bunch of these came out recently which got me excited but they mostly turned out to be bunk:
helldivers 2: always-online multiplayer with kernel-level anti-cheat.
it looks great but man, i ain’t installing malware for a fucking videogame.
space marine 2: not nearly silly enough for my tastes.
actually i’ve played a bunch more of this since i first posted about it and it’s pretty alright. once i understood what it wanted from me i was big chillin. the multiplayer is even pretty good (although the individual missions are kinda hit-or-miss). still it makes me sad that 40k takes itself so seriously now.
palworld: man this game is almost cool but unfortunately it’s a open-world survival crafting game
forever winter: no amount of art direction will get me to play an extraction shooter
that starship troopers game: dude i woulda been so mad/sad releasing that at the same time as helldivers like what are the odds.
edf 6: i mean yeah it’s edf it owns but like we’ve all played edf it’s edf it rules.
mindseye: got such bad reviews that it’s sort of horseshoed back around to being interesting
there are a shitload of others but they all basically boil down to softcore porn fortnight dogwhistle
…
anyway
there are also a bunch of indie thirpses coming out uhh eventually:
peripeteia: polish (thank u tulpa) grimdark anime movement shooter imsim. honestly it looks kinda cool but i have acquired a mild anime allergy and the whole thing seems kinda daunting.
kingmakers:
city builder + dynasty warriors but ur the one guy with a fucking m16 and a ute. bit of a meme but it does look very fun in a primary school playground stupid kind of way.
but eventually is not now and i felt so sad about there being no good modern thirps (warframe has like permanently fucked up my brain chemistry) that i decided fuck it let’s play some that i know are good. so i played these two yesterday:
ghost in the shell: standalone complex for ps2:
game rips. it owns. it rules so hard. that stupid wall-jump section is awesome. the guns feel so austere. the level design is so great. the control scheme feels completely alien. it rules. i love cavia.
operation winback 2: project poseidon (also ps2):
is that really how “poseidon” is spelled? looks fucked up. anyway this game is crazy. it’s like the slickest thing ever. also it’s wild to play this after gits cos that game is 30fps if ur lucky and this is a rock solid 60 at all times. god bless. i love cavia.
these two made me so happy so quickly that i decided to grab a bunch of other ps2 thirpses. so i’m currently acquiring
max payne 2
syphon filter dark mirror
007 everything or nothing
scarface the world is yours
10,000 bullets
crimson sea (2?)
the getaway black monday
the godfather, the game
mafia
i’m expecting most of these to also be bunk but a different kind of bunk, a kind that i’ll happily play for like 30 minutes at least.
isn’t it kinda weird how like, tps is the Default Game Format now, but most games that use that format aren’t actually interested in being a thirp.
this, coupled with the fact that the “genre” [format] label is inherently vague (i don’t wanna see your god damn top-down twin-stick danmaku under “third-person shooter” mate) means that searching for these games in modern storefronts (or really anywhere) makes me feel kind of insane.
anyway please go forth and recommend thirpses you like or thirpses you hate or whatever
Syphon Filter on ps1 has that taser that would shoot a wire across pretty much any distance and if you kept electrocuting a guy with it and didn’t stop he’d eventually catch on fire. Too bad my pirated copy back in the day had a glitch where a certain door wouldn’t open so I never beat it. In conclusion: pretty neat game!
Whoa I had no idea Winback got a sequel. The VS mode in N64 winback is classic Kusoge action. 4 people with pistols in an arena the size of a 4 car garage murdering each other. Winback 2 looks pretty good.
I checked out EDF 6 the other day and holy hell who decided this game needed all this unskippable story and tutorializing bs right up front. It’s only for the first 15 minutes or whatever and I’m glad I stuck it out because the game is still EDF but good god if I was new to the series I might seriously have turned that shit off before getting to the good part of the game and never would have known why people speak highly of that series.
Seconding the taser in Syphon Filter. I had a demo disc back in the day with Syphon Filter demo on it with the first level of that game and I played that a lot just tasering everyone. Think I rented it a couple times as I remember the rest of the game not being too bad.
Killswitch was kind of a Gears precursor. It did the cover shooter thing like a whole year or two before Gears came out but I never played it despite only ever hearing good things about it.
The other day I was thinking about Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy for PS2. It’s a thirps where you have powers like psychokinesis and can pick up and throw things with your mind. The game came out in the wake of Half-Life 2 and its gravity gun so that’s kind of the vibe it’s going for. Decent game, I wish it would get a port or something. I miss games like that. Probably why I loved Control so much. It is basically a much better version of that kind of game.
PS1 had quite a few that might still be worth checking out like the Die Hard game and C-12: Final Resistance. That last one came out later on, after the PS2 had released, and looked and ran really well for a PS1 game. Does the PS1 Ghost in the Shell count as a thirps. You’re in a tachikoma so does that make it a vehicle game instead? That one might be borderline but it’s a great game.
One of my favorite PS1 thirps’ is Army Men: 3D. It’s probably unfairly difficult by today’s standard but it was really satisfying carefully picking my way through those levels. You could run, jump into a prone position, crawl and roll left or right, all while shooting. You could stand still for a fine aim that was zoomed in a bit but most of the time I just pointed myself in the direction of the enemy and let the game’s auto aim do its thing.
There were a lot of Army Men games in various genres after that one but they never quite lived up to the original. Green Rogue was kind of like the 3D PS1 Contras: interesting in principle but not very good in practice. Speaking of Contra, is Neo Contra a thirps? I’m inclined to think not due to there being no way to control the camera to aim. That seems like a requirement for a thirps.
recing 2004’s dueling psychic powers third-person shooters released within three months of each other, Second Sight and Psi-Ops. Second Sight is “what if the Timesplitters devs made MGS” as well as “what if one of the Timesplitters devs tried to be the lead voice actor and gave a charming non-performance,” and Psi-Ops is “what if the guy at Midway who went on to direct Max Payne rip-off John Woo’s Stranglehold somehow presaged Remedy’s later game Control by 15 years”
imo it absolutely does. i love that game it rules. absolutely spectacular presentation and really great level design (except for that one jump in the final level lmao; classics of ps1).
this and
has reminded me that i forgot to link the list i started making on backloggd:
I have fond memories of Dark Sector as a completely unsung gem. A game that owed way more to RE4 than Gears, and something about its physicality echoed what I think of as the Starbreeze/Machinegames style (a huge compliment from me). Ignored I think due to its extremely cliche mid-2000s gritty dark toughguy look.
I don’t know what any of these computer words mean but if this style of game appeals to you you really owe it to yourself to get over whatever purity test you’re standing by here and play this game. I’ll play it with you.
I looked up the people who made this, since I never had before, and found out that they helped develop the original Unreal and went on to make Warframe, which all of sudden brings a lot of clarity to how much latent interesting stuff was lurking in this game.
counterpoint: the pseudo-fascist aesthetic is absurdly obnoxious and you should ignore anyone who tries to ply you into believing otherwise. it was like only a month ago that the developers put a “defend the giant shopping mall” mission over what is geographically the gaza strip lol. but hey at least you can earn cool nazi ww2 helmet cosmetics to wear!
