Ah, point and click adventures – they bring back such good memories. The amount of hours I wasted on my Atari ST trying to complete Operation Stealth, or trying to remember the code that bypassed the age test on the first Leisure Suit Larry, allowing you to see badly drawn naked ladies in their full, pixellated glory. Great fun. So I greeted Fenimore Filmore’s Revenge with a sense of nostalgia and good spirits. For the first five minutes, anyway. After that, the nostalgia and good spirits were replaced by frustration and boredom.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I expected more than a simple, linear point-and-click adventure, using no more than three simple commands (look, use, shoot) to solve puzzles (and I use the term “puzzles” very loosely there) which, when solved, reward (and I use the term “reward” very loosely there) you with cut scenes that keep skipping and lose their sound half way through. You would have thought that, after the storyline and puzzles, there wouldn’t be much to get right in a point-and-click adventure, mainly the pointing and clicking bit. But I soon grew tired of watching my little cowboy not understanding where I wanted him to go, deciding instead to spin around in a circle a few times before finally getting the gist of what I wanted him to do.

Some of the levels take the form of a third-person shooter, which seems like a bit of an afterthought that was tagged on at the end. It doesn’t work at all, and feels far too awkward to be entertaining. Even the little grammatical mistakes (“look at the Bill Carson”) give off a feeling that there has been no thought put into this game whatsoever. But the thing that really got me is how anyone can justify spending £18 on a game this poor, when only two to three hours of playing time are given back in return.

If this were a little indie game on Steam costing a couple of quid, then fair enough. But come on now. I have played some demos that aren’t much shorter than Fenimore Filmore’s Revenge. One of selling points of the game states it is a “humoristic western adventure!” but the only thing I found slightly amusing was the quality of some of the voice acting. The joke is on you if you part with your cash to buy this thing.

2/10

I sat down to type my instinctive response: that no, it’s not necessarily, but we’re at least given a context in which killing is acceptable based on the rules of videogame narrative. Action games are largely centred around the concept of self-defence – if you don’t shoot the enemies, they’ll still shoot you – and that’s not something you can apply to the sexual abuse of innocent bystanders.

But then, perhaps that’s only something I accept as obvious because I grew up playing Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. But as videogames strive ever more towards their twisted notion of realism, they seem to be leaving this important issue behind. We shoot to kill, and think nothing of it. We see comrades fall and say nothing more than “bugger, this next bit will be harder now.” We wilfully ignore the fact that you can’t quickload when you die in real life. The issue here isn’t really the age-old debate about whether videogames desensitise us towards violence, but that they perhaps fail to acknowledge the seriousness of their common subject matter. And if the medium is going to be considered mature, something it so desperately wants to be, is this not something that’s going to severely hinder its claim?

Michaël Samyn – one half of Tale of Tales, a developer whose two most significant releases have tackled the issue head-on – is worried. “Our society is so focused on eternal youth that that ageing and dying has become a taboo subject. The way in which videogames try to pretend that death is simply a meaningless game mechanic could be interpreted as a refusal of dealing with the issue.”

Of course, the counterpoint is that “it’s only a game,” something we play with, something to entertain us. But Samyn notes a flaw in the argument. “Play has always been an important tool for learning to cope with things you do not fully understand. As such, games should be dealing with death and ageing all the time, because it’s such a big issue in our contemporary society. So this rampant murdering of enemies is a serious problem. Ever gamer knows that, in essence, the first-person shooter is basically a game of ‘pop the bubbles’. But the fact that these bubbles are skinned as different life forms – often humans – is problematic. It’s not hard to imagine how such kind of play would desensitise players to the value of human life – or at least the life of everyone considered an enemy.”

This all comes down to whether we consider the term “game” a misnomer, particularly with new indie houses like Tale of Tales springing to the fore, producing games that eschew traditional gameplay mechanics in favour of something more artistic and expressionistic. It’s a term that, three decades years after the medium’s inception, has clearly stuck and is usually applicable, but perhaps our reading of it will change if more of these non-games that get people so worked up start to appear. It’s worth pointing to Tale of Tales’ own The Graveyard as an example of death being given real weight: when you die in that, you can’t even bring up the menu, and have to ctrl-alt-delete to the task manager to quit.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Kieron Gillen agrees that the treatment of death in games is often trivial, but is unsure whether it’s necessarily a bad thing. “Why not?” he asks. “It supposes an aesthetic purpose for the developer – that death should be treated like it is when your gran dies or whatever. A serious treatment of death can be powerful and moving, but it’s certainly not the only way to view it, and never has been throughout the history of human art and expression across all media. It’s like saying that being bankrupted in Monopoly trivialises the world’s financial downturn.”

