Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry.  I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.”  However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:

Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.

It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting.  Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.

I’ve come to tolerate it.  Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed.  My problem?  We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.

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Two years back, I huddled some friends for fun with the X-Box 360 port of Doom, a game I consider the cream of the medium.  Their experience with shooters was mostly Halo, currently fighting a tight battle with Call of Duty for “face of the genre”.  The words most consistent in coming out of their mouths: “This game is so fast.”  Having first played the Doom series when I was eight, I could only think “No, this game is not fast.  Halo is slow.”

Sunday’s entry was the story of a franchise (Team Fortress) earning accessibility by not only sacrificing gameplay, but the element of speed.  As other genres satiate the best players by becoming faster, adding more notes, and throwing more bullets at the player, what the hell happened to the first-person shooter?

No wonder pro gaming can’t get off its ass in the United States.  This country has a gun fetish.  It loves war.  Today, the most popular shooters simulate war.  War requires teamwork.  And guess what?  Teamwork doesn’t sell tickets.  Superheroes do.  And the pace of games like Halo have become Kryptonite for world-class gamers.

I am a carry-over from an era where Doom said “cover is for pussies”.  That evolved into Quake and Unreal Tournament, half-shooter, half-gymnastics simulation.  Those evasive maneuvers have been replaced by “get behind the wall, you noob!”

If you want to blame any one game for this, the answer is beautifully ironic.  It was Doom 3.

Yeah, Halo was the coming-out party for the console shooter, but ID Software is the undisputed father of the genre.  Set in code, they declared the first-person shooter a genre where reloading weapons was for bitches, that dozens of beasts would simultaneously fail to cut you down.  And then Doom 3, thanks to the Duct Tape Reduction Act of 2184, was pure darkness chugging at eight frames a second.

So much for “cover is for pussies”.  Maybe I should go order Painkiller.  I’ll be back later.

The shotgun.  The Cyberdemon.  Deathmatch.  The coming-out party for 3-D graphics.  Open-source modmaking.  My introduction to a beautifully-violent video game universe.

Two days ago, the greatest game of all-time just turned fifteen.  Happy fuckin’ birthday.

Stars and Stripes, overseas newspaper for the American military, marches into January of 1994 with a message: another killing machine is invading personal computers, with Doom becoming a revolution via online deathmatch. Leave it to college tech support (a.k.a. pussy liberal closet-virgins) to disapprove.

“[T]he name of the massively anticipated game is apt for the operators of college computer networks who have seen this software gum up their systems during finals week.

“As a result, computer networks at Carnegie Mellon University in Philadelphia and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, slowed to a crawl. And computer systems managers at universities in Texas say they believe it’s just a matter of time before they’re hit.

“According to the consultant I discussed this with, it is inevitable that it is going to happen,” said a University of Texas at Austin Computation Center employee who asked not to be named. “Right now, it’s the end of the semester and a lot of the kiddos are gone.”

“[A] matter of time before they’re hit”? An “employee who asked not to be named”? As someone who’s made his game from taking things out of proportion, this is one beautiful, technologically-inept line of bullshit. All this story needs is an out-of-context one-liner and we’ve got a special moment in gaming journalism…

“A Texas A&M programmer and analyst by the name of Elroy Dsouza states: “This game [Doom] is not conducive to a networked computer environment.”"

Doom…network play…not conducive to…excuse my while I direct the failplane to its landing location