First-Person Gaming

[Nick Halme]

First-Person Gaming

The only thing more epic than the stories games tell are the ones we tell about them.

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[Altorin]

I was playing Halo 2 at a local lan party a friend of mine setup, and I was sucking pretty bad. I was clearly the worst player there (I hadn't played much Console FPS's, while all my friends were experts). They were brutal on me. It didn't help that my screen name for the lan party was "FunBot".. We all thought it was hilarious - they thought it was hilarious to see that they had killed FunBot. Everything was sucking (while still being incredibly fun in a sick masochistic sort of way) until we played a Shotgun Melee game - only shotguns.. honestly, my best weapon.. say noob cannon if you like, but it was my weapon of choice.. and for the first time, I managed to climb the ranks. I was getting crack shots off left and right.. I remember stalking two of my friends down the hallway, and blowing both of them away with my shotty. I remember using a gravity elevator and shooting 2 people on the path up, just from sheer adrenaline. I wasn't leading the board, but I was holding my own, sitting at about 4th place out of 12.. That Shotgun Melee was FunBot's time to shine, and shine I did.

Right afterwards, I started sucking again, but that Shotgun Melee will go down in history as one of my more exciting gaming moments.

Does that count?

 

[TundraWolf]

All my most impressive stories revolve around heroism of some kind. My favorite one is this:

Playing Left 4 Dead with three friends of mine. Playing through No Mercy, we're on the finale map. I've got my auto-shotgun and I'm just wailing on everybody. The helicopter swoops in, just as we take down a tank, and I yell for everyone to book it. I'm the last one off the roof, and the others are running and gunning. One person gets jumped by a Hunter; I unload the rest of my ammo into the Hunter to shreds and hold off the horde with my pistols to let the other player up. We continue running. By now, one person is already on the heli, and the other is mid-jump.

All of a sudden, just as we're about to jump onto the heli ourselves (literally right next to it), the player who got jumped is swarmed and knocked down. Seeing this, I turn and run all the way back to the ammo pile, reload my shotty, come back and unload into the horde that has formed. I manage to save the person, get them back to their feet while the two in the heli cover us, and then hold off the horde as the player gets on the heli. All before jumping on myself and flying away.

Definitely my favorite moment in a game ever.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

My first online play of Left4Dead was, and remains, the most epic multiplayer game I've ever played.

Two of the players, Francis and Zoe, were exceptionally stupid, making bad calls and hanging back when they shouldn't have. Louis was brave, but crazy, charging the tank like crazy, startling the witch etc. Myself, being new to the online campaign and playing Bill was cautious and careful but corageous when the situation demanded it.

Anyway, we were playing Death Toll and we'd managed to make it to the boat without a single player dying even once. However the final act was when it all fell apart.

Heading for the docks, I bravely made the call and then ran back to the group, who were hiding out on a rock in the river with the horde at my heels. During the battle, Louis ran out of ammo and went back to the house without help, dying at the hands of a hunter. Next was Francis, who was jumped by a tank and killed before we could get to him. Only Zoe and myself were left, and the boat had finally arrived.

Battling our way to the dock, we jumped on the gangplank, Zoe just ahead of me. I turned to blast some zombies just in time for a smoker to drag me off of the gangplank and into the horde. I fought my best, but the boat pulled away with Zoe being the only survivor.

It was so damn epic I could hardly believe it. Too bad Zoe was being played by a little putz who promptly typed

"HA ha guyz, u all died"

Breaking the mood, fortunately, the game was still awesome.

 

[Unusual_Bulge]

A Call of Duty 2 story of my own.

One of the desert maps. I find myself alone and under sniper fire. I duck around a corner, safe from the scopes, but am confronted by the sight of three enemy troops holding automatic weapons no more than 20 feet away. With my bolt-action rifle, I don't stand a chance out in the open at such a short (and shortening) range. Luckily they seem to have been as surprised at the sight of me as I was of them, and my reactions turn out to be just that little bit faster as I toss a grenade between myself and my opponents and dive behind a small stack of crates.

They dive behind a slightly larger stack of crates next to them, no more than ten feet from my own stack, and avoid the blast entirely. That's ok, I hadn't expected to be able to get them with cover so readily available, but I'd bought myself a little thinking time. Unfortunately, I was now out of grenades, and there were no easy escape routes, with snipers behind and the automatic weapons in front. So the only option remaining was to try and take some of them down before they get me.

