I was tragically shooter-impaired as a child. I remember playing a demo of Hexen I’d grabbed off some magazine cover disk (3 ½”, natch), and giving up after ten minutes or so of playing and then swapping the game out for a chunder bucket. I had something later diagnosed as “simulation sickness”, a most insidious and debilitating condition for a career gamer like myself. You know how some people chuck up in cars and aeroplanes? I chucked up playing 3D shooters. Fortunately, the advent of 3D acceleration and dedicated video cards sort of fixed all that (mostly; Half-Life 2 occasionally jumbles my guts, and I had to give up on Red Faction Guerrilla: entirely after two hours or so and have a bit of a lie down), and my quick acquisition of a Voodoo 3500 (WITH 16MB OF RAM OMG SO MUCH) and Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear changed everything forever. My twin sister and I would hook up our PCs and spend entire nights camping each other on the Winter Chalet map (she never did figure out my trick of crouching on the table in the guardhouse, and sniping out the window). A torrid love affair with Unreal Tournament developed hard and fast thereafter – I’d probably marry ctf_lavagiant if it were legal. I’ll probably do it anyway.
I think shooters indulge some sort of atavistic “KILL EVERYTHING WITH ROCKS AND DEATH” urge in us all. That small part of everyone that wants to park a slug between the insolent eyeballs of anyone else when stuff goes wrong. The thing is, even the most reasonable, self-possessed, and completely unflappable person secretly wants to murder everyone else from time to time, and if you’re shaking your head in resolute defiance, it’s probably because you’ve got bodies rotting in a lime tub somewhere in your back garden. I know my grade 9 maths teacher stood shrieking about my unfinished trinomials behind a phantom reticule on more than one occasion. I hated stupid trinomials, what’s the point of them anyway? Stupid trinomials. Shooters gave me a family friendly outlet for all that indignant adolescent outrage, and so did all those ad hoc Mrs Hilton-Taylors disguised as testosterone-overdosed space marines (not an altogether enormous suspension of reality, mind you) exploding into a thousands glorious gibs. Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole has nothing on a Liandri-issue flak cannon. Nor do stupid trinomials, for that matter.
Of course, I’m a whole lot older and somewhat less brimming with indignant adolescent rage these days, but I still secretly want to murder everyone else from time to time. Mostly it’s because of banks and other people on the road at the same time as me and *******s with kids in my personal space. But that’s not much a point blank shotgun blast to a Wretch in Gears of War 2 isn’t going to solve in style – there’s no living like vicarious living, and shooters are really where it’s at. Hail to the king, baby.
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