“Pretend is safely pretend,” adds fellow Rock, Paper, Shotgun editor John Walker. “I’d want to see some convincing data before I believed anyone would react to the death of a loved one with less emotion because they’d watched Lara fall off 40,000 cliffs.” It rings true. And surely, if anything can be said towards the age-old violent games debate, it’s that this opportunity for artificial gunplay is in some sense beneficial. Surely the appeal of something like, say, Manhunt lies in its ability to tap into the masochistic side of our psyches, without us having to live out our disgusting fantasies? It certainly wasn’t adored because of its ingenious game design…

Of course, someone predisposed through psychological issues to brutally slaying another human being may be given ideas by a videogame. But equally, this person might get those ideas from the news – that’s arguably far more likely. For the overwhelming majority, there’s a barrier of fantasy, which allows us to experience another world where crazed destruction is fun, not tragic – and the barrier prevents any crossover, because we know what’s real, and what is not.

“Humans like fantasising about killing people,” says Gillen. “There are parts of us which are forever wanton boys, killing for our sport. Violent entertainment serves this purpose. I recall Warren Ellis’ lovely quote about videogame narrative and Soldier of Fortune: ‘No-one’s playing Soldier of Fortune for the plot. They’re playing it so they can stick knives in people’s dicks’.”

Is this ignoring a wider issue, though? Are there more subtle layers of this debate that tie videogame content in with the broader picture of society? Michaël Samyn has noticed what he considers to be a worrying trend. “Videogames basically subscribe to the ideology of the ruling classes of the world,” he muses. “The idea of a single monstrous enemy that needs to be utterly destroyed is an all too painfully familiar one with respect to the foreign policy of the previous regime in the United States. Of course, there’s a chicken or the egg question here: was Bush able to get away with his simplistic rhetoric because we were all comfortable with such ideas thanks to videogames, or are videogames imitating life and as such supporting such extreme policies?”

Tying these two threads together so closely does seem a little tenuous, particularly when the majority of the gaming community – and particularly the specialist press – appears vehemently left-wing. But this oversimplification of ‘the enemy’ is something that’s apparent over a wide range of entertainment media. You have the goodies, and you have the baddies, but this neglects to truly identify how humanity works. As the saying goes, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

But this doesn’t explain the clinical reaction to our own death in videogames. Joystiq’s Ludwig Keitzmann considers why this may be. “Modern games, which often aim to incorporate an involving narrative and cinematic gameplay, don’t really have a place for traditional death. With most stories presented in a linear manner, it simply doesn’t make sense for the main character to die and then suddenly reappear without any explanation. With the exception of games like Metal Gear Solid, games tend to treat death – and reloading of saves, for instance – as something that occurs outside the game’s world, which is why it doesn’t have much impact.”

It certainly seems, though, that regularly removing the player from the game world leads to a shocking disruption of the immersion that so many titles strive towards. Keitzmann points to Prince of Persia as a title that embraces the issue and works it into the game’s own universe, removing the necessity of fourth-wall breaking. I’ve long heralded the Grand Theft Auto series as a fine example of how to punish the player without resorting to a nonsensical portrayal of death: when your health runs out, you’re taken to hospital, and have to pay your medical fees – resulting in a harsher punishment than any quicksave / quickload combination could ever demand.

“If you assume immersion equals what life is,” says Kieron Gillen, “yeah, it’s totally immersion-breaking. But immersion can also be an accepting of a game’s – and its world’s – rules. If it’s a world which makes player death seem natural through various techniques, immersion can totally keep ticking over.”

“Coming back to life after death is jarring,” adds John Walker. “However, we save before death, and then restore that moment. It’s going back in time rather than coming back to life, and that makes more reasonable sense. I know where it does bother me: multiplayer gaming. I cannot rationalise respawning players on any level, and I think it might be an element of what puts me off such games.”

This is interesting, as it’s a case that doesn’t bother me. Playing a deathmatch game is so obviously submitting to another reality that respawning doesn’t seem to grate. Plus, if death were to be given any gravitas in this genre, it would be extremely troubling. After all, where’s the fun in inflicting actual death on an abundance of other characters? If these characters can pop back into existence after a few seconds, the notion of death becomes more akin a quick ‘time out’ session in sport. It’s not really “death” in the usual sense, so there’s no need for moral constraint.

