot about dimensional rifts. The extra enemies teleported in for a single sequel and were utterly defeated by Mr Shephard. So never mind gamers - Gordon Freeman could learn something from this guy. Thirteen years later and he’s still trying to clean up his own mess.

Then again, the Combine weren’t considerate enough to teleport in between twin emplaced machine gun nests

So let’s hear it for the smartest marine in shooter history. The only one smart enough to find himself in a hellish science-base and decide “I should try to get OUT of here.”

Valve are kings of the crossover, arming their characters with a crazier range of weapons than the Joker and Batman combined. TF2 gamers play with more fictional items than Harry Potter, and while other companies like Activision don’t just sue other companies far making similar games, but sue their own (ex)employees for making similar games, Valve promoted Monday Night Combat like it was their own work.

More murderous cyclopses than Greek mythology

What other games would we like to see on Steam events?

1. Serious Sam And Counter-Strike

Duke Nukem’s reclaimed the spotlight but Serious Sam is the thinking man’s not-thinking man. Mainly because he actually writes his own lines instead of stealing Evil Dead (one line is a reference, an entire script is copyright infringement.) If you ever want to terrify a Sam-player, just run at them screaming LOLOLOLOLOLOLLOLOOO! In fact, try doing that anyway. It’s a lot of fun.

No head and bombs for hands. Finally, an enemy who really would still attack after you’ve killed ten million of his mates!

The skull-free suicide-bombers are the perfect antidote to the professional CS server, where you’ll be informed that gaming is serious business and whatever you’re doing is noobier and gayer than a sonogrammed fetus looking disgusted to be inside a woman. They’ll also survive a lot longer than the average player – they’re the only thing in the first person world immune to AWP headshots, and the sheer frantic dashing of a horde of these things will shatter even the most professional team the first time it happens.

It’d be a hilarious custom mod, and even better as an admin tool. Someone’s screwing around but you don’t just want to kick him? LOLOLOLOLOLOL!

2. Doom with TF2

TF2 characters now employ more custom-created tools than MacGuyver, and unless you work in a sex shop they’re more fun to use on people as well. But the game is still missing the ultimate examplar of melee weaponry – something which would reclassify every TF2 server as a museum of modern mauling history.

The exact moment players first realised FPSes could trigger orgasm

As employed by Professor Williams, Head (Remover) of the Department of Chainsawlogy

Left 4 Dead 2 already understands this, but that’s because it is by definition “One of the best games ever, with improvements.”

3. Dead Rising 2 and Half Life 2

Dead Rising 2 is one of the greatest games ever made, and that’s with the flaws. Without them it would be the next stage of human evolution.

I have never seen anyone better prepared for anything.

Half-Life’s Gravity Gun is pretty much the only cool weapon not already in that game, and while it had a crowbar it was criminally, catastrophically un-combo-able. You also don’t even have to worry about game balance. While a gravity gun would break most shooter worlds harder than an armistice, Dead Rising has always been more fun and ludicrously unbalanced than a unicycling Sumo wrestler. This was a game which trusted you enough to give you a choice between a handbag or a spiked baseball bat, and fun enough that you’d try both.

Now imagine strapping a chainsaw to a crowbar and spinning the whole thing with a Gravity Gun. Just writing that has improved the health of everyone around me, because it repels the dead so hard we just became more alive.

4. Portal And Lemmings

We would have saved a full year of our childhoods.

In fact, put a portal gun in every title. If the players use it to skip parts, then those parts shouldn’t have been in your game!

Grenades! The exclamation mark is part of the proper spelling, because no noun has ever deserved one as much. This single usually-shouted word contains more warnings about the fragility of life, the urgent need for immediate action, pure excitement and sheer explosive force than ten self-help books and a thousand philosophy courses. It’s also much more useful, whether you’re faced with zombies or just trying not to waste your damn time in general. They’ve been essential part of blowing things up for centuries. Ever since man first thought “I really want to kill all those guys but they know that and won’t let me come over.”

They lead to far more arguments online than in the real world, because a real grenade’s entire function is to render the target incapable of discussion. We’ve looked over some of the most popular first person shooters to see how they deal with this most urgent of action-items.

