THE PINNACLE OF ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT

March 4, 2024 11:16 AM

If you're a gamer of a certain age you've probably played a fair amount of "boomer shooters". Your Dooms, Quakes, Dukes, Unreals....you get the picture. Pretty much any FPS pre-CoD and Halo. The unquestioned king of the boomer shooter is Civvie11.

Some cherry-picked reviews:

Daikatana
Duke Nukem Forever
Doom (2016)
Hunt Down The Freeman
TekWar
Dusk
You Are Empty
Scratches
Blake Stone
Blood

From retro FPSs to modern day boomer shooters to slav jank to pretty much every classic FPS (except for Halo - never Halo), Civvie has you covered. Oh and he's also trapped in a secret government dungeon being tortured by several robots and a radioactive mouse. He also may or may not be possessed. But don't worry about that, the storyline doesn't matter.

posted by Diskeater (36 comments total)

Sewer count: 287

I like the good mix of a bit of snark and a good dash of "yes this is jank. But it was 1996 and jank was all we had." I'm going through historical notes on the subject
posted by AngelWuff at 11:20 AM on March 4 [2 favorites]

M: I am an elder millenial.
C: That's even worse. That's just two different words for an old person.
posted by pwnguin at 11:33 AM on March 4 [18 favorites]

Doom always brings up a very specific 1996 type memory of being a teen. I was trying to impress my boyfriend and said something about Doom. He responded sternly that Doom was Bad, actually, and it was the kind of thing that ruined minds and served the government by creating future soldiers.

I was embarrassed at myself, but also secretly relieved that I wouldn't have to like FPSes. Not because of the military-industrial complex -- I just can't feel present. It's like playing through a glovebox. No doubt the experience is better now, but I'm also more comfortable liking what I like.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:35 AM on March 4 [1 favorite]

oh hell today i learned what the 'boomer' in 'boomer shooter' is supposed to mean. (i swear to god i thought it meant explosions)
posted by mittens at 11:35 AM on March 4 [8 favorites]

I though they were Gen-X shooters.

/cue “Don’t you forget about me”
posted by MrGuilt at 11:38 AM on March 4 [14 favorites]

Despite not loving this weird fixation everybody around me has developed on their age cohort all of a sudden, I like the term Boomer Shooter, because it implies both 1.) it's kind of a stylistic throwback and 2.) there will be a LOT of explosions. I like games with a lot of explosions. I've been playing Helldivers 2 in a highly grenade-forward manner, to the chagrin of my teammates (may they rest in peace.)
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:39 AM on March 4 [4 favorites]

(i swear to god i thought it meant explosions)

How do you do, fellow space marines.
posted by mhoye at 11:46 AM on March 4 [12 favorites]

Worst virus I ever got came packaged with a torrented DOOM executable. It wasn't even the full game, just the shareware demo.
posted by shenkerism at 12:46 PM on March 4 [2 favorites]

The unquestioned king of the boomer shooter is Civvie11.

Dang. The way the post was worded I thought there was a new Doom-style shooter out called Civvie11 that people were unanimously hailing as the best yet.
posted by straight at 1:02 PM on March 4 [19 favorites]

DUSK is kinda fun.
posted by exlotuseater at 1:02 PM on March 4 [1 favorite]

To steal from a classic parody of Overlord:

MDK
“I’m…Interested.”

Dark Forces
“Interest PEAKING.”

Rise of the Triad
“INTEREST CROWNING.”

Postal
“Aaaand interest gone. Thanks for ruining everything.”

Kind of surprised there’s no Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, though: short of Rise of the Triad there are few things that establish old school FPS cred like the first game to ever get first person melee right, and it paved the way for Dishonored.
posted by Ryvar at 2:23 PM on March 4 [3 favorites]

“ I though they were Gen-X shooters.”

Dude, we agreed to let them forget about us.

We had a vote and everything.
posted by oddman at 2:44 PM on March 4 [5 favorites]

Blake Stone is the quintessential "meh" shooter. It's the kind of uninspired, unimaginative, Wolf3D-with-extra-bells-drek that made Dark Forces stand out.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 3:05 PM on March 4

Ctrl-F ‘Avara’
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:47 PM on March 4

Ah, I remember booting up Doom from a stack of floppies.

-signed, a GenXer
posted by doctornemo at 4:51 PM on March 4 [5 favorites]

Doom always brings up a very specific 1996 type memory of being a teen.

