On Hardcore Shooters

When I was in High School during the early 2000's, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike were all the rage. At our homes my friends and I played Half Life, and on our school computers we installed and played Unreal Tournament on our free time, until everyone found out about it and got out of hand, and we got shut down. From there we gravitated to LAN Cafes, which exploded in popularity and we played Counter Strike beta for hours upon hours every weekend. When console shooters like Halo and Call of Duty started rising in popularity, I thought they were fun but ultimately shallower experiences, and I basically ignored them and focused more on playing games in other genres like RPG, fighting, and 3rd person action. My college anime club had a launch day tournament to celebrate the release of Halo 2, which prompted me to get that game (the Xbox was a birthday gift), but the subsequent multiplayer experiences were so terrible that Halo 2 made me quit online multiplayer for a whole decade. Only recently did I return to online shooters, via Metal Gear Online 3, which I became obsessed with. Since then I have gone back and tried to involve myself in other contemporary shooters such as the Battlefield, Overwatch, DOOM 2016 and Halo, but these games are always compared unfavorably to the games I played in school by the larger gaming community and are generally considered "casual" shooters. I largely agree, and this has caused a hunger to find FPS games with high skill ceilings, deep gameplay mechanics, and which require technical skill in order to reliably defeat the competition. This blog will generally document my journey to find a modern "hardcore" shooter, assess the games I've played along the way, and maybe even recommend a few good ones that got buried with time or were never fully appreciated to begin with.