F-ZERO to F-HERO friday: Best FPS Innovations

Honorable Mention
Mike - Guided Rockets (Perfect Dark, Nintendo 64)
Rocket launchers are always my favorite weapons in FPS games. I love the 0.5 seconds it takes for the rocket to reach its destination, because it's just long enough for the target to hear the noise, understand what it means, and to try desperately to escape...but it's always too late. So of course when Perfect Dark introduced the guided rockets, I had a field day. Who cares if you have to leave yourself exposed and totally vulnerable? There is almost nothing as satisfying as taking control of a guided rocket and hovering it silently in wait around a corner, and watching your opponent dash around and come face to face with looming, explosive doom. Following this up by chasing them around the level just to freak them out is just the icing on the rocket cake.


#5
Dale - Regenerating Health (COD4, Xbox 360)
It used to be I would run into the fray pepper the crowd of baddies take some hits and spend the next twenty minutes running around looking for health. Avoiding all groups and turning to guerilla tactics looping around seperating a few bad guys off and killing them quickly before more bad guys show up. I know I should play a little more carefully. Maybe no run in a spray and stick more to my guerilla tactics from the get go. But you know what thats a weekness of mine you give me a giant gun and some shit to shoot imma going to shoot it. With the invention of regenerating health ie if you stop getting shot for about 20 seconds your back to full health. I quickly took advantage of this style of play by running and gunning in stints. A stop and pop type of killing. Well a mixture of the two. Shoot like a deranged maniac, find cover pick a few off, jump out fill the area with holes.

Mike - Martyrdom (Call of Duty 4, Xbox 360))
This perk, which drops a grenade when you die, is awesome for two completely different reasons. From a statistical viewpoint it is a huge score benefit as getting kills after you die is just incredible. It's just free, bonus points. You can also kamikaze rush into a group of enemies and take them all out by sacrificing yourself. However as good as that all is it's even better because it's a giant FUCK YOU to your opponents. I have to think it was originally meant to counter the Halo jackassery known as teabagging, where when you kill someone you crouch on their face repeatedly so that all they can see is your armored Master Chief nether regions pumping up and down. But with this perk on when someone tries to teabag you all they get is a crotch full of grenadey goodness, and when you respawn you die again because you are helpless with delicious laughter.


#4
Dale - Vehicles (Halo series, Xbox, Xbox 360)
You know those old rich people who drink wine. They smell the cork, smell the wine, twirl the wine, smell the wine again, take a small sip swish it around spit it out and fully fully enjoy every aspect of the wine the tannins every little bit of that wine is enjoyed. I'm like that in Halo except its not wine its the Scorpion Tank. I'm not smelling the cork, I'm shootin. I'm not smelling the wine I'm shooting. I'm not twirling the wine I'm shooting the machine gun in 30 second bursts. I'm not smelling the wine again I'm running people over. I'm not sippin the wine I'm shooting everything EVERYTHING with that giant cannon. I enjoy every aspect of that delicious beautiful tank. I compliment the waiter and tip him with MORE CANNON FIRE. Since the tank has no tannins or subtlety of flavor i just scream with glee and shoot it more.

Mike - Killcam (Call of Duty 4, Xbox 360)
The Killcam shows you who killed you immediately after dying. To be more specific, it shows you the last five or so seconds of that player's perspective before they killed you. This can be frustrating ("He just threw a random grenade! Fuck!"), helpful ("Ohhhh THAT'S where he's hiding and sniping from!") or...downright humiliating ("Oh...he snuck up behind me, jumped up and down a few times, spun in circles, and then pulled the pin on a grenade and held it behind me until it exploded. Huh.")


#3
Dale - Learning New Abilities (Far Cry)
So you know when your playing an fps and you get bored of just shooting people. You start shooting them in the crotch or arms or even good trusty old head shots. You try to alleviate the tiresome shoot in torso till dead trance you fall in. Shooting barrels driving over with vehicles helps but it never feels as fresh and new as it once did. You have to face your relationship with your game getting stale. That is however unless there is learnable skills like far cry where you can jump 30 feet punch people so they fly 20 feet and even set up traps. That is enough foreplay to keep any murdering love affair fresh.