Halo

Halo revolutionized first person shooting with three things. The first was the beautiful Warthog.

The first time suspension was sexier than suspenders.

The second was making grenades effective, which sounds like making steak delicious but had been screwed up by every other game in history. Even the incredible GoldenEye (which you can now replay on Half–Life servers!) included grenades as one of the regular weapons. Which was the problem. It meant you had to cycle through the weapons to get them and a situation where you have time to idly flick through your armory is the exact opposite of the time you need a grenade. Halo servers attached grenades two an always–on button, and – along with the regenerative shield – revolutionized console shooting combat forever.

Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 embraced grenades like a noble soldier in a crowded trench, and did far better out of the deal. It certainly lasted longer. Modern Warfare’s emphasis on realism unfortunately includes how grenades are utterly, utterly lethal. Every CoD expert has inbuilt reactions because of them – if you want to kill a Modern Warfare player, just sneak up behind them on the sidewalk and make that “tinkling” noise. They’ll automatically sprint into traffic.

Counter–Strike

The most contentious because Counter–Strike servers are the most popular, the most competitive, and more unlikely to change than Commandments carved in solid diamond and frozen in Carbonite.

Camper

The problem is that CS uses status–changing grenades, the annoying smoke and the appallingly annoying flashbang. It may be a real tool used against terrorists but that’s because we hate terrorists and don’t want them to have fun. Blindness breaks one of the fundamental rules of fun game design: removing control from the player and/or scrambling their input so their ability makes no difference.

Not fun, especially when you know there’s someone trying to shoot you in the head.

Team Fortress Classic

The genesis of truly classic class–based combat. The makers of Team Fortress Classic knew that variety was the spice of life. Unfortunately they didn’t know that “making up a bunch of different things” is to “game design” as “blowing up a quarry” is to “constructing a building.” Team Fortress Classic servers are fun, but about as balanced as Muhammad Ali versus Tom Thumb on a seesaw.

Worse interpersonal relationships than a Tila Tequila show

The grenades are a greater collection of flaws and cliches than American Idol auditions. The concussion and plague grenades annoy the target more than outright death, which at least doesn’t scramble their controls, while the worst offender is the Engineer’s EMP grenade. The damage done is proportional to the metal carried by the target, which sounds cool and involved the very first time you see it. The second time you realise “Doesn’t that mean Engies could one–hit kill Heavies at long range from any direction? And isn’t that more broken than Atlantis’s levees?”

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is the greatest upgrade in history. They took all the potential of TFC and made it actually happen, and the most important part was taking out all the unbalanced grenades…

… and turning them into part of the Dustbowl ecosystem.

A psychocycloptic part

The Demoman means all the great grenade tactics still work – indirect fire, anticipating enemy paths, targeting groups – without breaking the balance because the Demoman has a longer reload time and less close–range combat skill than a pregnant woman. Which doesn’t stop idiots who think “Charge forward screaming” is an acceptable tactic from complaining that he’s too powerful.

Left 4 Dead

You could discover a call–center full of Neo Nazis and it still wouldn’t be a more perfect place for grenades than a Left 4 Dead server. Most of the thrown weapons on L4D servers aren’t regular grenades, with the bile jar and the brilliantly Tankicidal molotov, but sometimes nothing but a beeping cylinder of explosive pipe–bomb death will do.

Explosive ex-zombie excellence

It’s also the most perfect world for these grenade-a-likes: huge hordes of enemies swarming without tactics, you need to blow a hole and advance instead of killing everything, and in a reversal of the real world your enemies are attracted to the noise explosives make.

Sniping is the core of PC shooting even if you call them all camping cowards who should be shot (at close range). The mouse means we can aim precisely or spray the street with equal ease, making it a major challenge for developers who have to reward skilled play without breaking the balance. Make “Murder from miles away” too easy and everyone’s head keeps exploding, which is counterintiutively boring, but make it too hard and you’ve got a load of idiotically invincible linebackers running around waving huge guns like crotch-substitutes at an orgy.

