Shooters with stories can be fantastic (as 100% of all people currently hoping/praying/sacrificing animals to speed the release of Episode 3 understand), but it’s usually unnecessary. If you’re on a multiplayer server, you hate those guys. Story over. If things get heated you might add a romantic sub-plot between their mother and a football team, or some powerful contrasting symbolism involving their lifeless corpse and the part of your body which could generate new life, but mainly the plot development is limited to killing something and then reloading.

Some game developers put you in a building full of mutants, hand you a gun, and think they’re not done. It’s a worse mistake than an obstetrician delivering a baby then deciding to see what else they can get out of there. They try to layer story on top of the game with all the skill and success of an incontinent adding fudge to a steak - the best you can hope for is that they just miss and you skip their contributions.

1. Halo 3

Halo revolutionized console shooting by adapting it for thumbsticks, Xbox Live, and including a grenade button (the single greatest advance in First Person Shooting control since the the fire button). Halo servers brought this classic across to the PC and today, on a platform with so many shooters it’s technically an army, it’s still a lot of fun to play. The plot was a masterpiece: you’re Toughest Guy, Aliens are Bad, go kill them.

Notice how you make even the tank look wimpy

Halo 2 threatened to raise moral issues by showing that one of the enemies you’d been massacring was actually a good guy, then sidestepped them by showing that he was the only one of the enemies who was a good guy and had him immediately join your side. Unfortunately “Someone who looks different to me” was still far too much moral complexity for most Halo players to process, and he was relegated to the sidelines for Halo 3. So that it could concentrate on the worst story ever.

When your story is “damsel in distress”, the most unoriginal plot since “God created that light up there” you don’t draw attention to the fact. Mario only rescued a princess because without that he’s a genocidal turtle-murderer. Halo 3 very very wrongly thought it had a rich story, or even a real story, using new narrative elements to involve you. Translation: it interrupted gameplay with cutscenes you couldn’t skip. “Interrupting your view” and “Whining” are the two worst things a game developer can do outside of reversing your controls, so it’s a mystery why Bungie programmed Cortana to do both.

They made it this horrible and blurry on purpose, so that Cortana could prove that the Architect wasn’t the most annoying computer program ever

2. Homefront

To call Homefront’s story laughable is cruel because with a little work, and an understanding of parody (especially how it had already happened), it could have been. And it would have been glorious. It could have been Hot Shots: The Shooter. We’ve covered Homefront’s almost-hilarity before, but don’t think we’ll ever get over mothers bravely throwing themselves into combat situations armed with nothing but unkillably loud babies just to show how evil the Koreans are. (Here “evil” apparently means “lacking X-ray vision”, as the Koreans were at that point cruelly and evilly shooting at the terrorists who had just killed about a hundred of them, firing at a house that only said terrorists were in. Well, only the terrorists were in when they started shooting.)

Protect my baby! (Because I’m doing the opposite!)

Homefront servers offer so many advantages (the brilliant BP system and Battle Commander modes included), it’s unclear why they had to manufacture such contrived advantages as “Wow, this mode also doesn’t mock the very concept of patriotism!”

3. Gears of War 2

Gears of War has a brilliant story: a developer said “let’s render beautiful environments, blow the shit out of them, then release steroid-mutants the size of small tanks to fight there.” And lo, it was good. Unfortunately someone decided that this story of human fridges eroding each other with bullets needed deep emotional resonance, and that these should be emotions other than the “YEAAAAAAHH WOOOOO!” joy the game was already full of.

YEAAAAAHHHH WOOOOOO but no seriously we should include emotional depth too

The result was the least tragic death since Bond killed Blofeld. Dom being forced to kill his tortured wife (we’d have included a SPOILER tag if this counted as a plot) sounds heavy when you put it like that: quickly. Which isn’t how the game put it. They drew Dom’s whining out over so much of the game you’d have raced him to shoot her through the head. They also chickened out of their own drama, turning a mercy killing into a cowardly plot point by including a “Get out of moral conflict FREE!” card. Super-tough Gear Tai going insane from literally five minutes of evil torture. Dom’s wife had been down there for years of agonizing pain, which is about how long the cutscene feels, and means the big emotional moment is about as conflicted as the Ku Klux Klan voting on their uniform color.

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!