Mike - Teleportation (Shadowrun, Xbox 360)
I never even played this game, just the demo, but one of your abilities was a short-range teleport. Yes you heard me TELEPORTATION. You remember the movie Jumper that just came out that was about a guy who could teleport? Remember how badass Nightcrawler's fight in the White House was in X2? And how when you ask people what superpower they would teleportation is always right behind flight and invisibility? That's because teleporting is FREAKING. AWESOME. Imagine if James Bond had the ability to teleport in the movies. He would be trapped behind some old pipes by like nine russian guards with AK47s and he would just teleport behind them and plug them all in the head. This is what you could do in Shadowrun. You could also teleport up or down so you could get up to high ledges or "warp" down through solid floor to a basement below you. It was unbelievable. I cannot even imagine what a multiplayer match would be like between people who were skilled at using the teleport ability. I think my brain would fall apart.


#2
Dale - Rediculous Sci-Fi Futuristic Weapons (Turok)
You know what I was doing while people were running around re-created WW2 levels shooting some germans in dem grill pieces. Running through the mud dealing with recoil and trenches and enemies fully bunkered up. Go on guess. Give up I was hunting FUCKING DINOSAURS SHOOTING THEM IN THE NECK AND EXPLODING THEIR FUCKING HEAD WITH A CEREBERAL BORE. I am sure though you were having fun being historically and realistically correct. If thats for you have fun with the billion games that are trying to be realistic I however will be doing something I want and thats flying through space finding new worlds and new races and then shooting the shit out of them.

Mike - Portal Gun (Portal, Xbox 360)
Even though this isn't really an FPS game, it's just in the FPS point of view, it had to be mentioned. As cool as teleporting is, warp portals are so much better. The things you could do in this game were mind-blowing, and this was in heavily restricted, very linear levels. Just picture what you could do with a portal gun in an actual FPS game. Soldiers with guns rushing towards you? How about a portal on the ground in front of them and the other portal on a skyscraper 500 feet overhead. Locked door? Smash a window and shoot a portal on a wall inside the building - presto, you're in. Portal is the most innovative FPS feature in ages because it forces you to think in a truly 3D sense. Not just in the sense that "Okay I'm on the ground and I have to aim my gun UP and sideways at the same time to shoot something in the air", but in the sense that you have to actually learn to look at things not just from your current position and perspective, but also from high above you, below you, in another room entirely, etc. It's a revolutionary idea and seems like a great indicator of things to come.


#1
Dale - Dual Wield (Golden Eye)
Everyone knows Golden Eye is the grand daddy of all FPS we all cut our teeth on this game with the 4 person split screen. The game was amazing on many levels wether its the characters the guns the levels whatever. For me there was one thing that ruled above all. Thats shooting two guns at once. "Gee this shooting someone with a gun is pretty fucking rad how could it ever be better oh i know shooting this dude with TWO GUNS." Two dostovels, please, try beating that its like being a modern german dirty hairy.

Mike - Reviewable Matches (Halo 3, Xbox 360)
How do you know something is innovative? When you experience it once and then from that point on you wish every other game in existence had that same feature. That's innovative, and that's how amazing the match review feature in Halo 3 is. The ability to re-watch your matches is such an obvious feature, it's insane that it hasn't shown up until now. I do remember seeing it in a Tekken game, but when there's only 2 characters there's not much point re-watching it since you already saw it all. But when there's two whole teams fighting it's super fun just watching all the chaos and carnage.

Which leads me to the second awesome sub-feature - free-roaming camera. The ability to switch your camera to any player's perspective - or just to have it floating freely on the battlefield, watching everything - is RIDICULOUS. You can see exactly what someone did to reach a ledge you thought was unreachable, you can watch through someone's eyes and guess what they were thinking as they played, or you can just enjoy a good match a thousand different ways. It's like how when DVDs came out everyone was crowing about how movies would have scenes shot from different angles. Yeah that never happened. But Halo 3 did and the ability to be an omniscient voyeur is tremendous.

Now if only you could use this completely controllable camera to grab memorable or hilarious screenshots or video clips. Man that sure would be a fun feature and it sure would be OH WAIT THAT'S RIGHT YOU CAN DO THIS. You can screengrab, you can capture video, you can do it all from multiple angles or from anyone's point of view or from the sky or ground or inside a bunker...it's amazing. And because Bungie are a team of geniuses (genii) they made these all uploadable to their website where you can download them and show them off. Now when you shoot your rocket launcher at a pylon and send it flying skyward, killing someone leaping overhead, you can save that special moment for posterity and show it off to all your friends who totally don't care. That's the sign of brilliant innovation.