I lean out to see all three of them positioned neatly along their stack of boxes. They open fire. I quickly duck back in. I luck out; they, for whatever reason, aren't charging. So I take a deep breath and lean out again. Bring up the sights whilst swinging my aim towards the left-most opponent. Bang. One down. I duck in again, chased by the roar of automatic weapons. Lean out. Bang. Two down. Duck. The roaring becomes a discontinuous rattle. Lean out. Bang. Silence.

My heart pounding, I leave my cover and survey the scene.

Then I curse the fact that my computer isn't powerfuly enough to be able to run the game and record the action simultaneously!

 

[man-man]

Another Left4Dead moment, the time I got the All 4 Dead achievement (incap all 4 survivors with the tank)

It was in the top levels of the hospital (stage 4 of No Mercy), after the elevator but before the grand finale. The tank spawned around a corner from the survivors, and as I approached I saw their silhouettes on the other side of a pillar which kept me hidden as I came around at them.

Smacked the front runner off into the background, 2 of them ran back to help him up whilst the 4th stayed in my face as a distraction. I ignored Mr. Smokescreen and chased down the other 2, noticing a handy forklift to one side, slipped in behind it and belted it into the group, incapping all 3 of them at a stroke. Then I just had to chase down the 4th guy from behind me to finish the round.

I felt like some kind of tank-god.

Also the time I faced down a charging Tank from a crouched position and unloaded an entire clip from the assault rifle into him. He died just short of where I was making my stand and skidded to a stop just in front of me.

 

[Ginnipe]

My best gaming moment was on Halo 3, (I used to be the biggest fanboy, played it everyday and owned everything, now i hate the game) but anyway, it was me and one friend playing a ranked match against 6 other opponents (I don't know how it happened but they had 6, we had 2 on a 4v4 match). So I get the sniper while my friend getts a BR, (we both had one, it was my secondary) this is on The Pitt by the way, so we got into that building by grenade jumpuing and start owning. I would get the enemeies sheids down while my friend would BR their heads. At one point I got a tripple headshot when the came through rocket spawn having the bullet bouncing off the walls. We finaly run out of ammo so I switch to my BR and my friend gets rockets and more BR ammo. We do a full out charge twords the enemy base and we eliminate them all and just kept running around the map annialating everyone in our path. The game ended with us having 47 points (3 from total victory) and the enemy team having 0. We acually befrended the other team no matter how badly they felt of us. Even though I may hate the game now (and have acually sold my 360 for a better PS3) I will still remember that match.

 

[randommaster]

I played Banjo Twooie's multiplayer FPS mode with my friends a lot when it came out. If you've never played it, is a stripped down FPS that is simple enough to learn, but has enough vaiety to entertain for many hours. Anyways, one type of ammunition you can get is ice eggs, which freeze a person when you hit them, leaving you with just enough time to switch to something with more punch. In one game, it was near the end of the match and I happened to walk in on one of my friends taunting another one after they ahad frozen them. I took aim and shot a grenade at the frozen player, then shot another one at the other player as soon as I could. I taunter was, needless to say, surprised at his victim's spontaneous explosion and looks around to find the shooter. What fills his screen is a grenade coming right at him. It doesn't get closer, it just gets bigger. The best part was that those two kills won me the game.

This one isn't mine, but I remember two people playing Halo 2 slayer on Lockdown. One of the guys had found the sword and there was a lot of cat-and-mouse going on as the swordless guy was trying to find a way to win. After some time he was several points behind and found dual needlers, so he resigned himself to losing and used them. As it turns out, the needler works best at close range, which is where the sword needs to be. Not to mention that since you actually have to have your target in front of you with the sword, so it's hard to dodge needler shots and still kill someone. So it turns out that dual needler does indeed beat sword.

