Forgettable FPS's...

[Terminus]

I was just watching the Zero Punctuation video on Gears of War 3, in which Yahtzee makes a point about having almost entirely forgotten GoW 2 and rapidly doing the same to GoW 3.

He's overstating for comedic effect, but it still made me think about the many shooters I've played over the years, and I realized that I've also forgotten nearly all of them. I remember having played stuff like Doom, the original Duke Nukem, Medal of Honor, etc. but they haven't STUCK in my brain, disappearing into so much brownish-grey sludge.

The only shooter that HAS etched itself into my neural pathways is the first Modern Warfare, for reason obvious to others who've played it...

Anybody else have experiences like this?

[Fenrir]

Ah, Modern Warfare - how I do so love thee. As for forgettable FPS's I think for me it'd have to be Call of Duty Black Ops. As much as I love the 'Modern Warfare' series, Black Ops just did NOT do it for me at all. I think it was that plot that kind of put me off it - just the whole 'Ok, we're gonna toss you into this holding cell type thing waaaaaaaay at the beginning...not gonna explain WHY....but here you are. So .... good luck with that!' approach they seemed to take with it. Only reason I kept going back to it was for the zombie content!

[Cureless_Poison]

I pretty much remember everything I play, other wise I would need to play it again to refresh my memory.

[empath]

{nitpicker}The FIRST Duke Nukem game was a side-scroller, not an FPS; you're thinking about Duke Nukem 3D{/nitpicker}

I do see the original point, but many of the FPS's I've played stay distinct in my mind:

Wolfenstein 3D (you could easily map it out on graph paper), Doom (fucking imps), Duke3d (hail to the king, baby), Rise of the Triad (oh god, all the blood), Quake (oooh, REAL 3d sprites and not just 'prism sprites' with eight different 2d sprites set up to be visible from different perspectives), Quake II (an actual STORY as opposed to its predecessor), Unreal (oh, WOW), Dark Forces (Duke3D with stormtroopers), DF2: Jedi Knight (Quake with lightsabers, and "Huh. I wonder what that did?"), JK2: Jedi Outcast (LITERALLY Quake III with Star Wars), Unreal Tournament (even the single-player story is deathmatch), Half-Life (SAY NOTHING; just hit things with your crowbar), Star Trek : Voyager Elite Force (tired of lightsabers? Try setting your phaser to 'fun'...oh, okay; don't), ST: Elite Force II (interesting story set in Yet Another Quake III License), System Shock (Dammit, why did it crash THIS time?!), System Shock 2 (Ohfuckohfuckohfuck - I'm just gonna hide up on this engine and play 'Ultima' on my PDA!), Deus Ex ("Hey, you got your RPG in my FPS!" "What? YOU got YOUR FPS in MY RPG!" "Uh, guys? Stop fighting - you're getting your crap in my adventure game."), Deus Ex: Invisible War (Tolerable game, miserable sequel, but still unforgettable for that), Team Fortress 2 (Beautiful fun rooted in simplicity...and then the simplicity was removed to sell more shit), Space Trader: Merchant Marine (don't be fooled by the interesting premise of merging an FPS with a 'freelancer' style story - IT'S A FUCKING TRAP! It's so bad, the Government of Canada funded it with a culture grant and also unforgettable because of this), Deus Ex: Human Revolution (look, stop bugging me with your questions - I'm busy PLAYING, dammit!)

I can see what the factor here is - all the 'forgettable' FPS's - the GoWs and the Halos and the BFs and the CoDs - I seem to have subconsciously predicted that these games wouldn't really stand out in any appealing way for me, and I never bothered playing them. About the only shooter that I regret not getting into (more due to my limited time and $$$ than limited interest) is the Serious Sam series - sounds like this chap took up the FUN Torch when Duke dropped it to go have a decade-long nap.

But that's my take - YMMV.

[Terminus]

Yeah, I DID obviously mean Duke 3D.

[goat]

The first two CoD games actually have very good SP campaigns. Good enough that I've played CoD2's multiple times.

