Enter Blog Title Here

This is a well worn topic in certain circles so I wont get into anything really that in depth, but from a design perspective I don't understand why anyone would want a game to take place from the first person perspective. If you don't know what I'm talking about it means all you see is what would be seen from a virtual character's eyes directly in front of him or her.

At first, I think people assume this means the game is somehow more realistic as if that is what you see in real life. So why wouldn't you want to play a game that way?

The thing is that in actual life I have more senses than just vision and crappy computer sound to tell me whats going on. For instance, I can feel my feet and tell what I'm walking on. I can also tell if someone is punching me in the neck from behind and it doesn't take me more than a split second to turn around and focus on said puncher.

But I don't care about how a game compares to real life. Of course it won't be like real life! I just care if the game is fun and the first person perspective restricts my motion in such a way that the game is 'LESS' fun. The worst example of this is when I'm required to jump or crouch to avoid some death bringing lava or other obstacle. The control in these situations is horrifyingly bad and makes me want to quit playing the game immediately. If you want me to jump on a platform, then let me see my character's feet please.

Most people assume that I don't know what I'm talking about at this point in this conversation. They think I haven't played first person games before. Truth is that I've been playing first person games since the Commodore days long before ID thought it would be cool to put an allied commando in castle Wolfenstein, but those games were not like the shooters of today.

Wolfenstein was the first 'First Person Shooter' (FPS) that I ever played, and I played it in college (94). It was entertaining and at the time technologically interesting. ID software dealt with the tech limitations of the day by not animating the main character but letting you see through his eyes. It was brilliant.

Now we have the technology to fully render complete 3D images of our video game characters, but whenever I play an FPS, I don't even get to see them. Instead all I see is a hand with a gun in it that rotates around as I search for targets over and over again.

My biggest complaint against the FPS is that it is by far the genre of game that has the least differentiation in gameplay between the various titles. My opinion is that these games are simply copies of each other with no discernable differences outside of setting and story. For example, I have the same experience playing Delta Force that I do playing Halo 3 and the games are more than 8 years removed from each other.

MY FPS RESUME
My most recent 'retry' on the FPS genre is the original Halo. I bought this for PC because it was cheap and because it is probably most responsible for making this genre into the monster money maker that it is today. Before Halo, I spent a lot of time with the original Medal of Honor as well as one of its sequels that had online play, so I have played FPS games with other people, including the old PC favorite Delta Force which I played at many a LAN party back in the missionary days.