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.”

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.

Every day there’s another article asking “How can we get more girls into gaming?”, every one of them identifying an author who’s part of the problem.  It turns out that half of humanity isn’t a different species - the clue’s in the start of the sentence - but for an unfortunate few computers project puberty-prevention fields which hold them in a permanent terror of electro-cooties.  Which makes them see gaming girls as the End Boss of Adult Adolescence.

The involuntarily asexual market is a big one, with games like Bayonetta pandering harder than a horny hooker in an Evangelion costume, but by far the worst wish-woman-were-here efforts come from the custom skinning community.  Which is only slightly less psycho than the Hannibal Lecter Appreciation Society that sentence suggests.  We’ve found the five worst fan-made skins, software scribbles by slavering shooter-fans who think “This game about killing people would be better if I was doing it as a half-naked girlie.”  And then wonder whey they’re alone.

1.  Counter-Strike Hostages

In an attempt to create a computerized anti-ovary-antigravity field, “BlueGuile” reskinned Counter-Strike’s hostages as the girls from Dead or Alive and Dragon Ball Z.  And put them in bikinis.  The Dead or Alive series had already raised sexism to a scrotum-driven science - the first game had to invent entirely new attack animations for characters who (by mass) counted as having three torsos.  By “Paradise” they’d removed even the pretense of women having capabilities, removing their fighting moves, and clothes, so it took some serious effort to out-immature that.

“BlueGuile” is up to that challenge.  BlueGuile’s avatar is a repeating loop of an animated woman with gigantic breasts being hit until they break loose of her clothes, and he could probably invent a new forms of sexism which would make a pimp blush.

This is how BlueGuile presents himself to the world.

Hi, welcome to Blueguile’s house!  Let me introduce you - from left to right we have Immaturity Personified, Psychological Problem, Tragic Misuse of Time and Masturbation Fantasy.

The first comment on the mod is “Nekkid plz”.  The second is an essay on user “capitalchopper”’s life story, skills, and aims in life, the entire sum of his existence which leads only to “Nekkid plz.”  Because his explanation that he’s a networking student is essential to understanding his motivations for naked anime characters.  For one thing it might motivate pity, because if he can’t find those online already he must be the worst networking student in the history of the internet.  What is he networking, twigs?

Besides, any real gamer girl wouldn’t have anything to do with hostage mode.  Because a  real gamer playing anything but defuse doesn’t exist.

2.  The Female Scout Panty Fix

This is Santa’s secret midget sex dungeon - so many wonderful things have to exist and then go horrifically wrong before the sentence can exist.  A single fact revealing an entire evil world under the one you thought you knew.  Entire Nightmare on Elm Street movies have been based on less horrifying revelations.  The idea of female TF2 characters is nothing new, but this is a specific patch - a whole extra install - with the sole function of letting you look up the female scout’s skirt.

I never thought a real computer projection of serious psychological problems would have pink stripes.

Understand: singe88 took someone else’s skin and reconstructed what the panties would look by studying the gibbed body parts.  He examined exploded body parts and programmed a pervy reality based on them - untilJason Voorhees becomes a bomb disposal expert in a middle school there’s no possible creepier occupation, and we should thank Valve for not only giving us this great game but for keeping singe off the streets.

Oh god no this is bad. This is bad. This image exists and the man who coded it hasn’t been arrested.  There is no possible universe in which this is not a terrible image.

He worked for at least an evening to alter a simulation of a fan-made modified girl in a cartoon-style video game.  That’s further removed from sex than the average rock.  The Center for Disease Control stores vials of herpes which will get laid faster.

3.  Vending Machine

The most misogynist vending machine since Japan’s soiled panty dispenser, and even worse - at least that requires the user to leave their house and earn money.  We’re just going to show you the image, as any attempt to describe what’s happening would erase our ability to interact with women so hard we’d never have been born.

You will notice those words don’t actually make sense, because you are a thousand times better at higher functions like ‘reading’ than the creator.

On the original site those files not only exist, there are three full pages of multiple-thread discussion based on them.  An entire community thriving only on the intellectual discourse resulting from that image, and the only reason that’s not a convincing argument for re-education camps is that that implies education worked the first time.

An image so psychologically terrifying we’d have to resurrect Dr Freud and train him as a commando.

4.  Day of Defeat’s Future Girl

Apparently midriffs become bulletproof in the future

On the surface this doesn’t seem so bad: World War II really didn’t have any women in most of the units, so the only way to work one into a Day of Defeat server would be a Rosie the Riveter rhythm action game.  And she’s very modestly dressed - by the standards of female game characters that’s practically a ballgown.

The real problem is in the implications.  Someone decided to code a girl into a DOD:S server, and decided the idea was so amazingly unlikely he might as well make her a futuro-medieval scale-armored high-heel hooker.  Because in his mind that fit into gaming just as easily as any other girl.

