One thing i didn’t really want to do when i started this site was go over old games and try and review them. The reason i don’t do this is simply because in terms of games i have moved on to often times better games and either can’t remember or don’t care enough about the old games to want to go over them again for a review.

However some old games no matter how old they get hold a special place in your heart and you always look back at them and laugh at the good times you had playing them. The 3 games that i thought were out standing in different ways were the following.

#1 Mafia

#2 FarCry

#3 Counter Strike Source

Mafia..

First we have MAFIA , at the time this game come out i had went and read the reviews of it and even after reading the reviews i wasn’t sure i even wanted to try it let alone buy it. I looked at some screen shots for it and still wasn’t convinced in fact do the fact it was a 3rd person shooter and not First person shooter i wasn’t even going to go buy it.

So i went to a few other sites and did some more reading about it and decided the hell with it i would go buy the game. So i go out to the store and get my grubby hands on the game and get it back home and fire it up. It took me a while to get used to the 3rd person view but when i did i settled in to see what the game had to offer.

The first thing i was struck by was the vast size of the city this game unfolds in. I had never played any of the grand theft auto games so this was my first look at something like that scale wise. I was blown away by the fact it was so big and you could go anywhere in the city and never really encounter any load times. There is one exception to the load times and thats when you get to a few certain parts on that map like the country side and the game loads up the entire country side you can drive around in.

So after doing the free ride mode i knew the game was good when i noticed what seemed like a few minutes to me turned into hours when i looked at the clock lol. So i decided to stop messing around in the vast city and load the single player up and check that out.

Well two weeks latter i was done the game lol and thats how it went. I would wakeup do some work hop on the game and the next thing i knew it was morning time. You know you got a very good game on your hands when you have that happened. Another thing that struck me was one morning i was playing the game i had been up all night playing a mission and i got to the next mission and started that one and the mission in the game was set in the morning time or so it looked to me. The strange part was when i looked out my window for real and the color of the sky in real life and the lighting matched the game to a T.

I remember standing there looking out the window and thinking of how well they manged to pull that sky/lighting effect off in the game. I got to say the story in the game was first rate once you got into it you were hooked and as i said day turned into night and then back into day in real life real quick playing this game.

The graphics at the time in the game were top notch and it ran smooth for me. If you went crazy on the resolution and cranked that up I’m sure the game today would look fairly good but keep in mind the game is a few years old now. Still having said that i think the story in the game and the way the game plays out was a masterpiece.

I think the other thing that got me hooked on Mafia was the intro when you started the game up. I’m sure many of you out there are like me and for years have seen games with really wild intros and then you get in the game and your a stick figure with crappy graphics. Well in mafia once again the genius of the makers of the game would would shine proud. When the game intro starts off its hard to believe at the time what i was seeing i was thinking man its a shame they put all this work into the demo and then when i get into the game it will suck. Well not with Mafia when the demo ends you find your self in the exact same city the intro just panned around in.

The fact the intro basicly was the game engine was what impressed me. The intro and the game itself were one in the same. Right away a dream came true for me and they finally built a game and intro that i was stunned by.

One thing that sets this game apart from say the grand theft auto games was it was not port of a console game. Mafia was made for the PC and you could tell just by the graphics and how the game run at the time.

If you can find this game in a store and haven’t played it and you don’t want doom3 graphics get the game you may to end up with fond memories of it.

The only thing i didn’t like about Mafia was the support. Despite the fact the game makers made what i call master piece they didn’t support it very well and i think that only two patches ever came out for it. I never had a problem with the game on my system so i didn’t need the patch. The other thing i didn’t like was the fact the game had no multiplayer at all and a game like this would be so cool online. I didn’t like the way the developers just abandon the community and even to this day years latter we still don’t know if they plan on making a second up to date version of the game.

FarCry..

Like Mafia this game to was one that got my attention. I had never heard of the makers of farcry and yet when i seen the game i couldn’t believe the makers of the game just burst onto the gaming scene and this is what they had for a game and a game engine.

With the game i did here some hype about it and did follow a few previews of the game. When i heard that there was going to be demo out for it i was getting eager to get a shot at playing this game. This is one of the few times all though the demo was good it really didn’t sum up what this game really had.

It wasn’t until one of my buddy’s as in the Friendly Spider went out and bought the game and then told me how good it was , that i to went out and picked up a copy. The first thing that stood out in FarCry was the first thing that stood out in Mafia witch was the grand scale of the map making. A lot of games do a shitty job of keep you inside a box while your paying and they try and make it look big. The difference with farcry was it was big.

Not only were the levels huge the detail on them as in the foliage and the in game graphics were stunning. It was the first game that i played where i could actually hide in the bush while picking guys off. When you were walking through the tropical island jungle setting it felt like you would expect it to if you had done it in real life. One side effect to the Foliage was the fact some enemies were hard as hell to see. Lots of times guys would come up on me in ways you wouldn’t expect. The AI in the game unlike a lot of games in this game the AI was done really well.