So maybe it’s just the terminology that’s a little skewed. Not that I have a suggestion for the medium-wide renaming of an intrinsic gameplay feature, but still. Something doesn’t seem quite right.

Indeed, there’s a big gap between the emotional response to death in a multiplayer shooter – complete indifference, essentially – to that evoked by The Graveyard. Obviously, games like this and Jason Rohrer’s thought-provoking Passage take the idea and run with it, but this more serious treatment of death is seeping its way into more mainstream releases as well, which I can only see as a move forward for the industry. “Far Cry 2 had an interesting buddy system,” recalls Ludwig Keitzmann, “where NPCs would rush to your aid but run the risk of being killed – permanently. Their unique characterisations made them quite endearing, and the manner of their passing can be quite an affecting thing to watch.”

It’s an example I certainly identify with. For all Far Cry 2’s quirks, there was something eminently real about its characters, even shining through some questionable acting. But did we feel strongly about our buddies’ deaths because of our connection with them, or simply because it would make the rest of the game more difficult?

“Maybe it’s both,” suggests Keitzmann, “but either way, it’s clearly one of the rare cases where death actually has a real consequence for you.”

A list of things you are never going to see in the world of videogames:

1. Nintendo is going to come back from the brink of hardware sales disaster and deliver the most popular home console of the generation, which will outsell both Microsoft and Sony machines despite being nowhere near as powerful.

2. Arch rivals Mario and Sonic will put their previous console wars behind them and team up for an official Olympic Games title and maybe even a sequel.

3. Nintendo will allow Rockstar to produce a fully fledged 3D interpretation of their ultra-violent, socially corrupting, sandbox-based crime spree series on the family-friendly DS system. Oh, and this entry into the Grand Theft Auto series will have a particularly strong emphasis on drug dealing.

Hold on a second…

Despite Nintendo’s console possessing a reputation for child-friendly and family-orientated games, Rockstar Leeds and Rockstar North have delivered the handheld’s most mature title to date, bringing sex, violence, drug trafficking and all the usual staples of GTA’s sandbox gameplay to the dual-screened console. Contrary to what you many may think, this is actually not the first game in the series to arrive on a Nintendo portable (both Gameboy Colour and Advance saw old school, top-down editions a la the PC and PlayStation originals) – though it still came as a shock to many that a console on which they‘re used to petting puppies and training their brains will now allow gamers to shoot down prostitutes in cold blood before venturing on a Molotov cocktail rampage. This is even more surprising because Rockstar Leeds has managed to squeeze GTA IV’s stunning version of Liberty City (albeit minus Alderney) onto a tiny DS cartridge. The result is breathtaking and is perhaps the ‘purest’ title in the series for years.

The developers have opted for a more cartoon-styled world to play out this particular tale of gang warfare, very much in keeping with the comic-book look of the series’ loading screens and box art. This is probably as much to do with the limited capability of the console as it is artistic license, but the result is an incredible rendition of the GTA universe. You’ll also notice that the action is viewed from a much higher angle than in previous 3D versions – again, probably to avoid the issues of poor draw distance caused by the lack of horsepower under the bonnet. From static screenshots this can give the impression that the gameplay will be much closer to the original top-down games of the 32 bit era, but once the game is seen in motion you realise that this is no backwards step; this is indeed a complete 3D Grand Theft Auto experience on your DS despite the clever design choices used to disguise the hardware limitations.

Hardware limitations however aren’t what define the grade-A titles on Nintendo’s handheld. It’s the hardware innovations that count, and in this particular field Rockstar have excelled themselves. One of the biggest criticisms aimed at GTA over the years has been the repetitive nature of the core missions on offer; drive to point A, kill person B, escape to point C and repeat to final credits. By utilising the unique aspects of the console, the developers have breathed new life into the tried and tested mission structure. Arming bombs, hotwiring cars, constructing sniper rifles and hacking security systems can all pop up in the middle of a task and involve simple yet satisfying use of the touch screen. Even hailing a taxi has a new twist, requiring the player to whistle at their console before climbing aboard. These features, which many people – myself included – thought would be a throwaway gimmick, actually prove to immerse the player further into the Liberty City underworld and succeed in providing a much wider variety of missions than in any previous title in the series.

