I’ve been out of the gaming scene for the better part of 6 years due to work taking up too much of my time.
Well that changed and I got myself a brand new squeaky gaming PC and I’ve been burning through FPS games (my drug of choice) every night.
Before I went on my hiatus the last game I played was Half Life 2 Orange Box. Since I’ve started again I’ve been busying myself going through the Call of Duty franchise.
So I’m looking for recommendations on good FPS games. I don’t care if I’m fighting Nazi’s or Zombies or Aliens. I love a good storyline (Halo was the best at this) but any quality experience will do. I also prefer to just play campaigns against the PC than get schooled by 12 yr olds in multiplayer for what that’s worth.
As an unrelated question that I’ll just ask here rather than in GQ. Does anyone know why Steam is so slow for downloading games?
I have a 6MbS inet connection yet Steam cannot download games to me any faster than around 600KbS. Does anyone know why this is? I have the correct connection speed set up in my Steam settings…
4800kbps doesn’t sound crazy as an after overhead number of a 6000kbps DSL connection, so I’d guess that’s your problem. Do you ever download faster than 600KB/sec? If you do, your region is just saturated and you’ll need to switch to a different one. Seems pretty unlikely that stuff would be saturated lately, since nothing big is around. I guess Brink had that free weekend though.
I’m not sure what an “after overhead number” is. Would you mind explaining please?
You make a good point though. I’ve never actually measured in speed other downloads that I’ve done. Are there sites anywhere that allow you to measure this type of thing? ITunes does not display the speed at which you’re downloading. Most “internet speed tests” tell me that I’m running at close to 6Mbs.
Bioshock is very, very good and very immersive. From a strict shooting-mechanics standpoint it’s a little ho-hum but makes up for it with atmosphere in spades. My favorite true FPS in years. The sequel is arguably a better shooter, but just wasn’t as gripping.
Borderlands does a great job at meshing FPS gameplay with Diablo-style loot collection. Exceedingly addictive and chock full of style.
Also, it’s not an FPS, but if you missed Gears of War I highly recommend it as an excellent third-person shooter. I still think Gears 1 is the best cover-based shooter I’ve played, blending shooter and survival horror elements together really well.
Basically, information is transmitted over the Internet is little chucks called packets. Part of these packets is dedicated to explaining what the packet is, like where it’s going, what it contains and how the packets all fit together again at the other side. This is called overhead. PPPoE DSL connections need a lot more of this information than other connections for reasons I don’t know. This accounts for about 10% - 15% of the information transmitted by your connection. Another source of so-called overhead is packets are just don’t reach their destination for whatever reason and latency slowing down the transmission. That can account for another 5% - 10%, depending on the quality of the route. In particular, oversubscribed regions suffer greatly from this type of overhead. I’ve seen some rural areas where it’s close to 90% overhead.
So, in theory, you’re only able to download at 4800Kbit/sec or 600KByte/sec because the rest of the bandwidth is being used to tell the network how to download. Maybe it’s something else though.
I think the fundamental misunderstanding here is that he’s using kilobits and kilobytes interchangable. ISPs list their speeds in kilobits - how many thousands of ones and zeros per second - to make the number sound more impressive. PC file sizes are listed in bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. So a 6000 kilobit (Kb/s) connection is the same thing as a 750 kilobyte (KB/s) connection. So steam sending you files at 600 KB/s is using 80% of your max ISP’s allowance. So then the 80% vs 100% issue is the stuff Palooka outlined.
As for your early questions about bf1 and bf2 - it’s actually battlefield 1942 and battlefield 2 - they’re not single player games at all, and they’re fairly old (2001 and 2005). They’re still good, but the only thing you can do is play with bots, so no. A more recent battlefield game, bad company 2, does have a single player campaign. It’s alright.
As far as single player shooters - Crysis is underrated (it’s popular to bash it) and pretty good. Bioshock is good. Metro 2033 is good - it’s one of the few times it actually makes sense to have a corridor shooter. I love Just Cause 2, it’s the best of the sandbox games, not terribly story driven.
The call of duty games have decent 5+/- hour single player portions but they’re in no way worth what you’ll still pay for them.
Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. They don’t shine as single-player games, but if you don’t want to be “schooled” in Versus, you can play online co-op. Playing with other people is definitely the best part of the game. Campaigns are short, so you can knock out a game pretty quickly rather than having to settle in for a long haul when you want to play.
For single player FPS you should also look at Borderlands (it has RPG elements but is a shooter first - also has co-op if you have a buddy) or possibly Battlefield Bad Company 2. On the second reco I can’t vouch for more than half the game - I kinda got into playing mass effect (which is also a shooter/rpg).
I’m not sure I’d recommend either of the Left 4 Dead games to anyone who isn’t a hardcore, serious gamer- I got them as part of a Steam sale but was put off them pretty quickly by people forever screaming at me for “playing the game wrong” or simply not being as awesome at it as they were. It was Serious Business to them and woe betide anyone who didn’t treat it the same way.
Team Fortress 2, on the other hand, has been a lot more fun for me and it’s pretty easy to get into, IMHO.
Both BioShocks are amazing and can be picked up cheaply now. I recently picked up BioShock 2 and replayed 1 first to prepare. I was impressed on how well it held up.
A new DuesEx is coming out Tuesday. The first is one of my favorite games ever.
Both Crysis and Far Cry were 2 of my favorite straight FPSs (the others mentioned have a adventure gaming/specialize your character element to them). I didn’t like Far Cry 2 that much.
I’ve worried about this and stayed away from the multiplayer L4D2 because I know I’m not especially skilled and figure that being the weak link on a four man team was pretty noticeable. Especially when playing with folks who have been doing it for 18 months. At least when I started TF2, I could blend in the crowd and call less attention to my suckage
