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Red vs Blue
After completing the Marathon trilogy, Bungie turned for a few years to real-time strategy with the acclaimed Myth series. Then in 1998 the studio began work on an RTS/third-person shooter hybrid called Halo, which was publicly announced in spectacular fashion on stage at the 1999 Macworld Expo (one of the rare occasions that Apple talked about games in a keynote presentation).
Open “Operation Flashpoint Cold War Crisis” folder, double click on “Setup” and install it. After installation go to the folder where you install the game. Open folder, double click on “OperationFlashpoint” icon to play the game. Operation Flashpoint: Elite is such a full-featured and realistic tactical-shooter that if you are planning on serving in the United States Army or United States Marine Corps any time soon, it would behoove you to get this 60+ hours of scenario training under your belt before you ship out to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Microsoft soon snapped up Bungie for its burgeoning games division, and Halo was wrenched away from its Mac roots to become an Xbox exclusive (although Mac and Windows ports eventually followed two years after initial release). Mac gamers' loss was the world's gain. Halo: Combat Evolved transformed into an exceptional first-person shooter and got top-billing on the Xbox—it really was the only reason to buy the Microsoft console in its early days.
Halo's innovations were few, but its memorable stars Master Chief—now an iconic, helmet-wearing supersoldier—and Cortana—a sentient AI that lives in his neural interface—offered a great path into a story-rich world torn by aliens-versus-humans war. Like Marathon, the plot laid heavy on the idea of rampant AI and nuanced alien hostilities. (Unlike Marathon, however, the plot also got more pompous and less interesting with each sequel.)
Halo was rip-roaring fun, with accessible but deep combat that often ended in a drawn-out cat-and-mouse duel. Every game in the series has a swagger that most other shooters can't seem to replicate, and just as the first Halo sold Xbox consoles, Halo 2 (2004) sold people on premium online service Xbox Live, and Halo 3 (2007) multiplayer defined so much of the Xbox 360's identity.
War never changes
It's surprising, given how overdone the military thing feels in first-person shooters, that World War II shooter Medal of Honor felt incredibly fresh and exciting when it dropped on the PlayStation in 1999. A kind of spiritual successor to box office smash Saving Private Ryan (to the point where that film's director, Steven Spielberg, actually conceived of and wrote the game story), Medal of Honor sent you behind enemy lines in 1944 to wreak havoc in Nazi encampments and take out certain strategic objectives without getting caught or killed.
It was a far more tactical and realistic experience than the usual FPS or war game fare, with lifelike environments (relative to what the PS1 could output) and ambient sound and smart AI that had enemy soldiers and guard dogs reacting dynamically and evasively to your bravado.
Medal of Honor brought with it a string of copycats. Soldier of Fortune (2000) doubled down on the cinematic realism and violence (excessively so, for most people at the time, as you could blast limbs off and torture foes) while also switching setting to present day. America's Army (2002) was created by the US Army as a recruiting tool masquerading as a game. Battlefield 1942 (2002) stuck with the World War II setting but went with a class-based system that added massive depth to multiplayer matches. Current market leader Call of Duty got its start here (2003), too, with its main twist on the Medal of Honor formula being to provide frontline British and Soviet campaigns as well as an American one. And Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (2001) went for a more realistic tactical battlefield simulation (the excellent Arma series by the same developer carries on this legacy today).
Battlefield soon became one of the PC's online multiplayer mainstays. Its well-balanced class-based warfare rewarded all types of players—the run-and-gun caution-to-the-wind types, the patient snipers, the sneaky scouts, the pyromaniacs, the pilots (yes, there were plenty of vehicles), and the angels in our midst (read: medics) could all thrive in the sprawling, hilly maps and with the tiered objective systems.
The Battlefield series jumped around in time periods and play styles, with the most notable offshoot being console-only buddy story Bad Company (2008)—which was like a video game version of war comedy film Three Kings. But the best entry remains the second game, which transplanted the action into the modern day and refined all of the systems from the first Battlefield. It also introduced a commanding class that could (attempt to) direct squadmates from afar, a Battle Recorder that allowed public sharing of special moments years before most developers even thought of the option, and scalable maps that changed depending on player numbers.
While Battlefield effectively owned the PC market, Call of Duty became de facto standard for military-themed shooters on consoles. As with Battlefield, the standout entry was the one that ditched the World War II setting in favor of present day. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) was about as cookie-cutter as you could get in everything except for story and the addition of experience points to online multiplayer, but that didn't matter. It swept games media's many end-of-year awards on the way to selling seven million copies in just two months.
Modern Warfare's campaign made you feel. It wasn't a story of one man singlehandedly saving the human race; both your (multiple) protagonists and their contingent of non-playable comrades seemed very much mortal characters vulnerable to the petty whims of a fate that at any moment may turn against them—as indeed it did for one protagonist. They're all just soldiers—ordinary people with military training fighting other people's battles—and Infinity Ward's knack for big setpieces shined a light on how forcibly amoral their jobs can be—most notably in a disturbing, prophetic scene of destruction seen on a thermal imaging monitor.
Eight further annualized sequels have followed so far, each louder, faster, and seemingly more tone deaf than those before it. Yet still—for now at least--Call of Duty outsells almost everything that doesn't have Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft in the title.
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While military-themed shooters made their climb to the top of the genre's sales, tech leaders Valve, Epic, and id Software continued their three-way battle. The Quake versus Unreal Tournament rivalry continued until the mid-2000s, whereupon both entered the realms of irrelevancy except as engines (and anyone who follows the industry now will probably know that Epic's Unreal Engine long ago squashed idTech, while id Software as a game developer has done little of note in years beyond releasing overhyped corridor FPS-cum-racing game Rage in 2011).
Valve cemented itself as king of the FPS—and prince of the action game engines—with Half-Life 2 (2004) and its two episodic sequels (released in 2006 and 2007). Half-Life 2 remains many people's choice for the best FPS ever for its environments—set in City 17, a post-apocalyptic dystopia crafted in the finest detail—and for its restrained approach to storytelling. Like its predecessor, you remained in total control even when other characters rambled away on long monologues. And if you were somehow unimpressed by the story and the characters, you could still delight in the joys of using the gravity gun to fling stuff around.