The story revolves around Huang Lee who arrives in Liberty City from China to deliver Yu Jian – a priceless sword he inherited following his father’s murder – to his uncle, a local Triad boss. Before you can say Niko Bellić, Huang is attacked, his sword stolen and he’s locked in a car that’s been pushed into the river. After a touch screen-based escape, the standard GTA story unfolds, with plenty of twists and turns and the razor-sharp wit fans have grown to expect. While that’s all very enjoyable, it’s also something of a let down. Grand Theft Auto IV pushed the boundaries of what can be achieved through the power of a well-written script, brilliantly delivered dialogue and a truly compelling story. Chinatown Wars has had to ditch the voice acting set to well-directed, real-time cut scenes in favour of static, comic book-esque visuals with subtitles, and a narrative that fails to even come close to its predecessor in terms of both scope and level of emotional involvement. But then again, it never actually tries to rope you in on an emotional level. Chinatown Wars is quite happy to use its tale of Liberty City’s criminal underbelly to simply entertain and lead the player onto the next action-packed mission, and that is by no means a bad thing – especially when what is there can be hysterically funny.

If the manner in which the story is presented in this iteration of the GTA universe can be considered a step backwards, then the same could easily be levied at the way in which the game plays. This is a frantic action game just like the original title, but reworked to include all of the brilliance of the games since they went 3D. Backwards it may be, but its one hell of a lot of fun. It’s the perfect blend of gameplay styles which suits the medium of handheld gaming down to the ground. Missions are short and focused for when you’re just sneaking in a quick five minute burst of DS time, but the city is still there for exploring should you have a spare hour or ten. All of the usual GTA distractions are present; taxis, police cars, ambulances and fire trucks can all be hijacked in order to make some quick cash, as well as a few new side missions such as a Chinese takeaway delivery service and a tattoo parlour (yet more touch screen fun). You’ll need all the money you can get from these tasks as life’s pretty tough for Huang when he first arrives in town, and completing the main story missions doesn’t really pay all that well. If you want to be able to afford a stockpile of weapons and armour, you’re going to have to find a faster way of making money – and what better way to do that in Liberty City, than via the sincere and honest tradition of drug dealing?

The drug dealing side to Chinatown Wars is far from a side-mission or extra mini-game. It’s an integral part of the title and throws up a whole new ‘economic-narcotic-management-sim’ slant on the overall gameplay. The idea behind it is simple enough: drug dealers can be found throughout the city. Buy and sell when the prices are right in order to maximise your profits. Easy. Just don’t get caught.

You’ll be given tip-offs regarding which dealers are buying and selling certain drugs through your PDA system, which serves to replicate GTA IV’s mobile phone as your in-game menu system. It’s all arranged brilliantly using the touch screen and also allows you to check your email on the move, use the GPS to see where you’re going and you can even order more weapons through the Ammunation website which will be handily delivered to your nearest safe house.

As with just about every title in the series, however, there is one absolute star of the show who steals the spotlight and truly pulls you into the game world. In this case, it is of course Liberty City. A sandbox of this size and with this much detail really shouldn’t be possible on the DS. This is an open-world so gritty and believable that simply driving around and exploring all it has to offer can rob you of hours at a time. Anyone who has played through Niko Bellić’s story will feel instantly at home: while this isn’t a street for-street-replication of GTA IV’s Liberty City, it’s a very faithful representation with just about every landmark and point of interest you’d hope to see included all present and accounted for. This is a masterful achievement, one that’s worth the entrance fee alone.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is an incredible addition to the series. It heavily acknowledges what has gone before it, taking the best elements of both its 2D and 3D predecessors whilst breaking new boundaries with its clever use of the DS hardware and the drug dealing management side to the game. While the story fails to touch the high watermark left by it’s home console cousin, avoiding any attempt to affect the player emotionally, it does manage to raise a smile now and then and succeeds in driving the action forwards towards it’s fantastic Mexican standoff finale. There is so much depth to this game I can’t believe it’s on a handheld system – and I’ve not even mentioned the brilliant new police chases, or the rival gang bases, street races, buying new safe houses, scratch cards, stunt jumps, security cameras… This list really could go on and on. When you’ve closed your DS mid-game, for example, re-opening it causes a shout of, “D’you wanna piece of ma pie?” Genius.

So here’s something I really never expected to see in the world of videogames. The best game on a Nintendo system doesn’t feature Mario or Zelda; it’s not even a first-party title. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is without doubt the finest game available for the DS. It’s adult, violent, shocking and crude, but above all else it’s an absolute riot. Isn’t that what carjacking, drug dealing and shooting hookers is all about?