Bulletstorm is out tomorrow and we’re welcoming it like Mubarak would a return to the Pharoah system: a crazy, unbalanced and classic solution to an increasingly violent set of problems. It’s being released after a bigger blaze of publicity than Hindenburg Airlines, but it won’t matter if the game disc is a pink DVD of kitten movies. It’s already summarized modern shooters better than the sentence “Shoot people in the face in a sequel,” and if we’re not careful, it’ll be worse for first person shooting than a ban on imaginary bullets. Here’s how it represents the future of fake firearms (and how it’s a future which will send naked, violent men back in time to prevent itself.)

A Warning From The Future. And Hairstylists.

Anti-Videogame Insanity

If you thought anti-videogame scare stories would fade away now that even senior citizens care about high scores (thanks Nintendo!), then thinking was your mistake. You’ll never understand the media by doing something like that! Instead of accepting that maybe the existence of the human race proves how children don’t do things which end civilization, or admitting that a total lack of evidence might be a reason not to say something, FOX instead learned a lesson from their videogame enemies: if your real life is boring, make something up instead!

FOX’s new head of creative scaremongering/”opinion”

Carol Lieberman broke that last, lonely link with reason when she directly blamed videogames for an increase in rapes, despite rapes

1. not happening in the videogames she’s talking about
2. not increasing in the real world either.

The hordes of sexual aggressors exist only in her head, which technically makes her the most dangerous person involved in the discussion. The Lord of the Rings is a better news story, because sometimes people really do kill each other for jewelry. She held forth on the hundreds of studies backing her up but when asked to mention even one claimed she couldn’t remember any. Other psychologists, who base their statements on facts and will therefore never be famous, don’t either. Because they don’t exist.

It’s proof that videogame scare stories are going senile. A functioning brain stops shouting when every single person and fact is against them. Now that they’ve gotten away with utterly making things up, we can look forward to ever-increasing allegations – and we should be scared, if only because they’ll have to invent brand new and more horrible crimes to beat the “rape” card they’ve already played. Our only consolation will be how we’ve already won. Because old people have consoles now too – the Wii is the most popular technology with senior citizens, because it’s much more fun than the dialysis machine – so what used to be “These devilboxes are satanic, just like every other new thing any generation has ever done!” is now “No no, our console is great, but all the other consoles are terrible.” Which means they’re already videogamers. And we’ve won.

Shooting Things Monopoly

Shooting things Monopoly isn’t an attempt to fix the worst game in the world, or the natural result of having a family activity based on relentless sadism and the right bear arms in the same country. It’s the death of imagination. We’re looking forward to BulletStorm because it’s a chunky, fun shooter made the guys behind Unreal Tournament (which is more chunky fun than a LEGO set). It’s such a relief from the endless series of Call of Duty games, but it would be more so if they weren’t actively counting on that.

The viral “Duty Calls” game mocked everything wrong with the CoD games while admitting that they’ve utterly won. Make no mistake: Modern Warfare is one of the best shooters ever made. It should be bought (we did) and played (we still do), but it’s “Have fun” good. It’s not “reshape the entire industry around it like a Sumo Wrestler in your bouncy castle” good, which is exactly what it’s done – become a huge immovable problem which stops anyone smaller getting into the arena.

When the only shooter options are “That Game” and “We’re Not That Game”, That Game has won. It’s not just crippling shooter imagination, it’s reaching out and destroying the hopes of other genres new – EA recently cancelled all work on Mirror’s Edge 2 (though then countered that reveal with a powerful “We’re actually not saying anything either way” statement) to focus on Battlefield 3. Because what players really, desperately need now is another squad-based war shooter.

Activision’s sequilitis so brutal even Jason Voorhees would think it was a bit much. Call of Duty is always fairly fun, and Modern Warfare servers remain home to some of the sharpest shooting online, but the yearly sequels have become more predictable and considerably less original than birthday parties.

Consoles As King

First off, every article claiming that the PC is dying has been written by an idiot who cares more about hits than making sense. You couldn’t kill the PC with EMP warheads, and as long as Valve continue to create the best games ever we’ve nothing to worry about. But while we haven’t been mortally injured, we have been badly annoyed by consoles.

Because they make a lot more money, consoles are the target market for most of the big-name titles. Which means that they’re programmed to be played with a joypad instead of a mouse, which is like training someone to perform surgery with a spiked baseball bat instead of a scalpel, and switching from one to the other is a painful and frequently fatal process. You can’t just install mouse drivers over the thumbstick software. The game has been programmed to account for a central dead zone, wild swings, and characters who grindingly rotate their arms like tank barrels. It changes the dynamic of the entire game – and when youre entire concept is “Kill With Skill” (as opposed to the Halo-style “Kill by grinding their shields down over time so as not to draw attention to how joypads are terrible at accuracy”) it’s a bit worrying.