 

[Orange Monkey]

Ahh I remember one time, this was back in the PS2 days, I had gotten a fresh new Multitap and challenged my two best freinds and my sister (my normal play mates) to a 3 on one multiplayer match on ''007:Nightfire'' to break it in. First Team to twenty kills wins. Despite my initial cockiness that I would wipe the floor with all three of them, it was a close call, they were really pulling out all the stops, Tripwires, Remote Helicoptors, Oddjobs freaking hat of instant death.
Finally we had reached the inevitable tie breaker 19-19, my two mates were on the total other side of the map, racing towards me to back up my assailant, My sister as Spacesuit James Bond, wielding a wicked laser rifle. I was on the roof of the house, she was rushing up the stairs to confront me, I knew i couldnt outgun her in that tiny area so i'd have to outsmart her. I tagged a plastic explosive to the wall the door opened from and set its timer to ten seconds. On the fifth second she appeared through the door, on thr fourth she took aim, and on the third I threw myself off the roof, normally a death sentence as the impact would surely kill me, but just before gravity pancakes me, I shoot my grappling hook at a latch on the far side of the house. My sister, confused at my apparent suicide, didnt even notice the bomb as it hit :00 and annhilated her, earning me both the winning point, and a swift kick in the arse from my sister, sitting directly behind me on the sofa.

 

[Ginnipe]

Acually, another one of the best by me was on Team Fortress 2. Were on the last spot on Dustbowl and the enemy has the first cap point completely locked down, no one enters without dieing. there were about 3 pyros, 2 heavys, and 3 sentrys with engies acomadating them in al ine allowing no spys to pass. So my team has the idea to get 3 medics (one of them being me), 2 solders, 2 demomen, and 1 spy. So us medics get our ubercharges up and running with 2 ubercharged solders and 1 ubersharged demoman. We all break out running and focus our fire on one sentry, it getts desroyed but so does the ubercharged demoman i had. He go launched out of my mediguns range by a missile. So i'm still ubercharged and I sneak by with all the chaos goin on and i find myself hiding in the building behind all the action. So I'm still talking to my team and their getting ready for annother charge. so what I do is get ready, when I heard some battlecry of sorts and I go flying out of my corner with my serets going every which way. All of them land into the wall of engies and I kill them all in one go, then demomans bombs go off and the senries are gone along with one of 3 pyros. The heavies are lighing the area up and I bonsaw them (getting crit hits) So now 2 pyros are left facing an entire army, one getts a face full of rocket while the other getts a smily face of my seretes. I cap the point while the team charges forward. I cap it and make it to the last cap point just in time to see the 2 armies clashing again, so I just lob artilary of seretes (more crits) and take out 3 more guys. and them we wash over the opponents and whipe them off the face of the earth taking the last controle point with us. It is the best moment in gaming for me, and people still wonder why I like the medic (sorry about no parragraphs, wrote this quick from memory so i just got the thoughts out

 

[Zapataron]

This was probably about 5 years ago. I had been living with 2 sort of friends of mine for about 3 months when we had nothing to do on a Saturday and decided to play some Starcraft free for all. The map was Killing Fields (it later became a favorite) and I was Terran. The two of them had known each other for years and had been playing Starcraft against each other since it came out.

They both found me early so I figured I should expand to the plateaus. Good thinking because they both attacked me at almost exactly the same time and fought each other inside my base. I managed to save a lot of my important stuff and had operations going in hard to find places.

They continued to duke it out in the ruins of my base and near each other's bases for the next 30 minutes until one of them looked over at me and said in an EXTREMELY worried voice, "Is [my name] still playing?" My other roomate looked up and saw me still at my computer and they both realized it at the same time. They had left me completely alone and not seen anything at all of mine for half an hour.

*NUCLEAR LAUNCH DETECTED* *NUCLEAR LAUNCH DETECTED* NUCLEAR LAUNCH DETECTED*

The first one looked at the second (also playing Terran) and said, "I hope that's you." He replied in the negative and both of them experience fiery doom. Then the cloaked wratihs moved in. 2 groups each, hitting expansions and weak points I'd picked out earlier. The hastily thrown together alliance heartened them both but their armies and bases were in ruins and my production was fully intact with a huge resource stockpile. Cleanup took another 15-20 minutes before I had unrooted the last of the resistance and achieved supremecy.

I don't think they've forgiven me yet. Especially not since I won the next 10 games in a row. They caught on after that.

 

[Dr.Sean]

There was once a clan named {OTD}. I left them long ago and don't know if they are still around.

Their leader was a man by the name of Cuz, he's Alaskan. Him and a few others were on the TF2 server one day, playing on a map that totally favored camping and snipers. This was before the Medic Update, if that gives you a rough idea of when it happened.

Anyway, I disguised myself as a red pyro and ran around Cuz, and he had an uber. He was a medic. He promptly Ubered me without a second thought. My teamates promptly congratulated me over the mic with "Wow Sean"(s) clogging up the voice chat. I laughed at Cuz as I planted a blade between his shoulder blades after the Uber wore off. Needless to say, my team won.