Halo, for all its bright colors, gets a bit sludgy, but that might have to do with playing it and its sequel a metric age ago. I played through Reach with a friend a few months ago, and I don't think I could tell you much about the story.

But the sludgiest sludge of all sludge is probably Quake IV. I remember about 3 things from that game, and only about one of them is even halfway good.

[empath]

Wait...they MADE a 4th one?

[Metcarfre]

Forgettable FPS's what?

[Vigafre]

Hush up, Met. That's an acceptable apostrophe.

[War Monkey782]

I can't remember the story of Borderlands. Oh, wait...

[Genghis Ares]

I don't think I've really forgotten any of the shooters I've played. There might be some I never finished, or some that I haven't played in so long I only really remember the first couple of levels and probably the ending, or at lest the end boss fight.

For the most, if I beat it in the last 10 years, I remember it.

[Drunk On Mystery]

There really wasn't much TO forget in Borderlands. The whole game was "Go kill this one guy and his 850,000 identical twins." It somehow had less characterization than a typical Dynasty Warriors game, and I didn't even think that was possible.

I also forgot the individual plot points of Homefront the second I finished it.

[ANeMzero]

Pretty much any Treyarch Call of Duty game. I remember large portions of COD 1, 2 and 4. However COD3, World at War and Black Ops, which I played through only 2 months ago, are pretty much sludge (I never played COD: Big Red One due to lackluster reviews.)

I really with Treyarch would get over themselves. Their developers have said that they don't pay attention to Infinity Ward because Treyarch has been "doing COD since the beginning." But honestly, having a couple of employees who worked on the COD1 expansion pack doesn't give them license to do whatever they want. Hell, the expansion pack wasn't even very good!

It took Treyach 3 games before they realized that COD isn't Battlefield and stopped trying to shoehorn tanks into multiplayer, and their review scores have always been worse than Infinity Ward. They clearly were missing what makes COD great, but they were too full of themselves to ask for help. Now that the majority of the IW development leads have quit, sludge is all we're ever going to get.

[Dutch guy]

CoD 2 had a very good SP mode indeed.

The Brothers in Arms series have also stuck in my brain. I like their gameplay dynamics and story line (or narration of historic events as it could also be considered)

[taza]

I've played plenty of forgettable FPS games.

I just can't really remember which ones. Halo, I suppose.

[the_lone_bard]

Reading this thread it occured to me.
They were both so completely un-interesting and generic that PREY and duke nukem forever have blended into one... The only thing that i can use to tell the difference with them is that one was an indian and one was duke. They are literally the only differences in my mind between the two.
Same goes for the latter half of crysis. I couldn't tell you which memory was from which game :s

[solidnero]

Brothers in Arms ( for me )
and Call of juarez ( the first game )

[Dibria]

To be fair to Borderlands, you may forget the story but the game itself wasn't all that forgettable; Skag hunting, awesome opening music, repetitive quests - it was a good game.

I actually found Duke 3D quite forgettable, I know I sank a ton of my time into it, even several years after its release when I figured out how to install it on school computers, but other than a few generic half memories I have no idea what happened in it. I remember the Duel Grenade launcher (or whatever) was the Devestator, I remember saving women from tentacle rape pods and something involving an electric chair with a shotgun under it but other than that? Very little, even though I played it again for nostalgia sake within the last few months or so.

If a shooter is bad I give up pretty early, I'm not into the FPS genre enough to spend a lot of money on them - still haven't tried the Modern Warfare or Bad Company games as they're still too expensive in my mind (that said if I stopped doing all my shopping via Steam it may be cheaper).

I bought Crisis for about £2 a while back pretty much to benchmark (Turns out I *can* run crisis) and found the game to be so dull I gave up, I have since tried it another couple of times and every time stopped a couple of hours in - the reason i bring this up? Every time everything is new to me, I remembered nothing of the story on each attempt, I remember I got as far as a frozen boat on my shortest and a school or something on my furthest play through but I other than that... utterly forgettable.