My guess is that they don't let teenagers have weekly first person shooter LAN parties on school computers anymore. I'd like to be wrong.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:59 PM on March 4

I downloaded Doom on New Year's Eve 1994, because that was the first night I could stay up late enough and I could get a long enough block of phone line privilege from the rest of the family.

My friend Drew was over and we were both blown away by the realism, the head bob, etc.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:07 PM on March 4 [3 favorites]

Starsiege Tribes version 1. Nothing compares. This post is heresy.
posted by TreeHugger at 6:58 PM on March 4 [3 favorites]

Yeah, Doom was perfectly positioned in the BBS era to be distributed like wildfire. The initial Shareware release was only 2,164,729 bytes; you load more than that today in just JavaScript when you visit twitter. In 1993, the most common modem speed was 2400 baud, which got around 230-240 cps assuming you were using a sane download protocol like Zmodem or Ymodem-G that didn't have ACKs (and not garbage like Xmodem or Kermit.) At 240 cps that's almost exactly 2.5 hours download for the demo. That may sound like a lot but for a full featured game (albeit only the first episode of 10 levels) it was more than doable, even if it took a little planning sometimes.

It was of course also available on the internet proper via dozens of FTP sites, but in 93 it was more common to get it from a local board.
posted by Rhomboid at 7:01 PM on March 4 [3 favorites]

Pretty sure a Boomer Shooter is a Drambuie next to a Elton John pinball machine.
posted by credulous at 10:00 PM on March 4 [5 favorites]

I like Civvie a lot- he can be abrasive but he's got the same clear love for what he's doing and affection for the stuff he's covering that always made James Rolfe's Angry Video Game Nerd videos better than those of his imitators, and he's not a chud like certain other members of the retro gaming scene.

Also he gave Cultic, one of the absolute best things to come out of the retro FPS boom, a glowing review that it deeply deserved almost immediately after it came out, and that makes me happy.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:51 PM on March 4 [1 favorite]

The video where he reviews all the Serious Sam games in parallel instead of sequentially is fun, amusing, and pretty impressively put together.
posted by straight at 11:54 PM on March 4 [1 favorite]

I hate the term 'boomer' anything. Why does America have to invent stupid names for everything ?

Anyway, Civvie is great and very funny and is a big fan of shooting virtual Nazis so that's nice.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 1:05 AM on March 5

I would get offended at "boomer shooter" but then I remembered that the first week at my First Serious IT Job we had a Quake2 tournament and that was in 1998.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:41 AM on March 5

So, I fancy myself something of an expert on Daikatana-- not because I ever played it, or even watched someone play it, but because I was online and breathing during the late 90s, and no one would ever shut up about it, it was the fucking worst-- but that was all before the advent of ubiquitous streaming video, so I was today years old when I finally saw Daikatana gameplay in all its glory. It is so much worse than the ancient legends say. I can't stop laughing.

It's kind of crazy that most modern shooters are way less fun than Quake but take orders of magnitude more time and money to create. The days when you can just hack weird problematic skins on top of Duke Nukem 3D and call it a day are long behind us. I blame consoles.
posted by phooky at 5:34 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Daikatana

Ug. And having to hear Romero crow about how awesome he was every time he opened his mouth (and everyone was giving him a platform to do it). On top of that, the constant "well sure we'll ship a product eventually, and it'll be the bestest game evah...BUT HAVE YOU SEEN HOW MUCH WE SPENT ON OUR FUCKING OFFICE!". Ion Storm was the OG 'form over function' startup template that so very many sought to emulate.
posted by kjs3 at 6:27 AM on March 5

He responded sternly that Doom was Bad, actually, and it was the kind of thing that ruined minds and served the government by creating future soldiers.

The funny thing is the US Army actually made a shooter sometime in the mid/late 90s.

The *HILARIOUS* thing, from dim memory, is that it's actually really Army-ish and uncool and no fun! You start the game and go directly into a safety briefing. Then, iirc, you need to qualify with your rifle, and if you don't do well enough then all you get to do is try again after being yelled at. ISTR that there are lots of points where if you fuck up (like you frag someone on your side) you just immediately exit to your virtual sergeant yelling at you.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:35 AM on March 5 [3 favorites]

Pretty sure a Boomer Shooter is a Drambuie next to a Elton John pinball machine.