I gotta say one of the things about the game i loved the most was the sniper rifle and how it worked. There just ain’t anything like putting some guys head in a set of cross hairs and letting him have it with a 50 cal lol. I would sit there some times in amazement at how well they had done on the physics of the characters in the game when you would see a guy fall down after being hit with bullet.

There were also many times that i would stop right in the game and just look around at how well done the level was. I have dabbled in map making myself so when i see something on the level these guys did it really makes you pause in the game and look around.

The actual single player part of the game was like Mafia it was really well done. I wasn’t to interested in some of the monsters you had to kill but over all the game was really well put together. A lot of the times i was playing the game thinking the end must be soon because i couldn’t believe a game that looked as good as this one did would last as long as it did.

Unlike Mafia this game did have a multiplayer portion to it but it was missing something. I’m not sure what it was but it didn’t keep my attention for very long. Where they made a huge mistake with this game that i think no company should make is they released a patch to early one time and a lot of people to patch their games and then later users had to revert to a previous version do to some problems with the patch. I think this alone hurt the multiplayer because you had to different camps running servers. Some liked the patch because it made the multiplayer a bit better and yet you had other people who had major issues with the patch and had to run the game with no patch. This lead to instead of having one massive list of servers you had half a list because the other half had a different version then you had.

Aside from the multiplayer though the game really was amazing and its a lesson to any wanna be game maker to go through and see how they designed that game. One area unlike Mafia i have to give credit to is the guys put together some really good mod tools. There map editor for example all though buggy at times was truly impressive. Most map editors say for quake 3 and the like you had to compile the map then load the game and then play the map. In the far cry editor you hit a key and could run through the map and see how it would look when played in the game. This really cuts the time down that mapper has to keep switching back and forth to see how his map looks in the game engine.

Also in terms of mod support from what i have seen they did a good job there as well. And a lot of other game companies should take the same approach to mod making.

This game is a bit newer then Mafia and I’m sure its graphics will reflect that. I think this game if you run it at full graphics and all the goodies on high will even tax the high end processors of today. Having said that i ran the game on my non high end machine and the game ran fine as long as you could live with not having everything cranked to max.

Over all though this game was very well done and my hats off to the guys who put all the time into such a great looking and a great playing game.

Counter Strike Source..

Now before you close this web page when you get to this here me out first lol.. Counter Strike stirs a lot of emotion in people and you either love it or hate it. Most people think its a hack fest and i can’t say if thats the case or not but one thing is for sure the game does what it does well.

I see a lot of games today that are first person shooters and i always compare how the ground combat is to Counter Strike Source. Counter Strike Source is by no means a simulation but the way it works has impressed me since the time i played counter strike for half life 1. Counter strike is a fast paced game and i think thats what i love about it the most. Next in line to that would have to be the weapons. I think this game has got the best looking weapons in any game i have seen to date. The way the weapons respond and how fast they respond is another area that sets it self apart from a lot of games.

The graphics in the game are pretty good as well. Another thing that got my attention was the rag doll physics. This truly blew my mind , i used to love going around in the ghost view and just watch the action unfold in a match and be totally amazed by the way a guy may die or the way his body may get through around from a blast. I think i spent more time in awe of the physics then any other single factor in the game. If you haven’t seen a game with good physics then this is the one to get to see some truly stunning stuff. This was so radical when i seen it that now i expect every game to have such physics. To bad for me a lot of games still don’t have the physics that you see in Counter Strike Source.

A couple of areas that really impress me about the game ain’t even to do with a actual game. For example i thought the idea of downloading the game from Steam would suck but after doing so i wish more game companies would go this way along with making cd’s for store shelves. I think Steam may be the future for a lot of game companies if they can ever get rid of the strangle hold EA has on em lol.

The good thing about Steam despite the fact its good for downloading the game its also a pretty nifty way to keep the game up to date.

Another thing and maybe the most important thing to me was the mod support for the game. I spent quite a while checking this out and even started to work on a map. The amount of support from valve was clear from the start and their were tons of resources and FAQ’s around on how to MOD the game. A side from maybe the Quake 3 and the Unreal line of engines i would be hard pressed to come up with a game company who has put as much as valve has into its mod Support.

This is still a great game that i still play from time to time. Unlike the other two games mentioned who are no longer on my machine i always keep Counter Strike Source around.

Well thats it folks thats my run down of the 3 best games i have played in the First Person / 3rd Person shooter category. Any one of these games are still worth buying today if you haven’t played them yet. Unlike the first two games i mentioned Counter Strike Source is purely a multiplayer only game. There is no single player to it at all.

WolfManz611..