Kyros on 30 November 2008
First Person Shooter games (as a genre) are one of the most brain-dead genre on the market. There are exceptions to this but most first person shooters have no puzzles and are remarkably linear games where you walk around shooting stuff with little or no strategy involved.
sigh, if a PC gamer would say that it would have some merit. Because there are truly deep and strategic games on that platform that make the gamer think:
RTS like Starcraft, business games like Rollercoaster Tycoon ..., Civilization, Sim City, and the unfortunately now dead adventure genre...
But from a console gamer this sentence would be ridiculous. (Don't know what you are therefore the would). Where are the console games that make you think?
Do you talk about the 3-4 puzzles in Action-Adventures like Tomb Raider? (Which should be the second biggest genre) or the really deep party game genre (Yeah Carnival games if you want to do something more intelligent than FPS) How about arcade and Jump&Run games like Mario Galaxy jump, jump jump again? Or JRPGs with endless dialog and ad nauseum repeated fights? The "puzzles" these games have are so basic its ridiculous. There are games that let you cook food (Cooking mama), walk around town and collect purple hats (Animal Crossing), garden and you have a problem with the FPS genre? Oh my god.
If you think those games are in some way more intellectually stimulating than Half-Life2 you live in a weird galaxy. FPS like Bioshock, Thief, Half-Life prove that FPS can be as varied and intelligent as any of the other genres.
And besides we are talking about GAMES. There is nothing wrong with blasting away a couple thousand aliens. Because its fun! Serious Sam was an amazing game because it didn't pretend to be something more than mindless fun. Because we play to relax (at least I do) If I want to be intellectually stimulated there are things like work or programming, or reading or ...
