Anyone else prefer the older arcade-styled shooters over the modern 'realistic' shooters?

[SvennoJ]

I fully agree and pretty much stopped playing shooters since CoD and Halo. Halo already felt slow to me, CoD killed my interest.

We used to have the best battles in Half-Life death match and Unreal tournament. Fights would last several minutes, both knowing the layout and location power ups perfectly. Escape was also possible, for example with a huge jump with the energy weapon, jumping on a train or behind a trap. Running backwards while navigating through the level became 2nd nature. That also left room for fun tactics, putting traps on doors and around corners to chase people into. The levels themselves also had a big variety of built-in traps.
We also used to restrict ourselves to only using pistols to have the best parkour like chase shootouts through the levels.

Unreal tournament also had some great ideas to level the playing field. One of the options made the player ahead fatter, thus easier to hit, while thinning people behind in score.
I also miss the silly weapons, for example the shrink ray from Duke Nukem 3D. Get hit enough and you shrink to the size of a mouse for a few seconds. Run like hell zigzagging all the way while your opponent tries to stomp on you. The old technology also made for some interesting gameplay. Portals and water were not see through, but you could shoot through them provided a whole different dimension to battles. And the elevator shoot outs in Duke Nukem 3D were the best. See someone go in an elevator, call the button to recall in back down and get ready, great fun.