First-Person Shooter Games

First-person shooter (FPS) video games are a type of game in which shooting and combat is shown from a first-person perspective of the character. This offers the player a more realistic experience, giving them the feeling of 'being there', and enabling them to focus on aiming a variety of handheld ranged weapons. The majority of FPSs are fast-paced and require very quick reflexes during high difficulty levels.

Effective first-person shooters were not available to the average computer gamer until the early 1990s, when home computers became sufficiently powerful to draw basic 3D graphics in real time. The first widely known FPS came in 1992, with id Software's Wolfenstein 3D. This was followed in 1993 with the release of Doom (also by id Software), which used a number of innovative techniques to make the game run fast enough to play on consumer-grade machines. Doom was also noted for its networked multiplayer gaming ability, in which two to four players could team up together over a network, or enter into a 'deathmatch', whereby they fought each other, rather than the enemy monsters.

The top-selling first-person shooter game (as of 2008) is Halo 3 (Xbox 360 - 8.1 million).

Since the release of Doom, almost all FPS games have a multi-player feature, with 8-64 players in the same game. However, in 2001, World War II Online was released, which brought the fast paced first-person shooter action to the MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) framework, allowing thousands of players to play simultaneously.

Other notable FPS games include:

• Battlefield
• Call of Duty
• Counter-Strike
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Far Cry
• GoldenEye 007
• Half-Life
• Halo
• Killzone
• Marathon
• Medal of Honor
• Quake
• Unreal