That’s their subconscious function anyway

Sniping is a vital element in shooter design (despite being the opposite of the word “vital” as in “to do with living”), and the recent fascination with realism makes even more important. Even if that’s a very special definition of “realism” which involves carrying ten tons of ammo and resurrecting from the dead, as long as you have lots of detailed shading on boringly repetitive guns when you do it. We’re looking at how some of the best multiplayer games deal with the Sniping Problem. Surprisingly few of them chose “run away” or “wear a helmet.”

NOTE: These aren’t the best sniping games (though some of them are).  They’re games that represent very different attitudes to shooting people from a mile away.

1. TF2

TF2 servers are better balanced than a Zen monk holding a Ming vase on a tight rope. Some cunning design decisions make the Sniper part of the most aggressive ecosystem outside of Mur-dorr, the Violence Planet, in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors-But-They’re-All-Guns. The usual problem with gaming snipers is that by definition they must carry a gun capable of instant kills. In real life this forces them to hole up somewhere for half of forever in the hope of their target passing by, but on a server there’s nothing to stop the sniping idiot running around shooting it like a ludicrously large six-shooter with bigger bullets.

Ideally a pistol shouldn’t be as long as the person holding it

But in TF2 our Australian friend can’t noscope. He needs to charge up a headshot for an instant kill, and the scope sticks him with tunnel vision more restrictive than right-wing earthworm. He can cripple an enemy advance by dropping the Heavy, or even better, blue-balling the Medic, but his back is wide open to anyone who can kill at closer range. Which is everyone else in the game. Spies are the natural predator but there’s nothing more fun than Scout-bashing a Sniper’s spine in.

Grevious Bodily Fun!

2. Counter-Strike

TF2 reduced the Sniper’s awesome kill power to balance the game.  Counter-strike servers take the exact opposite approach. They “balance” sniping in the same way capitalism “balances” being extremely rich. The AWP is the most lethal weapon in the history of gaming and has killed more players than Bowser’s spiked-flooring contractor. When asked “Doesn’t that mean that someone good with an AWP could kill everyone?”, CS answers “Yes. So get good with it!”

The cause of more electronic deaths than the MCP and Skynet combined.

But even the most awesome force in gaming history has an equal and opposite reaction. The AWP is an incredibly powerful and effective weapon, and the opposite is weak and ineffective whining. A full decade after the first headshot, players still complain that defending an objective by using a sniper rifle to pick off targets at long range - that is to say, using a sniper rifle to snipe - is in some way “cheap” or “camping.” If you want to run around all across the map go play a CP map. In the meantime, being shot through the head sucks. Buy a helmet.

3. Crysis

Crysis servers technically have a sniper attachment, in the same way “Meat is murder” PETA campaigners can technically be listened to - it’s far more effective (and fun!) to just run over and punch them.

Or punch other things at them!

Shooting people from four miles away is fine for frail fleshbags, but when you’re wearing a nanotech tank it’s not just hiding your light under a bushel, but sealing that bushel in concrete and dumping it in the North Sea. The single player campaign might manufacture a few artificially heavily-emplaced locations to force a headshot or two, but it’s usually faster - and always more fun - to sprint at them like a pissed off Flash who’s allowed to kill people.

4. Day of Defeat

Day of Defeat servers embrace the idea of fields of fire, making the sniper even more effective despite his being more of a furrow. Heavy machine gunners can suppress entire teams by blazing across an open street, which is what makes one man who can take him down a team player. The exact opposite of the sniper’s normal role.

I hereby rename this street Death Street!

Capture point maps make excellent use of this rock-paper-everything-else battle: the sniper can kill the gunner, but the gunner can kill everything, and the sniper has to watch out for an entire enemy team moving up under the suppressive fire. The central square battle on Donner is the first time you truly understand the phrase “Cover me!” In most games randomly spraying your machine gun is about as damaging as a camera flash, and less likely to even worry the enemy, but DODs heavy machine guns really can kill dozens of people in seconds. Like real machine guns.

Which is why taking them out is so important it’s even in the achievements.

5. Halo

Halo revolutionized console shooters (although the PC Halo servers are pretty fun as well), but that revolution was all about ending the importance of accuracy. After Master chief first marched through an enemy army and restored himself to full shields a few seconds later, health bars have been more endangered than bald polar bears.

