There was also the likes of Gears of War adding realism to gunfighting by emphasising cover mechanics and minimising incoming damage rather than soaking it up and hoovering up medkits.īut as we entered the era of the “cover shooter” and the “realistic shooter” there was a sense that gaming had lost touch with part of what was fun about the original boomer shooters. Stealth, alternative paths, talking your way around problems as well as shooting. Half-Life, Thief, System Shock and Deus Ex all paved the way to the immersive sim, in which player choice was king. Quake introduced full polygonal 3D while simultaneously Duke Nukem 3D discovered that you could have levels that look like cinemas and fast food restaurants and actual places that exist rather than demonic labyrinths.Īnd the innovations didn’t stop there, as technology improved and memory capacity expanded people were discovering all kinds of wonderful ways that first person games could be more than just popping at dudes in a room. Then Doom discovered how to make one bit of floor higher or lower than another bit of floor and that set the world ablaze. It started with Wolfenstein 3D being nothing but single level corridor shooting that as far as the engine was concerned was basically a 2D game being viewed from a funny angle. That was what drove the progression of shooters in the 90s. The onus of new, cutting edge video games has always been to make things bigger, more impressive, more complex, and frequently more realistic. I think retro-style boomer shooters still provide something that modern triple-A shooters do not. But I think there might be something more to it than that. That’s certainly part of it, and most definitely the motivation behind the boomer shooter design of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal which arguably kickstarted the current wave. Popular culture always being nostalgic for the world of 20 to 30 years ago because that’s when the people who create popular culture and generate the most profit for it were around the age of 12, that wonderful nostalgic period in most people’s lives when they’re just old enough to properly appreciate their entertainment but not yet old enough to be cynical about it. Well, a lot of it’s the usual nostalgia wave. Fine, forget it, so back to the point, why are so many of them cropping up now? I suppose “boomer shooter” also implies that these games tend to be much more violent and feature protagonists capable of dealing out more violence than the kind you see in your more modern, more realistic triple-A shooters. Yes I am being overly prickly about this. Boomers are people who were born in the baby boom after the second world war and proceeded to grow up and divert all the money to themselves, I was born in the 80s, I’m just as much a victim of the boomer economy as you young scrotes. But these are the shooters I was playing when I was a teenager and I’m not a fucking boomer. In meaning an old-style shooter, that is, shooters for old people, i.e., boomers. So what’s brought on this present wave of interest in boomer shooting? Actually can I just say, I kinda hate “boomer shooter” as a term.
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