I left the clan weeks later.

 

[Chipperz]

My tutor had set up the 360 in one of the lecture theatres and helped set up some tournaments. After a quick sort through of the college's and my collections (I live a few minutes down the road and the college's collection is... awful), we ended up playing Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War. I'd thoroughly sucked in Call of Duty, more or less depending on my teammate to get all the kills while I tried not to die. My luck carried on to Gears of War - I'm not that good at shooters at the best of times, and being watched by twenty (at that time) near strangers didn't help.

Being offline, we were stuck with one-on-one matches. I hadn't slept properly in the two weeks leading up to the course and I hadn't played Gears in years. All told, I think the bullets could have been homing missiles and still missed. I'd ended up getting pinned quite early by a guy who knew the maps and had gone straight for the Sniper Rifle - all the while telling me about how great he was and how quickly I was going to lose. I was stuck with the basic Lancer and a rough idea of where my opponent was sniping me from. I skipped from one block of cover to the next, letting bullet after bullet pound inches from my head. I stood for a second to try to get a shot off and saw him looking straight at me. In a rare moment of luck, his shot didn't fully kill me and I ducked back into cover to assess my situation.

All this time I'd thought he'd been in an elevated position - he was on my level, in the next set of cover. Creeping to the edge of the cover, I let off a few rounds in his general direction and, as soon as he took cover, I stood and ran at him, stopping every few seconds to keep up a semblance of supressing fire that could be considered accurate. He'd switched to the pistol, probably to stay mobile, but it didn't help him, he broke cover and I bayonetted him in the back.

With a Chainsaw.

I got knocked out next round, but I'd won my own war - I'd got the only chainsaw kill in the entire class, and had managed to knock out the guy who had been going on about how much of a great Gears player he was.

My other story involves acing Run DMC's "It's Tricky" on Singstar while suffering from Laryngitis. It's not quite as epic.

 

[whaleswiththumbs]

To be honest I don't turn my FPS experiences into a story. I do get epic moments, but not enough to warrent a story.

Same, makes me feel bad though, I don't play alot of multiplayer games, cause i alway get stuck with pricks.

 

[Toners]

I suppose one of the best matches I ever played was against a guy everyone considered a total noob, and he himself said that he was. We were playing a 1 shot kill instagib match in UT99 on a small, symmetrical level, 1v1. It was a tournament match and everyone was totally convinced I was gonna win outright and kick serious ass (because I used to be pretty good at it). In my cockiness I decided to play the game off my mattress, because I figured he'd never get an accurate shot in, giving me time to aim properly...
Imagine my surprise when he's absolutely dicking me over, winning the first match 30-18.
I was still playing off the mattress, but the next level was a huge map and distance based, which I excelled at, and beat him hands down, which meant the last map was the tie-breaker.
I actually moved into the other room for this, it was pretty exciting and we had gained the interest of a few spectators, wondering whether the lad was gonna properly beat me. The last map was another fairly small map, although there was still an element of being able to hide and use serious tactics, which I was taking full advantage of. As a player I'm fairly sneaky, and in 1 shot kill 1v1 matches, taking someone on head on is suicide unless you have lightning fast reflexes, and his aim was exceptionally good that day. The match began and he took the lead quite early by about 10 kills, and I was absolutely bricking it, for every kill I got, he seemed to get 2. I managed to pull it level and the score was 29-29... And the final kill seemed to take forever, neither of us could hit the other, and we ended up ducking behind cover. In almost a movie style, we leapt out at the same time using the leap function and I'm lucky enough to get the shot in first.
People almost wanted the other guy to win, because I'd gained a reputation and was at the time the joint leader of the clan. Turns out it wasn't actually him playing at all, but someone completely different who had been playing since the game had come out :O So basically the guy tried to cheat me out of it without using aimbots, and failed ^.^

 

[whaleswiththumbs]

To be honest I don't turn my FPS experiences into a story. I do get epic moments, but not enough to warrent a story.

Same, makes me feel bad though, I don't play alot of multiplayer games, cause i alway get stuck with pricks.

Don't be. I often play online, it's just it doesn't feel epic enough to warrent a story. I do what I do out of skill. Even though there are epic moments, they can most often be repeated.

Well, I have someone else's story, but plagiarism isn't my stuff.

 

[whaleswiththumbs]

To be honest I don't turn my FPS experiences into a story. I do get epic moments, but not enough to warrent a story.