You had to use things to heal? We were living like cavemen!

Console combat compensates for the inaccuracy of thumbsticks by turning into a grinding battle - every assault rifle is effectively a Pyro: hold the enemy in your sights for long enough and you’ll win, if he gets away he’s fine. While there are sniper rifles they’re included like the AOL homepage is included online - grudging relics of an older time and simply not very good.

He didn’t even notice that.

Parting Shot

What does all this tell us? We’ve only covered a fraction of the sniping games, barely mentioning the graphical joy of the ghillie suits in Modern Warfare or the ludicrous image of an Unreal Tournament player trying to hide, but the conclusion is clear: sniping is a PC player’s privilege, and it’s all kinds of fun.

User-created content is a complicated subject, with all manner of issues like profitability, piracy, distribution rights, liability, and various other words which are the exact opposite of fun.

Which is why we’ve broken it all down into one simple question:

It’s purely a question of corporate attitude, and any “issues” raised by that company are excuses because their corporate attitude is one that says “suckers” instead of “players”. Modifications are indisputably a good thing for gaming. The question of whether mods actually add anything to the player experience hasn’t just been answered, it’s been so answered it now reveals anyone who even asks it as either a non-gamer or a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. And at least the latter has an excuse for not knowing what they’re talking about.

Team Fortress and Counter-Strike both started off as modifications (for Quake and Half-Life respectively). Sorry, typo, I meant to say the two greatest FPS games in existence started as user-modifications. You could no more argue that mods are a “maybe” than you could claim the Sun is optional for life on Earth.

Smart companies take things like those and extend them into incredible new products. Team Fortress 2 and CS: Source servers are the most popular shooters online, and Valve regularly embarrasses every other company in the business with their sheer levels of sales and support based entirely on “providing great content for users, and letting them do that too.” It’s enough to make other developers ask themselves “Why the hell are we doing it our way?”

Like Modern Warfare. The first was an excellent online shooter with integrated Mod support. Modern Warfare 2 treated the user like a special needs student. They removed so many options you counted yourself lucky they still let you control the character. Tying to set up a server in ModWar2 gave you the strong impression the developers thought you were wearing a helmet.

The idea that modifications damage profits is ludicrous. Civ V took approximately infinity man-hours to make, and they’ve installed mod-support right from the first menu. No unpacking, no hacking your way through file trees, just telling the game “Hello lovely game that I bought, I would like to use you for fun things!” And the game goes “Great idea!”

You can tell somebody’s lying when people hide behind issues of “stability” and “customer satisfaction.” No company has ever failed to work out technical problems when there’s real money to be made, and unfortunately the opposite is also true: if they can make more by refusing to do something simple, that’s exactly what’ll happen. Player-made mods for popular games aren’t an abstract option, or some weird internet extra: they’re a simple binary indication of whether the company really cares about players or not.

Now we’ll look at which games don’t allow server mods. Or to put it another way: which Halo are you playing? It’s certainly not the original (unless you have a PC Halo server) despite how it that introduced the revolutionary - in fact now mandatory - shield mechanics for console shooters, or the grenade button (not so much an incredible innovation in that title but an incredible oversight in every game before that) Because the original Halo servers have been shut down (though you can still play on PC!) So has the Halo 2 support. So you’d better have bought 3. No, ODST. Sorry, Reach. Whichever they told you to buy most recently.

And people accept that! A strategically-mandated announcement “You don’t get to play anymore. It’s no longer worth OUR while to support this, so YOU don’t get to play this game you paid for - and clearly love because you’re still playing - anymore. Why not buy our sequel RIGHT NOW?”

Meanwhile, six years after release Half-Life 2 players can now now enjoy the cyberpunk class-combat of NeoTokyo, or the horror-movie hunting of The Hidden, the teamwork of Synergy and Follow Freeman, the insane Mad Max mayhem of D.I.P.R.I.P. and many more all from the same game.

