To put things in perspective, the last game I bought was Mortyr - 1st person shooter, Quake engine, kinda boring but got the job done. Before that, I had Carmageddon, loved it, but played it so much that after a while all I did was become the super cop tank guy and drive around wasting police cars.
So I’m looking for mindless fun action with good graphics.
Blood and Blood 2: Pretty good, far enough behind the curve they won’t eat up all your resources (cash or computer). I like the general mood (especially of the first one) and the dark humor Caleb spouts. And hell, Blood 2 has some really cool weapons! The singularity generator springs to mind, and nothing eases away the cares of the day like plinking idiots from 2000 yards with your scoped sniper rifle.
Postal: A third-person shooter that has some really wicked ways to kill people. Flame throwers, heat-seeking missiles, automatic weapons, and grenades can be used by your character to great effect on characters that don’t die immediately. For example, if you shoot someone with your flame-thrower that person will run around and scream. If you wound someone with a gun, that person will lay on the ground and moan (I’m not kidding) “Kill me…kill me now…” And you can, by kneeling right by him and performing a Kevorkian Special with your trusty sidearm. And when the mindless violence of the prepared levels gets tiring, the game has one hell of a level-builder so you can create your own battlefields. You can even mix-and-match AIs and weapons and give, for example, a child the mind of a soldier and heavy weaponry to match, or a grenade thrower the mind of a robotic missile launcher but the armament of a saxaphone player. This is an older game, but it is as fun as hell.
Mindless fun eh? Here’s what I can think of off the top of my head.
Half Life: Counterstrike (Online Game)
Unreal Tournament (Both offline and online, online component better but offline AI very good)
StarCraft (Takes a little thought. Single and multiplayer)
Diablo II (Takes no thought. Single and multiplayer)
Quake III: Arena (Single and Multiplayer, stick with multiplayer)
I hate to bring a negative into the discussion, but don’t take Derleth’s recommendation of Postal. Postal is one of the worst games ever made for the PC; after about two minutes of fun, you realize there’s really no game behind it.
If you want a cheap, fun first-person shooter, try Jedi Knight, which is easy to get into and has a terrific soundtrack.
This games is Duke Nukem meets Austin Powers! Everything is cool. It is a great first person shooter with cool tools. It is set in the 60s and the clothes and sets are great. It is funny as hell. It is varied enough that it never gets boring. I hope they make an expansion pack. I do think you need a pretty high end machine to make it play well, but you can tell that from the demo.
IMHO Unreal Tournament is the best game ever for mindless blasting fun. Not only did I buy a whole new computer to experience the game at its best, I also bought a £60 optical mouse to facilitate shooting people in a particular part of the face.
Never took to Quake for some reason, think the lack of a sniper rifle was the thing. I’m not a camper but one shot kills? Ooh mama, that and the sheer joy of some shithead at the other end of a coridor from you with the shield belt and a rocket launcher lobbing hi ex death at you, and you dance around it all while popping enforcer caps in his ass.
I would like to second (or third even) the nomination for Diablo II. It’s easy to get into and the game is long enough and can be replayed in each of 5 classes and withing the same class a character be developed any number of ways. Great game with good replay (and a kickass expansion pack to boot).
I’ll bring not a negative, but a caution: Blood 2 is the twitchiest games I’ve ever owned. By that I mean, there’s just no telling whatsoever if it’ll run or not. Ran perfectly fine at lower detail settings on my first system. I reinstalled it about a year later on that very same system–and it just plain would not work. My newer PC, likewise, running it just doesn’t happen–which is a shame, because Caleb had a great personality. There was a key whose sole purpose was making him utter a quip when you pressed it.
Strong support for Serious Sam and Unreal Tournament; Sam is about the epitome of mindless action fun.
Half-Life is a classic; large chunks of it are frequently more puzzle-ish than action, but it still deserves a mention.
If you want to take a gamble on action with a bit more mind-engagement, I strongly recommend System Shock 2 (and the first one, for that matter, if you can find it–tall order these days) and Deus Ex.
Seems this is mostly FPS recommendations. No problem with me, God knows I love 'em, but they’ve never gotten me addicted. At least not in unhealthy ways like staying up until two in the morning when I have to go to work tomorrow.