Especially when the makers insult your intelligence. Epic assured us that the PC version would be perfect, truly engineered for the magic mouse, but there was no demo for the PC when the XBox got one. Meaning “We have the game pretty much finished and are ready to show it off, but we haven’t programmed the PC controls yet.” Which means they’re going to be welding mouse controls in over joypad programming, and sticking to wildly unrelated things together for combat purposes only works if you’re Chuck Greene.

But then it works better than everything ever!

Past adaptations like this ended up with worse Axis control than the 1940’s Reichstag, with a similar-level of killing-people-atrocity in result.

We’re Going to Play It Anyway

Despite being a worse indicator of your future than bear’s stomach rumbling inside your caravan, we’re going to buy this on Day 1 and play it until Day Power Cut. It’s Epic cutting loose and their “serious” game was an interplanetary reality television tournament starring men and women the approximate size, texture and attitude of a mass extinction asteroid. A UT server’s idea of secondary fire was fitting a rocket launcher with a Triple Spiraling Rocket Death, to this day the main reason we need a Nobel Prize for Explosives.

That’ll do, explosive multi-death machine, that’ll do

Any game where you can shoot someone, pull them, wrap grenade-bolas around their throat, kick them and turn them into a firework, twice, has got to be fun. They had us at “grenade-bolas”, a return to the sheer spectacle fun we’ve been missing. Gaming’s attempts to go Hollywood range from Halo’s horrifically intrusive Cortana whining in Halo 3, through the ridiculously expendable Noble squad of Reach, to Mason whining about numbers like an insecure accountant (and slightly less thrilling to listen to.)

The second is how it’s a spiritual sequel to a game we’d given up on ever seeing again. We’re going back to The Club! The score attack and spirit of “More points for killing people in stupid ways” couldn’t be clearer – the only difference is that instead of racing through a killing spree in a building, we’re doing it in a building that’s collapsed, still falling over, and equal parts on fire and full of mutants.

We can’t wait. We just hope the most “creative” shooter this year isn’t a brown-and-grey unofficial sequel starring the Gears of War crew without their shoulderpads.

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.

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.

Video games are the ultimate in capitalism, and not just because fanboys will queue all night to spend an extra hundred dollars for some fancy packaging (as long as you remember the magic word “Collector’s”)

Spartan Utility Cash Kollection/Extraction Receptacle System

In video games buying better equipment really does make you a better person, just like advertising’s been telling you.  You’re faster, stronger, more powerful and - depending on the level of choice and palette - significantly more fashionable.  You can tell you’ve joined a losing Counter-Strike team when they storm out of the buy zone with pistols, running along hunched over not to shrink their hitbox but to scan the ground for loose change. Gotta save for that AWP somehow!

In real life a better graphics card means smoother graphics (you might even be able to run Crysis), and a bigger monitor - well, if we have to explain what that’s good, someone’s reading this out to you and it would be cruel to describe the glories of sight.  But what other equipment enables you to blast better?

1.  Wolfking Warrior Pad

With a name like “Wolfking Warrior Pad” this should be the most tragically uncool contraption since the first fridge prototype caught fire.  The way it advertises “Fire Red” and “Mystic White” make you start looking for the Razer tag, but here’s the thing:  it’s absolutely fantastic.  Utterly indispensable, in fact, and I would no longer dream of logging on without it to the point where I use “I” in an group-voice-”we” article.

Using WASD on a standard keyboard means you have real access to less than half of it - how many times have you juggled keys, working out that you need to toggle grenades more often than the flashlight so the light source gets shunted over to T or Y?  Where do you cram all the quick-talk keys?  How many times have you been killed in the extra millisecond it takes to stretch across to hit rockets with “6″, before giving up and training yourself to hit “Next Weapon” five times fast?

The Wolfking arranges half a keyboard in circles around the sacred cross of WASD* with special attention to big fat buttons for the thumb - or as I like to call them, “reload” and “deploy.”

*It even works for obscenely obscure configs like my UOEK setup.