Last year Microsoft made exciting noises about the ultimate PC vs Xbox battle.  This sounded great, and not just because it would give the idiotic Live For Windows platform a reason to exist (”So I have to run another layer of Microsoft over my Microsoft operating system so that my system can operate this Microsoft game?“)  The software had more layers a stack of metaphysical pancakes, but the chance to play Xbox-owning friends would have made it worthwhile.  But then the whole project was quietly killed.

Because the PC players loudly murdered the console gamers.

This is actually the first time anyone’s played conkers since videogames were invented

The Xbox has an excellent controller for arcade games, a good controller for third person movement, a decent controller for racing, a terrible controller for fighting games and a downright atrocious skill-amputator for First Person Shooters.  Everyone knows this, especially the programmers, which is why so many Xbox games come with lock-on.  Shooting with a thumbstick is like performing heart surgery on a unicycle - you can certainly learn to get good at this ridiculous skill, if you don’t mind a lot of deaths, but there’s absolutely no advantage.

Even mediocre PC players were able to crush the console masters, in the same way a decent college team could destroy the Saints if you amputated the experts’ hands.  Sure, some of the more spectacularly sporty Saints could learn to catch the ball between their stumps or maybe hold it in their mouth, but you just can’t compete with someone who’s able to spin 180 instantly instead of over the course of three seconds.

An Xbox player turns like a tired tank and all their games have changed to account for that: the average Gear of War can absorb more incoming fire than an artillery testing range to give him time to at least see his attacker.  Even expert players - pouncing from cover and flanking like pros - turn into a spastic shotgun-flailing competition when enemies get within three meters of each other.  The thumbstick does its best to compensate (allowing adjustable sensitivity and scaling the response as you bend the stick) but it’s like programming a supercomputer to translate dog barks back into English so they can work customer service - no matter how much you tweak the software, it won’t work because that’s not what it does.

There are mountain ranges which can take less damage.  And act better.  And honestly?   Better looking.

A mouse doesn’t turn like a construction crane - you can instantly aim at any point on the screen, enabling far faster responses, actual accuracy (a concept rendered almost unnecessary by Halo’s shields and Battle Rifles), and murderously fast games like Counter Strike and the original Modern Warfare.

Unfortunately, the Xbox is winning.  You can see the coding for consoles creeping through into cross-platform releases.  Horrifically underrated score-attack gun-racer The Club features mouse response more sensitive than a screaming Jerry Springer guest with covered in salt instead of skin, and an “instant turn” button.  That’s not for cool kills: it’s because turning with a thumbstick doesn’t just give enemies time to shoot you in the spine, but to romance it into running away with them.  And Mass Effect 2, where you have to turn the mouse response down to “novocaine” levels to stop spinning like a tazmanian devil on a gyroscope.

Despite its own controls this game was a ludicrous amount of fun

That these adaptations are inflicted on mouse-users is horrifying.  It’s like carving the wings off a Golden Eagle to better fit a kit to its back.

Even our ancient records remember this problem.  In the mists of time, Doom and Quake masters remember the ancient idiots of the “keyboard players,” lumbering targets doomed providing free points to anyone who bothered to fire at them.

So PC vs Xbox isn’t going to happen again - this embarrassing experiment in annihilation escaped into the wild only once.  Luckily it was Shadowrun, so no-one played it.

Let us never speak of this again.

The latest advertisement for the hottest game hits gametrailers, you hear about it on one of the dozen identical regurgitation sites on your feed list, load it up, click “Of course in HD you idiot machine” and immediately start drooling over something you can’t quite have instead of the dozen things you do.  I’m guilty a dozen times over, and only recently have I asked “What on Earth am I doing?”  Also: “What the hell is wrong with me?”

Gaming cosplay articles are where substandard gaming bloggers show how much they wish they worked on Maxim (For Men), or Poorly Constructed Sexual Metaphors By People Who’ve Never Been Involved In The Process (For Virgins). For every awesomely engineered Big Daddy there are ten thousand shots of Cammy’s ass described in terms which would make a horny chef blush, and every single one seems to think they’re the first to think of saying how they’d like to “Cannon Drill” it.

That’s why we’re looking at five fan-made efforts with nary a sex organ in sight. Which means we’re not only alone among cosplay collections, but may be unique among websites.