5.  Porn on a screen in a game on a screen

There’s something about Counter-Strike’s disastrous combination of killing people and being in an office that apparently murders the human soul.  There’s no other way this could have happened.

Just idly playing with a knife alone while looking at porn. No, he doesn’t see anything wrong with that

That’s a patch to add a picture of a girl to fake computers inside a game - the above additions have officially given up on real sex, but this one’s even distancing itself from real porn.  If it was any further removed from the idea of human interaction it’d be HAL9000, and even his red light - murderously glaring at you like a monochromatic hate-powered laser - would still be less disturbing than this mod.  Oh, and that little patch of pink on the upper-right of the image?

He hasn’t moved since the last image was taken. Moving isn’t something he ‘does’

That’s right, it’s a poster of a picture in a fake office in a game.  This guy’s got so many not-women installed on his computer he’d have a panic attack introducing himself to an inflatable sex doll.

Cries of joy substituted for shellfire across the servers last night, as millions of Allied troops celebrated victory in World War II for the three thousand and sixty-fifth time that day.

“It’s been a hard struggle” said Sergeant Martin, who first answered the Call of Duty in 2004 (and again in 2005, 2006, and once more in 2008.)  “Those dirty Huns sure are persistent, and seem to keep reappearing five-to-seventeen seconds after you kill them, but by God we pushed forward and stood on the designated map marker for thirty seconds.  Thereby resolving the entire nightmarish tangle of debts and international pressures which drowned a quarter of the world in blood.”

The Reichstag Falls (127.7 times per hour)

“We fought for this one,” agreed Private Brigs, surveying the streets of dod_avalanche - now silent as combatants rested and checked their kill/death ratios.  “When I think of the millions of deaths in this struggle - several thousand of them my own - I can only hope future generations remember what it is we did here, and why.”

The spirit of Private Jones, reincarnated into a Wolfenstein server by the intensity of the combat (and the dynamic vertex-based anchored animation technology of the  modified Quake III graphics engine) reported confusion over the victory.  “In my day, we just shot them,” he complained.  “I don’t recall ever watching a timer and shooting them three seconds later to do more damage.  Most peculiar.”

Red Orchestra units on the Gazala Line were too busy to comment as a three-man team is required to move each tank effectively, though many gunners were heard to comment on “balancing” of the Allied and Axis units” - removing any incredible technical superiority one side may have had, for example - had helped with the American victory.  Did they say American?  Sorry, they’re sure they meant Allied and no disrespect for the millions of British, Russian, Australian and other nationalities who carried the bulk of the fighting.

“It’s strange, mankind seems to keep fighting these same senseless wars over and over again,” said Martin, visibly tensing for the resumption of hostilities.  “And I don’t mean wars of greed, or fear, or against those who look different.  I mean these exact wars.  I’ve taken part in Market Garden so often I’ve left a furrow, and I’m thinking of bringing a bucket and spade for the next time through the Normandy beaches.  Desperately fighting for survival there is beginning to get a bit samey.”

“We can only hope that future generations will live in peace,” he concluded, hurrying to reload the Thompson which has been rendered by seven different graphics engines in the time he’s used it.  “That they’ll understand the importance of brotherhood, and respect, and basically not calling people you’ve never met stupid noob faggots for no reason.”

Let’s be honest:  first person shooters live on PC.  They might survive as crippled console versions, thumbsticks turning at the same speed and accuracy as the average wheelchair, hooked up to auto-aiming life support to stave off Terminal Lack Of Mouse, but it’s only on real computers that the ability to aim actually means something.

Second honesty: single player is practice.  That’s all.  It might be the most cinematic practice you’ve ever seen, with incredible set pieces and innovative action scenes allowing to you to indulge in every Hollywood fantasy, but as long as the enemies are AI it’s just a glorified Tutorial.  You played through Modern Warfare for the fun, World at War for access to the Zombie servers, but it’s all sort of pointless unless you’re plugging people so that victory means “You’re better than someone”, not “The computer was programmed to let you have that.”  That’s what game servers are for, and that’s why we’re looking at the most popular multiplayer FPSs:

1.  Counter-Strike

If this is news then please, stop wasting time here and get your ass onto a Counter-Strike server right now.  Right now there are more people playing CS than there are holding hands, which might sound like it says something scary about society until you realise romance never killed any terrorists.  Various versions take up the first, second and seventh positions on the most-played list - and that’s not just shooters, that’s in terms of every game Valve has (to say nothing of the thousands of pirate players out there).  Counter-Strike: Source is now outperforming 1.6 servers (despite the complaints of purists), and even the relatively unpopular Condition Zero servers are stuffed with several thousand players at all times.  Or to put it another way: statistically speaking, Counter Strike is more popular than Shakespeare.