2.  The One And Only Awesome Mouse Mat Ever

It’s an absolute fact that every “gaming” mouse mat in existence is a money-sucking scam rendered harmless by how it only targets idiots.  But someone with a solid-steel serrated sawblade can alter absolute facts, and the awesome metalworkers at greensforged have brought the most badass gravity gun projectile out of Half Life 2 and into the real world.

The Ravenholm isn’t cheap at $50, but if you ever need another mat after getting this you won’t want to play games anymore - what with having the super-powered secret agent anti-zombie life that enables you to use up a 9″ circular saw blade.

(Greensforged provide a range of mousemats and you could technically choose one of the others, in the same way you could use three wishes from a genie to wash the dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.)

3.  USB SNES Pad!

You won’t use it on Team Fortress, but if can’t see the awesome in a USB SNES pad we simply have nothing more to talk about.  Go do whatever important modern clicking you feel you have to, we’ll be over here playing Super Mario Bros 3.

4.  Razer Naga Gaming Mouse

We mock a lot of Razer gear, and they deserved every word of it and a thousand more for building the DESTRUCTOR GAMING SURFACE, but we have to admit that they’re onto something with the Naga Gaming Mouse.  Mainly because (unlike the “Imperator” and “Abyssus“) they stopped trying to think of scary names and new ways to say “detects movement” and instead actually improved the thing.

It’s obviously designed for MMO play (all they way down to the advertising copy where they stress its comfort when playing “for hours on end”) but those twelve extra keys could be seriously useful in any game (especially since they’re customizable, and double especially if you use macros.)  In a perfect final touch, the panoply of pressables doesn’t necessarily interfere with normal mouse function, as the now-standard “two thumb keys” are still in place further up the pommel.

Well done, Razer!

Games are awesome.  You’re either agreeing or extremely lost because, in case you haven’t noticed, you’re on a site that rents online game servers (aka “Palaces of Pyro-explosive Joy!”).  But some go above and beyond the simple call of fragging, helping their FPS fantasies escape into the real world WITHOUT - and this is important - going insane and killing us.  Here we salute these brave server-servers and their incredible efforts.

1.  The Sentry Gun PC

The single coolest thing to happen to Team Fortress 2 servers since the game itself, “TiTON“’s Sentry Gun PC is the most beautiful sight outside of a burning Spy.  As well as being an excellent reproduction of the ultimate in BLU team point defense, the tripod-mounted heavy-calibre (fake) machine gun is a decent desktop as well, featuring a GeForce 9600 and a Core 2 Duo processor.

This means you can set up sentries on Team Fortress 2 while playing on a sentry from TF2; so you’re so many levels into an imagination, you have to start setting yourself on fire to make sure you’re not a spy.

2.  Real Life Warthog

Halo servers don’t actually need any promotion, what with the game being connected to approximately every college student dorm in any country, so this real-life Warthog is nothing but luxury.  Awesome, awesome luxury.

It’s even the original Bungie team who get to ride in the recreation of their creation, creating a “Cycle of Awesome” which could be used to drive all coolness on Earth -  except they’re a little too aware of how this is a one-of-a-kind result of weeks of work.  So they drive carefully, apparently unaware that driving carefully in a Warthog is like fasting on the set of Iron Chef.  Luckily there are real Halo servers where you can skid that thing’s beautiful inverse kineamatics right through an opposing soldier’s face.

3.  Real Life Crates!

You’ll see crates on almost every FPS server, with “Time Until You See A Crate” acting as respected review system, but you pay far more attention to the crates on Counter-Strike servers.  Because you normally pay more attention to things that can hide terrorists with machine guns, or if you don’t you need to radically re-evaluate your priorities.  All of which make these real life crates a thousand times more awesome than wooden boxes have any right to be.

Part of the best-named art exhibit ever made, the “de_dust installation,” pixelated packing was placed all over the city, popping up in streets and stations and generally making people try to reload while walking down the street.

4.  CERN Crowbar

The above escaped server-stuff is slick, but none of it ever protected Earth from interdimensional invasion (though we can see that Warthog being significantly awesome in an urban combat environment).  Luckily some cyber-citizens saw that CERN’s screwing around with the stuff of spacetime could lead to a resonance cascade (and a little alliteration) and organized probably the best nerdy thing ever to happen.