1. Amazing TF2

Ryan Crasmussen and Grep Peltz utterly utterly destroy Hollywood in a single shot, and despite holding a rocket launcher that refers to a camera. Movies can’t make game characters look good despite access to millions of dollars and Milla Jovovich (who can make orange plastic dungarees look amazing). Ryan and Grep managed it in their spare time.

You didn’t/won’t look this good on your wedding day.

The most important is the incredible photography work of Alex Tkatcheva: unlike everyone else on the internet, it’s nice to see some people understand there’s a reason professionals don’t use blurmatic cameraphones to share sights with the world..

This may be the first time in history anyone has happily exclaimed “Look at those grenades!”

2. Really Left 4 Dead

If these guys looked any realer I’d start headshotting hoodies on sight

Seattelite cinephiles, as well as sounding like they watch movies in space, are part of the mix making zombie production Night Zero. It’s as photorealistic as a comic can be because it’s actually real photos, shot on location (and more professionally than you’ve ever done anything) before being touched up for final release. The sign of a real creators, however, is how they don’t hide from other incredible products in the same field - they engage with them.

She’s now the obsessive fantasy of at least one person. Welcome to the internet.

They turned their talents to Left 4 Dead, recreating the ultimate zombie killing game in gritty detail and releasing the shots just to prove how good they are. That’s how you make it online, and now far more people know about Night Zero - and think it’s cooler - than if they’d whined about doing it first or “better”.

I’ve never put this much effort into Left 4 Dead and killing zombies is my job.

3. Counter-Strike

This may be the greatest cosplay of all time.

Sure, anyone can collect the necessary clothes, spend ninety-nine cents on the fakest gun since you drew one on Etch-a-Sketch*, and hunch around a convention like “Keyboard-based Spine Deformation” and “Dodging bullets” were the same thing, but this man has the true spirit. He genuinely looks like he wants to kill you. That’s a simmering cauldron of repression, rage, and hastily assembled equipment intended for just one function. He couldn’t me more of a Counter-Strike terrorist if his elbows were pointed.

You must suppress every junior high urge to not give him back his orange-tagged backpack.

*Escher-style angled clip projecting out to one side extra!

4. The Heavy

At conventions TF2 cosplay isn’t just popular, it’s practically a nationality (just count the number of scouts vs the number of Ghanans at any event). Something about the slick cartoon style just lends itself to awesome group shots, but none have ever beaten this:

And just this once, we’ll admit to staring open mouthed at that beautiful girl: Sascha. If you were looking at anything but the minigun, there’s something wrong with you. Props are where most TF2 attempts fall flat (RED or BLU clothes aren’t that hard to find), but one is so un-flat it’s a fizzy Mt Everest. The reast of the Heavy costume is also excellent, is appallingly good, but if she’d turned up in a business suit and a judge’s wig Natascha alone would still have made it work.

BONUS: From the same photoset by frzdragon, more backstabbing than Judas Iscariot in a Tom Clancy novel.

5. GoldenEye

Transcending mere costumes is College Humor, who truly capture the spirit of GoldenEye - one of the most important games in FPS history. The N64’s incredible Bond game kicked the entire concept of shooting people in the ass (the manliest sentence you’ll read today) and showed that controllers could be tolerated in a good enough game long before Halo. They don’t just dress the part, they don’t just play the characters, they truly capture everything about the game in two minutes.

The X-chromosome seems to screw up computer games by sheer proximity, and we’re not talking about mutant Magnetos electrocuting the hardware. One’s fine, but two together destroy characterization, removes focus on gameplay, and seems to evaporate all clothing beyond the g-string grade. A while back we saw the five worst attempts at forcing girls into games, and it’s evidence enough to convince an alien court to vaporize every testicle on the planet.

This week we’re looking at the opposite: excellent additions which understand that maybe it’s possible for females to wear things which cover their midriffs, or even function like real clothes instead of sparkly wrapping for a T&A buffet!

1. The TF2 Medic

Frau Doctor is fantastic, a model which really recognises the unique style of TF2’s eternally-in-demand übermensch.

The Doctor will see you now. And she doesn’t like it.

