Ruined My Life

I’ve decided to compile a list of what I feel are the most influential first person shooters released on PC as well as consoles. This first installement covers the years of 1993 on to 1998, however all of 1998 isn’t included, which will be continued in a later installment.

I know this has been done a millions time before, however this is the list that matters to me and if others feel the same, great!  As stated, this list is purely subjective from my point of view, and all are free to agree or disagree with it. I don’t feel comfortable ranking these games, instead I’ll present them in a chronilogical orders and let you readers decide how they should be ranked.

Wolfenstein 3D

Who can forget their first experience with Wolfenstein 3D? I can still remember it clearly to this day, heading over to my buddy’s house as a kid to check out this “amazing” game his dad had gotten from a buddy at work. Loading the game up on his blazingly fast 386 cpu, the main menu screen popping up with it’s awesome midi soundtrack. As soon as I first got in the game, nothing else to that date had prepared me for such an awesome gaming experience. I also remember the disappointment that I experienced when I learned my friend’s dad got the game on 3.5″ disks and I only had 5.25″, with no way copy them to 5.25″. Keep in mind in the early 90’s computers were not near common place in a house hold, often costing $2000 and up.

While Wolf3D may have not been the “first” FPS game, it is the one that brought it to the main stream of FPS gaming. Battling your way through the game, killing countless nazis, taking countless (or so it seems) left turns had never been so fun. From the first time one would play the game, you could only see where this genre could and did go.

Read more: Doom, Quake, Goldeneye 007, and Half-Life

The past few days have been abuzz with hype regarding Internet Explorer 8, however is it justified?  Microsoft has released their new web browser as a beta for “web developers and designers”.  Upon trying to download it to check it out for myself first hand I keep receiving URL errors through Microsoft’s website, so as of this point all commentary will be done from a non-hands on point of view.

Perhaps the most talked about new feature of IE8 is the private browsing feature dubbed “InPrivate“, aka Porn Mode.  Basically what InPrivate allows you to do is browser the web without any of your actions being traceable on your computer.  This is done by temporarily disabling the browser’s caching feature as well as denying cookies as they are sent to your browser.  However, using this feature does not truly make your web activties “Private”.  This isn’t an issue, however one needs to remember that your IP will still be logged on the website you visit as well as on your ISP’s end.  Apple’s Safari has a “Private Browsing” feature that functions basically the same way.

Microsoft has also planned some new features to provide user’s with rich web content outside of normal websites.  User’s can view selectable content from a website via a “WebSlice“.  Basically, a WebSlice is a kind of a “rich, designable” .rss feed that will be proprietary to IE8.  Instead of providing users with a .RSS feed that they can decide how they would like it to be displayed and/or utilized, WebSlices are little web apps that user’s can choose to view as designed by the web developer, thus taking out all of the work of using an RSS feed.  This could be an interesting concept, however will we EVER see it be cross browser compatible?  I doubt it, thus leading me to believe it will never really catch on.

Finally, Microsoft is touting full CSS 2.1 compatibility with IE 8.  With IE7 web designers still had to use several CSS Hacks to get around the atrocious CSS rendering.  Hopefully IE8 will actually adhere to W3C specifications.   As soon as I get it downloaded and give it a good looking over, I will follow up this post with a Hands On review.