Or a Harvey Wallbanger
posted by TedW at 7:11 AM on March 5

"Boomer Shooter" is kind of a dumb name, but it does make me wonder how many actual boomers play/played videogames. Arcade games really started showing up when I was a teen and I'm sure that people at least a few years older than me (I'm at the tail end of the boom) were partly responsible for them becoming a big hit. I tend to associate older boomers with the more addictive social media/mobile games such as FarmVille or Candy Crush if they get into games at all.

The days when you can just hack weird problematic skins on top of Duke Nukem 3D and call it a day are long behind us.

I thought that that was going to link out to Shadow Warrior. (Which I wasn't above playing; I'd play the shareware version of just about anything.) I never did try Daikatana; I had a hard time taking anything that John Romero was associated with seriously after that ad that promised that he'd make me his bitch.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:24 AM on March 5

Pretty sure a Boomer Shooter is a Drambuie next to a Elton John pinball machine.

Most underrated comment in this thread.
posted by mhoye at 10:08 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

...but it does make me wonder how many actual boomers play/played videogames.

*sigh*

Tons of us. Tons. We started on the Atari 2600. Then we hit the arcades to play Space Invaders, Centipede, Donkey Kong, etc. Eventually enough of us had home PCs and started playing stuff like Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Halo, CoD, etc. I skipped a ton of stuff in there, but you get the idea.

Your dad was probably on the family PC shooting nazis after you went to bed.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:33 AM on March 5 [4 favorites]

ISTR that there are lots of points where if you fuck up (like you frag someone on your side) you just immediately exit to your virtual sergeant yelling at you.

Depended on the severity of the fuckup - you could easily get thrown in the brig just staring at the jail cell walls with a fairly lengthy realtime sentence. Definitely made people a lot more careful about friendly fire once you finished boot camp.

I remember thinking the medical training portion was pretty cool if a bit dull, and it removed a *LOT* of bad Hollywood-based assumptions I had as a teenager about what grenades or C4 explosions actually looked like or could accomplish.

I was amused to discover that between growing up in farm country / having been sent to the uber-religous version of Boyscouts - which meant a lot of rifle range time - I’d would’ve qualified for Marksman shooting proficiency at age 12. I think my best ever (at age 15) was only a little bit below Sharpshooter proficiency.

Honestly? I kind of enjoyed it in an Arma-‘s-ugly-nerd-brother way.

We started on the Atari 2600

Atari 5200 starting at age 3 in ’83, and I’m on the Xennial side of elder Millenial. There are no true Boomer shooters, even Pong is GenX.
posted by Ryvar at 1:28 PM on March 5 [2 favorites]

...but it does make me wonder how many actual boomers play/played videogames.

Both my boomer parents played video games. They bought one of the earliest video game systems in the 1970's -- an RCA Studio II. After that it was a TI99/4a computer that my dad would spend hours on playing arcade games like Parsec, The Attack, and Munchman and my mom would play text adventure games. Later on it was IBM-compatibles, on which my dad usually played various flight simulators on and my mom would play Sierra adventure games. They only really stopped playing video games when smartphone doom-scrolling finally ate their brains.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:46 PM on March 5 [2 favorites]

in 93 it was more common to get it from a local board.

Or from the weird dude selling shareware on floppy disks for $1 at the computer show in the cruddy hotel ballroom.

I spent ages playing Doom II with one of my friends after school, connected via modem, tying up the phone lines. We also really loved ROTT and Duke3D, but most of the others? Nah.

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed playing a FPS, though. Like even Doom isn't for me anymore. That said: the music still kicks serious ass.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:29 AM on March 6

Or from the weird dude selling shareware on floppy disks for $1 at the computer show in the cruddy hotel ballroom.

For those who weren't there, part of The Deal with shareware was that you could charge for distributing it- there were businesses whose entire business model was downloading shareware games, putting them on floppy disks, making appealing boxes or sleeves for them, and charging $5-10. You'd see racks of them in grocery stores, a special shelf at Best Buy, and so on- episode 1 of Monster Bash or Jill of the Jungle or Doom or Descent or whatever, $5. Most shareware games put all the good stuff up front (Doom is a noticeable exception), so $5 for episode 1 was generally a better deal than $30 for the full game, anyway.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:48 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]

There are no true Boomer shooters ...

Sure there were!

Man, I miss shareware. Not long ago I was thinking of Ambrosia Games, which were great and cost me ... maybe $20 for 4 of them, if I ever paid, which I believe I did purely out of conscience. But Ambrosia Games are lost to time, except for a couple on archive.org that I can't use.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:45 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]