The only problem is that since she’s doesn’t seem to be displaying any sex organs in plain sight, many modelers might have difficulty recognising her as a female. “It has a higher-pitched voice but nothing jiggles!” they wail, before going back to drawing nude Cheetarahs. It’s worth noting that such scribbles have a tendency to suck…

“I couldn’t fit the other set of stripper models in the screen shots” - actual description of a custom Specialists skin

…while this fully clothed character was created as part of a Masters thesis. Just in case the inverse intelligence/want-to-shoot-at-exposed-breasts relationship wasn’t clear enough.

2. Unreal Samus Aran

You want a strong female character? How about an armored warrior holding a giant gun WITH ANOTHER GIANT GUN?

Her right hand is holding more weapon than the Hulk scratching himself

A custom skin for Unreal Tournament 3, and possibly the coolest thing in it. As well as standard levels of Retro-Joy, the distinctive color scheme is a seriously welcome relief from the spectrum of “Brown, Grey, Blood Red and Bits of Black” dominating almost every modern shooter. And while she can’t convert into her morph ball here, neither has she been “upgraded” by people who grew up fantasizing over her first games into a skintight lycra showgirl. Unlike actual Nintendo games, unfortunately.

3. CS Female Urban

Another excellent example of clothing restraint is Counter-Strike’s female urban counter-terrorist, thought that could just as easily be technical limitations. Running on the original Half Life engine, any attempt to render breasts would have given her two extra bladed weapons, as well as the ability to cut parallel lines in glass by pressing against it.

We’re one white fill effect and an i away from an Apple advertisement.

4. Joanna Dark

If you’re unclear on why the Carrington Institute would enter their agents in an Unreal Tournament, it was part of a brave attempt to update UT with a Perfect Dark mod. Which would easily have been one of the best things ever. It was abandoned, but the skins were saved and are available for download.

In their defense, none of them look happy about this.

Unfortunately it’s more an anatomy lesson in Epic’s inability to draw character models thinner than an oil barrel. Samus survived above because she wears a full suit of armor, but poor Joanna ends up looking like a human/giraffe hybrid who got stuck on a taffy-puller before battle commenced. But it’s still one of the best mods ever, because honestly, anything involving Joanna Dark that doesn’t end in “zero” is one of the best things ever.

5. Have a little Faith, pal!

Possibly the best cross-dressing crossover in videogaming history, the TF2 scout gets a fashion update from gaming’s greatest freerunner.

Man, if you thought sad people complained about her chest size before (and they did)

We admit it’s a tiny bit horrifying but it’s half-way to something spectacular: someone sorting out a full Faith conversion for the Scout model. Unfortunately we might be waiting a while, as most modelers are still too busy regressing the last ten years of character development by putting the Pyro in a bikini.

Wrongness on more levels than Dante’s Inferno

An even better, if less playable, rendition of the runner is in Half Life - where we finally explain exactly how a headcrab zombie can be so fast. After all, the resonance cascade opened up portals across reality - all we would need is one in New Eden. And for a headcrab to hang around a red drainpipe for a while.

Sniper rifles start a lot of arguments online (the exact opposite of their real world function).  The ultimate expression of what guns are meant to do - kill someone else from so far away that the word “fair” would need a satellite to see it - they’re a worse balance problem than a one-legged camel.  If they’re realistic everyone hides in corners screeching at each other to stop camping, if they’re weak there’s no problem.  Or point.

Ah’ll nevah rule the universe with you, ya overpowahed wankah!

We’re rating five sniper rifles on Effectiveness and Fun, just one more of the millions of things that are okay in videogames but would be terrifying in real life.

5.  Unreal Tournament

Sniper rifles on UT3 servers are fun, but the problem is obvious:

Three engine blocks and a drinking straw.

They fit about as well as a square peg in a duck’s hole.  UT3 player models look like American footballers wrapped in sacks of sausage meat (Epic Games went on to make the beef-tanks of Gears of War) and in the massive meaty paws of these Hulk-a-likes, the sniper rifle looks like the world’s most lethal toothpick.  And if anyone gets close it’s about as effective.  Even when you’re successfully sniping, you feel that the game’s calling you a pussy.