9/10

Before we start getting carried away with ourselves and begin comparing ‘Sgt. Peppers’ with Soldier of Fortune, or ‘Houses of the Holy’ with Half-Life, I’ll point out that I don’t necessarily think that “old-school” shooters are better than “next-gen” ones (to use those sometimes misleading and very broad terms). But I would argue that there is something missing from the design of many games developed after the revolutionary watershed period of 1998-2000, and in particular from even the field’s strongest sons of the last few years. What it is that’s missing is difficult to pin down, but it’s arguable that in fact it’s a variety of interconnected aspects. Personally, though, I’d say that these absences are connected by the modern shooter’s influence by a central concept, one that’s mentioned more and more in press releases, previews and lofty statements of intent – realism.

We’ve all heard the “escapism versus realism” game design argument before, and probably read comments from designers over the years who have both played up and played down the importance of striving for realism in games. The FPS has long been considered the benchmark for advanced gaming engines, from Doom to Unreal to CryEngine – and with each successive incarnation, the titles using it have been hailed as the pinnacle of gaming technology. Those engines are then licensed out to developers who can’t afford to develop their own engines, giving rise to the concerns of some who claim that too many games look the same these days because of common technological heritage – but what I’d argue is that the emergence of today’s increasingly sophisticated engines has affected some of the core tenets of game design for the worse. More broadly though, this article will look at a few of the common hallmarks of my personal definition of the “classic FPS”, “Doom clone”, or whatever you might decide to call it – then we’ll think about why these features disappeared, and whether we’re likely to ever see them return.

***

Gore
Ah, good old ultraviolence. For many people, gore is one of the prime markers they think of when they cast their minds back to the heady days of Doom et al in the early- to mid-90s. Doom was one the FPS’ main contributions to the ongoing videogame violence argument, along with later releases like Raven’s notorious 2000 release Soldier of Fortune. Most of the big shooters from those times were very gory, arguably culminating in Monolith’s 1997 game Blood, which was very bloody indeed.

So what happened?
Gore in FPS games has never been in every example, but it does seem to have waned. The “gibbing” of enemies into bloody chunks was still fashionable in the late 90s and early 2000s, especially in multiplayer-focused games like infamous rivals Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena (both 1999), but games like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Half-Life 2 (2004) seemed to point to a lessening in gore’s pre-eminence. People certainly don’t seem to want to make gore a key gameplay element any more – those days appear to be gone. OTT gore just doesn’t seem to be in keeping with today’s often more serious, realistic shooters.

Surrealism
The primitive technology that old shooters used meant that creating genuinely realistic environments was virtually impossible, which was the reason that iD’s first proper FPS, Wolfenstein 3D, had the most boring level design that most people have ever witnessed. Clearly that was bad, but within a year or two the constraints had eased a little and for a period, level design in terms of realism was in a happy, compromised place. Compare it to film special effects – in 1991, ‘Terminator 2′ was released, and for me, has the perfect balance between then-groundbreaking CGI effects and conventional nuts-’n'-bolts SFX work. Realism was a similar issue in games a few years later – technology had evolved to a level which allowed developers to play around, but it didn’t allow them to create the potentially boring factories, streets and other identikit locations they were probably itching to. Instead, what we got were crude but fun attempts at real-world locations a la 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D) and/or the frequently surreal environments that technology allowed, as in games like Doom II, Blood, and Heretic.

So what happened?
Technology marched on and realistic environments became easier to portray. Of course this has allowed some brilliantly realised and interactive environments, but it has also given us some numb and tedious ones, a trap into which Monolith fell with their 2005 game F.E.A.R., which replaced Quake’s brown with grey and subjected us to endless offices, corridors and even the excitement of a water treatment plant! Oh, the joys. There have been some more environmentally interesting games in recent years, but better technology is one of the key things that has facilitated the droves of WWII and gloomy futuristic shooters we often find ourselves complaining about.