Same, makes me feel bad though, I don't play alot of multiplayer games, cause i alway get stuck with pricks.

Don't be. I often play online, it's just it doesn't feel epic enough to warrent a story. I do what I do out of skill. Even though there are epic moments, they can most often be repeated.

Well, I have someone else's story, but plagiarism isn't my stuff.

That sucks. Ah well, it doesn't matter. You'll find something else to make an epic story out of. Instead of FPS games, I make mine out of my matches in Warhammer 40K (tabletop).

I would love to try tabletop, dunno though.

*toast* to the story making experiences!

 

[llewgriff]

I was playing the campaign on company of heroes, it was a mission where you have a set time to biuld defences then the germans would attack coming from 3 bridges, you had to hold out for about 15 minutes I think. Anyway about halfway through the germans bombed the biuldings I was tasked to defend.
In the process nearly all my men were killed, I hastly erected sandbags at the fall back point and dragged the remainder of my men back there. By now there were a few minutes left till reinforcements arrived, with a single horwitser and two sqauds of riflemen I held back waves of german infantry and tanks, and just when my final soldier was about to fall reinforcements arrived.

edit: was it meant to be a first person game? not that I'm that bothered but just wanting to know.
Now I don't know if this was the games programming to make that experience or it was just self created, but I remember it fondly.

 

[quiet_samurai]

L4D

The game had only been out a day and I decided to venture off in Blood Harvest alone. It was the first time playing that map so I had no real knowledge of the layout. I got pretty far ahead of my teammates and could see one of the train cars that is used for the safehouse. However between the safehouse and myself was a witch, so I carefull walked past her to the safehouse got inside and shut the door. I waited a few seconds for my teammetes to see her and just as they we walking by, I shot her through one of the little windows that are just off to the side of the safehouse door. Needless to say she went nuts and ran right for the safehouse door screaming and dry humping the shit out of it. Now remember the game was still new and this was when everyone avoided the witch at all costs. My teammates were just standing there afraid to shoot her because they didn't want to attract her attention. Eventually I was able to kill her with a hunting rifle through the windows. It was just hilarious because my teammates were just petrified of her and didn't know what to do.

L4D has the best player stories I think.

 

[far_wanderer]

It was my first year of college and a friend and I participated in a fairly small Starcraft LAN tournament as a team. I had played maybe three multiplayer games of Starcraft at this point, so while I was fairly good I was inexperienced. We got down to the final match, and as a new player I had no idea why everyone groaned when "Blood Bath" was announced as the map, or why everyone else chose the Zerg. I went Protoss, and built a bunch of probes and a few pylons. All this time jeers are coming from the other side of the room as the opposing team brags about how badly they're going to beat us. I was a bit nervous due to the pressure, so I was a bit fidgety, which caused me to control group all of my probes just for the heck of it. Fairly quickly the Zergling rush hit, and a fairly stretched out trail of eight zerglings, four from each opponent, began to trail into my base and head straight for the probes. The probes were very tightly grouped, so I don't think they realized just how many I had built by that point. As the first zergling closed, my probes broke of from mining and spread out. And spread out, and spread out, and spread out some more. The first zergling walked straight into the middle of a circle and exploded after only getting one hit off. The next two came as a pair, and managed to take down the shields of a single probe.
That was when they wised up and actually fell back to form a group with the remaining five. In a more that couldn't have been timed more perfectly if we had planned it, my teammate's slightly slower and larger zergling rush started to hit them, and they focuesed on trying to save their drones. While they were distracted, the probe army snuck up on and annihilated their group of five zerglings,
Over the next five minutes they gradually fought over the center area, my friend having the advantage due to crippling their drones earlier but still outnumbered two to one. It was a constant, desperate struggle of one or two units at a time and frantic reinforcements. Finally, the enemy retook the center with a force of two zerglings and their first hydralisk. They were just getting confident enough to start trash-talking again when I reappeared with a force of 24 zealots.

My favorite part of that story is the rematch afterwards, when our opponents claimed that rushing maps were unfair and we played a Big Game Hunters free-for-all. They teamed up very early on and very obviously, despite being the ones that requested a free-for-all, but took long enough destroying my friend that I was able to set up a very solid Terran turtle base. The crowning glory of that game was when I, not once, not twice, but three times spotted a massive Overlord drop gathering (in the exact same spot each time) and destroyed them utterly with Valkyries.