If you want the most addictive games on the planet, check out the Civilization series. The first came out about 10 years ago, and was followed by a sequel some years later. You could pick up Civilization II, which is pretty old, or you could go for the similarily bargain priced Alpha Centauri. I recommend the latter.
Of course I am eagerly awaiting Civilization III.
In case you didn’t know, Civilization is based on the premise that you start out with a group of stone-age humans and run them until they become a glorious empire. The gameplay is so smooth and fantastic that even when you’re playing for the first time you will keep playing and playing until you have succeeded. (You’ll also keep playing if you don’t.)
The game is digital crack. Run away! Run away now!
I, too, would offer up a recommendation for Serious Sam. The body count at the end of each level is astronomical, and it has the coolest minigun in any game I’ve ever played.
I’d also recommend Unreal (no, not, Tournament, though that’s fun as hell, too). Do NOT play UT without playing Unreal first. That’s an order, marine.
well, Planescape: Torment kicks such a prodigious amount of ass i cant help but to reccomend it.
but for FPS…
well, i just played a demo of Red Faction, and it looks nice.
nice story for the first level, and it’s big selling point works GREAT!
the “thing”, as it were, is that all surfaces and objects are deformable and destructable, as in, you can tunnel through walls rather than open the doors, if you have blasting caps or a more powerful explosive weapon. one of the vehicles you can stal is a drilling tank. fun stuff.
in one area in the first level, there is a tank and some troops crossing a bridge. if you want, you blow out the bridge and then later there are fewer baddies and no machinegun tank in a room. fun fun fun. i might go and buy the full version.
If you like blasting space ships into oblivion I can’t recommend Homeworld too highly (on budget realese now) and its sequel Homeworld: Cataclysm.
Total War: Shogun (plus expansion pack The Mongol Invasion) is the best real-time strategy game I’ve ever played, and you get to use cool ninja warriors as well.
In the Sim City/Civilisation category Pharaoh is absolutely fantastic. City building in ancient Egypt, obviously.
When you get tired of running around and blasting everything that moves, check out Thief and Thief 2. These are “first-person sneakers”. At the most difficult level, the point is not to be seen, not to be heard, and not to kill anything.
now, since Alex’s post was slightly vague, Homeworld isn’t a spacefighter game. it is space-based RTS, but it’s fully three-Dee.
as in, you can send your ships down, and then have them rise out of a nebula from beneath to start wailing away at the vulnerable engines, possibly shattering some frigates and whatever destroyer/cruiser set is spearheading the assault fleet before the escorting fighters and corvettes chase you off…
or the incredible coolness of watching a mass of last-ditch mines soar into an unsuspecting “victory” fleet, smashing everything before they realize what happened as a sortie group of your cruisers drop out of hyperjump to tear apart the undefended mothership.
or simply tricking a brigade of enemy Ion Firgates into firing their ion cannons inside a nebula, and cooking all their escorts in the ensuing lightning storm!
or the light show of blasting a cruiser until it’s weapon reactor touches off, sending out a MASSIVE glowing blue cloud of ionic plasma fury.
ohh, now i want to go play a round, and it’s too late in the evening…
well, if you do get it, download the patches, especially the Pilotview patch; it is incredibly cool to look out of an interceptor’s cockpit while it’s in a dogfight.
the story is neat too. some liken it to B5’s pilot.
Need For Speed: High Stakes (or perhaps Porsche Unleashed). However, they are coming out with Motor City Online in mid-October, if online racing appeals to you and you have a decnet connection. There will be a fee for online racing however.
High Stakes already has online racing for free, the graphics are great and there are plently of tracks and modes of play. (ie. collision on/off, bet your car, tournaments, knock-outs, hot pursuit–as the cops or against them, etc).
As far as 3D shooters, I’m currently enjoying the Wolfenstein sequel demo:
I’m gonna throw in another vote for Unreal Tournament. It’s one of the very few PC games that I play. I don’t have a net connection at home and can’t play multiplayer on-line but against the computer is still pretty fun. It usually eats up about an hour out of every day for me.