Humour
The older FPS games often relied on humour as one of their key tools, unlike today’s largely stony-faced, serious types. Whereas a lot of today’s FPS protagonists are of the “strong and silent” persuasion – most notoriously Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman – the average beefcake killing machine in the 90s was rather vocal. 3D Realms were particularly keen on this, making Duke Nukem into a veritable goldmine of wisecracks (“It’s time to kick ass and chew bubblegum… and I’m all outta gum”). Lo Wang from the lesser-known Shadow Warrior (1997) drew some criticism for his perceived racism but also could list a flair for comedy alongside severing heads in his skillset. It wasn’t just dialogue comedy though – whilst Caleb from Blood could give Duke and Lo Wang a run for their money with his one-liners, Blood was also filled with satirical references to other films and books, including but not limited to ‘Frankenstein’, ‘The Shining’, ‘The Fugitive’ and ‘Army of Darkness’. Duke 3D was in on this too, referencing lots of films and TV series in its expansion pack, not least ‘Dirty Harry’, ‘Die Hard’, ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Mission: Impossible’. These games also often humourously sniped at each other – dead visages of Commander Keen had to be destroyed to completed a secret level in Doom II, but in retaliation 3D Realms allowed Duke to find the mangled corpse of the Doom marine in one of Duke 3D’s secret areas. Duke’s wisecrack? “That’s one doomed marine!” – obviously.

So what happened?
Humour hasn’t completely died out in the modern FPS – Valve still seem keen on it, despite their games being some of the ones which hammered a few nails into the old FPS’ coffin. Team Fortress 2 has to be one of the most overtly silly shooters released in the last several years, and HL2: Episode Two had some humour of its own. But the increased seriousness in theme of today’s games has largely excised genuine attempts at humour, it seems. The masses of straight man war shooters and epic future war scenarios had seriously damaged the presence of wit in the FPS. It’s a shame, because those older games proved that combining humour with ultraviolence could be devastatingly effective. I mean, that’s how multiplayer works, isn’t it? Do Counter-Strike players run around in character, or do they deliberately try to engineer situations in which they can “accidentally” kill teammates with flashbangs? Exactly.

Simplicity
Just as crude technology demanded simpler (and potentially more imaginative) level design, the very concept of levels themselves was imposed on the classic shooters by technological limitations. Huge open areas, and cohesive, linked-together game worlds that we often expect today, didn’t even begin to properly take form until games like Quake II began adopting a hub system. It’s easy to forget how radical Unreal and Half-Life were in 1998 when they introduced level-less gameplay. But levels had their advantages – they could rapidly transport us between vastly different locales, they divided games up into handy bitesize pieces, too, which had numerous advantages. Levels made up episodes, which in turn made giving away games as freeware versions of games and demos easier and more convenient to distribute. Wondering why it takes so long to get hold of some demos these days? The death of the level system is, along with increased file sizes, one of the reasons.

So what happened?
The simplicity of game structure went out of the window partly because it wasn’t really necessary anymore. More sophisticated engines find large areas a doddle, In addition, consistent game worlds are a major selling point today as they allow for more open-ended gameplay, for example in games like Crysis. Levels are seen as a crude, retro feature of old and inferior games, not something to be returned to.

Speed
It’s well-known that a lot of the old games play a hell of a lot faster than today’s. Although you could famously run like a motorbike in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., everyone could do that all the time in the old days! The doom marine was like a plasma rifle-wielding Usain Bolt when sprinting, and stamina bars were yet to be invented. The fact that weapons didn’t need reloading also eliminated many of the pauses we find in today’s games.

So what happened?
It’s possible that game designers got a bit more precious about their beloved environments. Because today’s game worlds take a lot more effort and care to create than the often idendikit levels of the past, developers often express a wish to make sure players can’t plough through games too quickly. Maybe that, along with a striving for increased realism, was one of the factors that led to the ever-present stamina bar and inherently slower movement speeds. Either way, it’s meant that today’s games are less hectic and frenetic experiences than they used to be, often thriving on being more meditative and cautious – which gave rise to the tactical shooter sub-genre. The Doom-heads at the back are yawning.

***

It’s clear that there are pros and cons to lots of the features that define the fathers and godfathers of the FPS we know and love. If we go back and play classics like Duke Nukem 3D and Doom today we find that, like ‘Sgt. Peppers’, they are still works of genius. But like that album, does it mean that such a work could never be emulated? Did the classic shooters only work in the context in which they were developed, and do they appeal only to the retro-minded among us? These are big questions, but we know that people have tried to return to some of the old formulas, with mildly successful efforts like Serious Sam and Painkiller. Maybe the classic FPS stylings are dead after all, or maybe Duke Nukem Forever will stomp in and rekindle some of them (give it 20 years – Ed). But those old games are all still out there for the playing, and maybe we can hold out hope that some of today’s visionary developers can learn something from them – and, at the same time, step one of gaming’s flasgship archetypes up a gear once more.