2.  Call of Duty 4

Things can get a little hectic

Modern Warfare servers continue to crush even their own sequel, with World at War servers lagging behind because of “Less impressive weapons”, “Not being made by Infinity Ward” and the all-important “Being yet another World War II game even though the reason we were excited before was because Modern Warfare didn’t do that” factor.  Cod4 is the top FPS on X-fire’s total playtime charts ranking only behind World of Warcraft overall - and ranking below WoW in playtime is like ranking below the universe in size.

3.  Team Fortress 2

It’s all about class balance

Valve’s magnum opus of online play, and proof that a decade of development time pays off.  Team Fortress 2 servers rank second only to Counter-Strike on Valve’s charts, and even outperforms Football Manager 2009, the biggest non-shooting-people-in-the-face title on their service.  For some reason.  The constant addition of new maps, fixes and unlocks keeps the population pumped up, although it’s still a factor of four behind even the closest Counter-Strike game.  But then, many religions have less devout followings than CS.

4.  Left 4 Dead

This game is fun

Multiplying the number of players by the average game bodycount, L4D servers shoot through three million zombie corpses an hour.  It seems those protesting the sequel were an extremely vocal minority, with most players far too busy “actually playing the game” and “enjoying themselves” to waste much time on such silliness.  It also means that at this very second there are at least four kilo-Louii running around with machine guns.

5.  Day of Defeat

There’s a slight learning curve

Ruggedly hanging in at number five are the Day of Defeat servers (both Source and old-school) - guilty of being set in the same time period as 90% of all known games, but at least with the excuse of coming from a time before the problem wasn’t quite so bad.  It also shares the status of being a Half Life modification, meaning that the altered adventures of Gordon Freeman literally have the entire FPS table surrounded.

Gamers dressing up as the gamees is a tradition dating back as far as disposable income, but what about the characters themselves? Can they cackle in costumes for all hallows eve? Since we don’t waste opening paragraphs around here, the answer is “Yes”, and we look at seven skins to spice up your servers:

1. The Creepy Counter-Strike Skull

Counter-Strike servers are already stuffed with Skullz and Killaz [sic], usually embedded in usernames between clan tags and half the number row’s symbols. Modder “Laca” enables the anti-terrorists to become even scarier than “someone with an assault rifle out to kill you” by skulling things up under the creepily human eyes.

2. Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault

Those playing on Medal of Honor servers shouldn’t suffer because of the age or authenticity of their game - so “Vdog777” has built an in-character costume, and is far better at 3D modeling than coming up with a name. The French resistance fighter adds another option when you’re dressing to impress (and shoot several times in the head) those fashionable Nazi chappies.

3. Team Fortress Halloween

Halloween costumes are something fun and awesome, so of course Valve are involved. We’re only talking about this because we enjoy it, anyway, as anyone on any TF2 server has already enjoyed the new koth_harvest_event map, exploding pumpkins, brand-new hats (to pile on top of all the other awesome headgear), and the incomparable ghost costume of Zepheniah Mann.

PS We love our Gibuses, though proper grammer sometimes makes for odd pronunciation.

4. The Classic Spy

Just because you’re ten years behind the times doesn’t mean you can’t dress up - though it can mean you wish you were more advanced. That’s the lesson behind the awkwardly-named |WS|*Nikon’s smooth spy skin, disguising a Team Fortress Classic server’s Spy as: a TF2 spy!

5. The Red vs Blue Crysis

In the most insanely complicated meta disguise outside of Major Smith in Where Eagles Dare, “not so l337” lets Crysis commandos disguise themselves as the staff from Red vs Blue, who in turn are played by Spartans, from Halo. It would be impossible to add more layers to a costume without forming a human pyramid or dressing up as a double-decker bus.

6. Day of Metal Gear Defeat

Dr. Cloud understands exactly how to guarantee an Allied success on Day of Defeat servers: staff the side of the angels with an endless army of Solid Snake clones. With the Axis forces represented by far inferior GRU cannon fodder it’s quite likely the sheer psychological pressure will force them to fold (despite their advantage in heavy machine guns).

7. Left 4 Dead

The most popular costumes over the last week come from the Left 4 Dead pre-order exclusive demo, with our four favorite survivors sporting spanking new skins.

Bill: Everyone’s favorite armed uncle-figure swaps Vietnam flashbacks for a love of candy, and an incredibly convincing Coach fatsuit.
Zoey: The apocalypse’s only female pulls an incredible double reverse-Michael-Jackson, both turning from white to black AND staying alive to play Rochelle.
Louis: The hard-working everyman goes even further than Zoey to become Elllis’s engineering Suthan bo-ay.
Francis: Why hate everything at random, when Nick can hate and distrust everything as a scumbag conman?

The best bit? Game servers can be dressed up every day of the year!