They sent CERN a crowbar, a headcrab for practise, and a strategy guide detailing what to do in the event of alien invasion (specifically, a Half-Life strategy guide).  And because some scientists are awesome, the actual factual Gordon Freeman (codename: Sandro Bonacini) came out to demonstrate his readiness.  Even cooler, as if that was even possible, Sandro’s work is in radiation-resistant logic components - so he really couldn’t sound more like a videogame scientist if he was wearing body armor and could run top speed while carrying ten thousand rounds of ammunition.

Video games have come a long way in forty years - the average controller has more buttons than the first computers, and the internet connects you to so many people Nintendo are terrified to let you do anything but press “A”.  But what does the future hold for those of us who live in online game servers?  What do we want from future technology?

1.  A wargame where jumping like a tazed rabbit doesn’t confer a tactical advantage

The Call of Duty series creates an incredibly realistic environment, equips you with authentic weapons, has graphics so advanced that ghillie suits work, and then prances all over that with players leaping like turbo-boosted kangaroos.  The only way a marine could jump that high in full kit is by standing on a claymore, and in real life, a terrorist whose panic reaction to an MP5 is jumping?  He’ll be that soldier’s “funniest confirmed kill I ever had”.

On CoD4 servers you can be killed by expert players who bounce and crouch like fast-forwarded gymnasts.  An amphetamined-Mario couldn’t keep up with them.  You’re pouring machine gun fire right into them, and when they land behind your corpse after a triple inversion somersault you expect them to score 6.0 for Grace, 5.9 Agility, and 0.0 in Realities of War.  Halo servers technically suffer this problem even worse, with ten-tonne armored space marines leaping like they have trampoline-simulators in their futuristic space boots, but the great thing about cyborg soldiers fighting a race of space-mushrooms is that it never claimed to be realistic.

2.  Mice which administer electrical shocks to people who miss five times in a row but still play Sniper

The last eight years have been pretty funny for FPS players - at least, those with the sense to play on PC servers. Aka “a proper gaming system”. Platformers just feel wrong on keyboards, and vertical shooters are all about the joysticks, but since 2001 consoles have truly believed that they’re where first person shooters are at - with their hulking space marines and their other, slightly hulkier space marines.

This near-decade of delusion was triggered by one thing: Halo. Or to give it its full name, Halo: Combat Evolved (which may as well be Halo: Nobody Uses The Subtitle). Halo smashed sales records and converted the XBoxfrom an oversized punchline into the critical success of the console generation - which is odd, because compared to PC Halo Servers it was utterly amateur hour. It couldn’t have been more inept if Master Chief had tripped over Guilty Spark and shot himself in the crotch plating. We’re going to say a phrase and see if you laugh: an FPS without official multiplayer support. Also: Carlos Mencia getting punched in the face.

Halo 2 and 3 rectified that on the cute little consoles they insist on using, but there’s no way they can ever compare to a real game server. They can add online multiplayer, energy shields, Forge custom creation modes and as many vehicles as they like, a Halo Server can offer one thing they never will:

A mouse.

Explaining this advantage to a player with cramped claws clutched around a sweaty pad is like explaining the color red to a violin. Some games even support controlling the PC with XBox-alike USB pads, which is like supporting using the Mona Lisa as a lunch tray. Master Chief may be a one-man tank, but using a joypad to control him simulates that a little too well - it takes ages to turn and you get a real sense of satisfaction just from getting him pointing the right way.

Log into a Halo server and you’ll get a level of control the console cowboys can only dream of, or perhaps nightmare: they’re not used to things like twitch-aim, and most console close-up battles degenerate into spastic slapfights with players flailing at each other like angry cheerleaders still protecting their makeup. There are a few problems with grafting a game from one system to another: even before you log on to a Halo server, you’ll find the controls more sensitive than a skinless ACLU rep. The merest twitch of your mouse sends the cursor careening across the screen like a drunken drag racer, giving you a terrifying insight into the lead-padded slow-motion controls it’s used to.

But when do adjust the sensitivity and get your space-armored self online you’ll see why people play. It’s not the revelation it was for XBoxers, as PC gamers have decades of Counter-Strike servers under their belts, but it brought the field well forward. The widespread end of the health bar (replaced by regeneration if you hide for a few seconds) is now the standard in many games (including Call of Duty servers). Halo servers also offer:

Oh you naughty thing, don’t tempt me.

1. The Warthog, aka the most beautiful thing on four wheels since Milla Jovovich tried skateboarding. This sexy inverse-kinematic (translation: why they way it moves looks so cool) Jeep Of Death was THE sex object for fans, and there are still twenty-year marriages with less love than many feel for this wonderful, skidding, infinite-ammoed beauty.