This guy’s using the transmission from a Dodge Viper as a weapon.  He thinks a sniper rifle is a tool for gynaecologists.

Effectiveness: It’s like bringing a javelin to a touch football match - it’ll definitely murder people but it’s not really playing the game properly (and when the others get close they are going to kill you.)

Fun: As much fun as playing Double Dragon in a Harem - great game, but you’re not exactly in the spirit of things.

4.  Left 4 Dead

The closest thing to sports sniping on the list, with hordes of milling undead offering excellent headshotting opportunities at all times.  It’s just a pity that you’ll be simultaneously boom-smoker-hunt-charge-jockeyed if you take more than two, with your so-called “team-mates” half a level away complaining about the idiot actually standing still on a Left 4 Dead server.

Left 4 Dead 2 upped the anti with a rapid firing military model, but it still can’t cut the mustard when the horde descends.

Effectiveness: Is it a shotgun?  Can it beep or set things on fire?  If you answered “no” to both of these, don’t bother picking it up in Left 4 Dead.

Fun: We did just mention the shotgun.  If you find a weapon more fun than the shotgun, well done on using the guitar during the Midnight Riders finale.  If you find a weapon more fun than that, well done on having such an excellent dream.

One of the best multiplayer shooters ever made (including its own terminally hacked sequel), CoD4 servers couldn’t do a better job of sniping without killing JFK.  They’re only one option among many, you can customize perks to enhance your “death from afar” vibe (though this does often mean choosing Claymores, the Dark Side of online explosives), and you’ve even got a shot if they get close.  Up to seven if you’re quick with the pistol. And, the mark of a truly good sniper game, if you forget to check your back you’ll find fourteen knives in it.

It even gives you a Ghillie suit.  PS That mound by the car can kill people.

Effectiveness: Perfect.  The Special Forces call doorways “coffins” and if you can find a safe spot to snipe one you’ll enjoy why.  The natural breathing shake and limited hold-breath window balance the lethality with skill.

Fun: Full “it would really worry anyone who overheard you talking about how much fun it was to drop people with the twitch of a trigger” joy.  You really do have to search for targets in the detailed environments, and you only have a split-second to snipe them, and you will enjoy every single one with psychologist-terrifying intensity.

2.  Team Fortress 2

It’s challenging work.

It’s hard to stress the sniping aspect of your game more than creating a guy called “Sniper,” handing him a sniper rifle, then telling him to snipe things for a snipe snipe.  It helps that TF2 servers are better balanced than twin Zen masters floating over either end of a seesaw - facestab-whiners aside, Valve is a team of amazingly award-winning professionals and they’ve spent the last three years working on Team Fortress.  The result is that it’s better tuned than the London Philharmonic.

Effectiveness: Exponentially decaying.  A single sharp sniper is essential for a team of eight or more, dropping Heavies and forcing Medics to deploy their übercharges early.  Unfortunately you’ll have a minimum of three and at least two will suck harder than a gay black hole.  Your team will have all the offensive weight of a half-full pillow, and enemy Spies will stroll across to enjoy a backstabbing party.

Fun: Maximum.  The Ozzie Assassin is excellently balanced, with cunning coding preventing rapid fire or noscope shots - you need to scope to charge up your hit, so you can kill anything at a distance (just like a sniper should), but  all the while your back is a big “Stabby-knife-goes-HERE” sign.

1.  Counter-Strike

Of course it’s the AWP.  Doctor Doom could fire a scoped superstring projector which detonates eleven Earths in parallel dimensions, and the Arctic Warfare Police rifle will still have killed more people. With less chance of them seeing it coming.  Unfortunately, the best weapon in the world won’t work with an idiot user, leading to a few CS server problems.

Effectiveness: The AWP is more effective than actually shooting people through the head, because you can do it more than once, you can enjoy their reaction, you don’t have to bother with wind, drop, or - for experts - actually bothering to aim through the scope.

Fun: The AWP is an absolutely effective sniper rifle in a multiplayer game, making it about as much fun as doing dental work on an unanaesthetised elephant.  In Counter-Strike an AWP noscoper is able to kill everyone instantly, and the only counter is to be him or better than him.  Which is no fun at all.