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The great part about Valve is that they patch the game, add new content based on player's interests and no longer allow it to go stale. I have at least 600 hours into the game and have learned specific tactics for taking out the special infected while most people run aimlessly out to their death. It's a team-based game where if you stay together, the chances of survival are high. Cool binds to use such as taunt, yes, no, take the lead, stick that up your a$$, etc. make for some interesting jokes even if everyone is already on voice chat. What you're really doing is making a movie and if you're one of the 4 star actors you're able to take a break and watch. I love how the game seamlessly as well as instantly adds new players or replaces them with bots without some lengthy game re-load or re-sync making everyone wait. It was remarked that the grenade launcher sitting out in the open for anyone to grab and descimate the game solo was making the game too easy and allowing people to leave the rest 4 dead, so Valve moved them to more hidden areas so players had to search for the big guns. I hope it's evolution continues.

Every last bit of exquisite detail in the game might as well have been a poster, pure artwork on an invisible wall. The pathfinding is a direct one-way-to-the-end-of-the-level route in SP, with so many cutscenes and the headache-unducing camera wobble make the game a pure piece of trash. Even the cursing seemed as if it was either translated or curse words given to a 5year old to memorize and make a sentence with. Multiplayer has ZERO chat function via keyboard so unless you're telepathic, good luck getting people to understand what it means to wave your gun towards a target. Out of the box, it has NO startup screen forcing new players to download a completely new interface in order to verify your game and download 2 patches from dial-up servers on the MOON! It took a week of searching forums to find the way to completely install the game to play it. While PCF (People Can Fly) make great gore and gibs with slo-mo effects, that's pretty much where they're skill ends. An absolute waste of money. I really tried hard at getting my $60 worth, but with no way to talk to other players via the keyboard, and a slow acceptance of people that would consider using voice chat to talk to strangers, this was a serious disappointment.

This is a great game you can play for hours if you simply love light sabres. I passed on the sp part and went right for multiplayer and was happily slicing and slashing in free for all deathmatch servers. Use one lightsabre or two, customize your character and saber all you want and spend hours figuring out new moves and combos. I never bothered learning the game but it was by far the best non-restrictive free for all fps game I had played in a long time.

This where the term BFG9000 comes from, and once you've used it, all other guns seem pointless. The term, "Doom the walls" also comes from this game by pushing your character against a wall to try to open a secret wall or door since in it's time there were no buttons to push, just run into whatever door you want to open. Very mindless game if you want a fast shooter with a no brains learning curve. Baddies are everywhere but ammo is not, use your weapons with care.

The first FPS game to incorporate the "leaning" and "prone" tactic to the genre which over the years gave way to macros to perform a lean while strafing, commonly called "the electric slide" allowing the player model to be about 75% harder to hit due to being in a form not recognized by the original game code, thus spawning many mods to a game with an open source code. However, hidden Quake developer console commands ultimately ruined the multiplayer aspect allowing players to shut down servers and hack other players resulting in an extreme loss of interest in trying to keep servers up. These were earlier days when Punkbuster's system of detecting aimbots and hacks was in it's infancy.

Incite minions to come to your side, build extensive underground cities of minions, train them, feed them and whip them with your hand to make them work faster at mining or cultivation of fighting skills to fend off attackers. Twenty levels will keep you entertained for at least a week.

One of the earliest Civilization-esqe games requiring one to build an extensive Egyptian city along the Nile river complete with fields, granaries, and monuments to say the least. I know I've built a few cities over the course of a few years, a timeless game.

Quake 3 took Quake 2 to new heights and kept true to the game mechanics adding so much eyecandy and pioneered the item pickups that were scattered throughout the level such as haste, invisibility and invulnerability. Based on a pure and strict multiplayer platform, this game gave way to team mode options while still allowing players to create their own maps, sounds and 32 bit textures versus quake2's 8bit textures giving the player a sense of flashy deathmatch arenas designed for the pro-killer. Gravity and propulsion debuted here and the developers took those new mechanics to never-before-seen heights. This community of players still thrives 12 years after it was created. Master this game and everything new will seem slow, boring and scripted.

Quake2 was the first FPS game to add "jump" to the game mechanics as all other previous fps games were strictly walk around and press buttons. It was back in those days when players could make their own multiplayer and co-op maps and then release them to the masses within the MSN Gaming Zone servers. It was where the the first "rocket-jump" mechanic was invented using existing game mechanics by altering the mechanics' values via simple text files executed in a live game. This game was the adam and eve of all current FPS games. I, myself created over 500 multiplayer maps over the course of 4 years as the game's popularity lasted no shorter than 10 years, well beyond the creation of Quake3.

After playing for 4 years at a cost of 675$ in total subscription costs and a couple hundred in discs and another hundred worth of pets and mounts it has been the most immersive MMORPG I have ever installed. The cataclysm expansion was long awaited by myself and millions of other players and it delivered about 25% of the satisfaction we expected in the game. Farming nodes are as if someone just decided to put a few lines of nodes in each new area and call it a day, versus pre-cata where nodes could be anywhere. Each week is met with at least 8-10 hours of complete downtime and neverending restarts as if they don't quite know exactly what they are doing. They recently also shut down all forums during these downtimes to ensure they need not read about unhappy players who spend real money for downtime. Quests which used to take time to figure out to complete are overly too simple as if the new target player base is 8 to 12 year old kids. Rest assured that once you have learned your class and become good at it, blizzard will rewrite your skills and abilities to ensure you are half as strong as you once were and after overcoming that hurdle, they weaken you even more. End content in the game requires you to somehow become affluent in raid tactics and gear to even be eligible to play the end content, typically reserved for the top 10% of the realm. Goldsellers, (hackers), frequent the servers to steal passwords and accounts then bilk these accounts clean to sell your stolen items on the auction house with no retaliation as blizzard can roll-back your account to replace stolen items. One would surmise that these hackers would be banned, yet they are not and instill the idea that they are beneficial to Blizzard akin to the term, "you scratch our back and we'll scratch yours", the idea that if a player buys gold from a goldseller, that player will be banned but will be able to buy a new cd set to continue playing with a new slate. Tactical title sales? Be warned, it's no longer as safe as it once was, just ask any player who purchased an authenticator.

Great game for $10 but not much more. It was quite easy to beat the sp version in about 3 hours, just look for the white walls. Co-op is horrible if you don't speak portugese, spanish or german. If you don't have a microphone your games will end abruptly due to the inability to exchange tactics resulting in the other player disconnecting due to frustration. It should have been 3x as long to keep my interest and incorporated all the game mechanics in all areas. It seemed divided as if different developers made their own concepts yet did not collaborate to bring the entire experience together. I didn't approve of the negativity and condescending nature of the female voice, after listening to Cave Johnson's commercials.