Good Idea: Being in a Warthog. Bad Idea: Not doing that.

2. Plasma grenades. Grenades which not only blow people up, but stick to them shining brightly as if to say “Haha you’ve already lost!” Halo was the first mainstream game to realise “Hey, maybe if players didn’t have to cycle through five weapons to get to grenades they’d actually be USEFUL!”

Just look at all those targets players!

There are still hundreds of Halo servers in action every day, and as an older game it’s practically free these days. Online support, voice comms, customized servers (you know - all the things the XBoxers had to wait years and buy new games for) are yours from the get go, and there’s just something about climbing into space armour and shooting people with rocket launchers that will always be good.
Which is probably why so many games use the exact same plot - but for many, this was the first.

Exhausted, seven fellow geeks and I sit around a dimly lit coffee table at three in the morning. The others munch on chips and gurgle Dr. Pepper like there’s about to be a shortage at the bottling plant.

We’re taking a break before diving back into the game. Someone finishes a drink, stands, stretches and says “You’re all going down.” Collectively, we groan. The rule is that once a challenge is issued, the game must begin again – no matter what. We split into different rooms and, stepping carefully over crisscrossing Ethernet cables and router hubs, we begin another round of Halo’s spectacular multiplayer on our Halo Server.

What? You were expecting 20-sided dice?

Halo: Combat Evolved, the original that was to spawn a phenomenon and a franchise that dropped cash like a Grand Theft Auto hooker, was a video game pioneer. Halo changed the way that first person shooters were made and set a new bar for multiplayer combat through Halo servers. In a genre peppered with little else but Counter-Strike and clones thereof, years later, Halo continues to be a popular alternative to newer multiplayer FPS games.

It is with a bout of nostalgia, then, that we take a look at one of the most irritatingly effective enemies ever produced for an FPS title: The Flood. We pose a simple question: which is a more dastardly enemy – the Flood or Venereal Disease? Both are gross and funny when they happen to your ex, sure, but which is more terrifying?

Flood vs. VD: Grotesque Appearance

To begin, both the Flood and venereal diseases cause disgusting growths and deformations in the infected tissues. To illustrate, here is a picture of a UNSC soldier after complete infection by the Flood:

And, just below this, a picture of a disease-ridden appendage has been (thoughtfully) replaced with a silly kitten.

You’re welcome for that.

Most Hideous: VD

Flood vs. VD: Dogged Persistence

This one is a little easier to call. Some VD can never be cured, or cured only after years of painful treatment. Other types of VD can be erased with a simple shot or an antibiotic regimen (or so I hear), making VD contraction a mixed bag as far as persistence goes.

The flood, however, never stop coming. They swarm together so that - once you’ve fired every bullet you’ve ever owned - you get to start using your pistol like a hammer to finish off the leftovers. The Flood have been known to come back to life just for the pleasure of stabbing you in the back.

To illustrate, here’s a video of a headless, armless Flood following a player around. That’s right – this Flood can no longer fight, bite, or infect Master Chief, so its fall-back position is just to follow him around like a lost puppy. A lost, hideous, stinking puppy.

Tell you what, the next time we have to nuke Los Angeles to get rid of Herpes, we’ll call this one a draw.

Most Persistent: Flood

Flood vs. VD: Sneakiness

The ability to transmit itself relatively undetected is a great asset to an communicable disease. Crippling its victims and turning them into bed-ridden germ factories is exactly how the Black Death managed to approach a filthy, hygiene-challenged populace and only managed to kill 30% of them. You want a

sneaky virus? This is not a sneaky virus:

Massive, spore-spreading explosions? Very subtle.
Most Sneaky: VD

Flood vs. VD: Effects on Health

The worst of all VD will result in certain death after sucking the life out of you over a period of several years. For the flood, the above prognosis is often replicated from beginning to end on Tuesday before lunch. Also, there is no such thing as a “minor” bout of the flood.

Most Detrimental: Flood

It is a close call at two points each, but the final verdict must go to the Flood. The horrors of either infection are numerous. With the Flood, however, all the really crappy stuff is no less horrible just because it happens to you after you’re already dead. But for that small act of mercy, the Flood deserves a sincere thank you. Congratulations, Flood.

But seriously, no hugs. We don’t know where you’ve been.