Boomer shooter

Realistic boomer shooter.

Boomer shooters are a "new" (as in: newly regurgitated) genre of first-person shooters for ageing millennials who only wish to return to a time when their dicks still worked. Boomer shooters harken back to the primitive 90's "classics" of the FPS genre, complete with 90's graphics, 90's music, 90's design sensibilities and general 90's shittiness. They are the vidya equivalent of reheated leftovers.

The term initially referred only to the original first-person shooters that spawned like maggots in rotting flesh after Doom's unexpected success in 1993. Beginning in the late 2010's, though, it has been expanded to include a myriad of low-effort modern copycats. Today, a plethora of major corporations and talentless indie hacks are more than happy to repackage the childhood memories of balding 30-something old men and sell it back to them for a quick buck. The result is a glut of absolutely identical garbage games flooding online stores.

Characteristics

Although all FPSs are fundamentally the same, there are certain characteristics which, when taken together, make up a boomer shooter. These have their origin in the primitive state of PC gaming in the 1990's. Although the industry as a whole has moved on from this experimental Doom-clone phase after figuring out what works and what doesn't, nostalgia-blinded retards continue clinging to these objectively failed paradigms.

Low-polygon graphics

Imagine finding this appealing.

Boomer shooters are most easily recognized by looking like absolute dogshit. Some don't bother rendering anything other than the level geometry itself, using fugly pixelated sprites for enemies and weapons.

Why was it used in the 90's?

Computers in the 90's could barely render a jpeg without crashing and burning, much less a full 3D environment.

Why would anyone use it today?

Because programming modern graphics is hard. Nevermind the fact that any illiterate code monkey can shit out a functioning 3D game in an afternoon using nothing but Unity and Stack Overflow.

Fast player movement

GOTTA GO FAST

The player character moves around at SANIC FAST speeds.

Why was it used in the 90's?

The games were made for caffeinated teenagers with twitchy masturbation arms and low attention spans.

Why would anyone use it today?

Moving fast leaves no time for the player to scrutinize the ugly game environment, or indeed the shittiness and repetitiveness of the game itself.

Enemy crapflood

At any given movement the player is surrounded by at least 9000 abominations to shoot.

Why was it used in the 90's?

Level design still hasn't progressed past "put enemy in room" and, for challenge, "put more enemy in room".

Why would anyone use it today?

As it turns out, designing encounters more complex than "enemy in room" takes time and effort. Why bother?

No story

This is all you get.

Boomer shooters have no plot to speak of. If the developers even bother with a story, they stick it in boring walls of text before and after every level, or, in some tragic cases, inside the user manual.

Why was it used in the 90's?

Development teams consisted of a single Computer Science dropout and his 3 virginal friends, all of which are clinically autistic and incapable of writing anything more engaging than code documentation.

Why would anyone use it today?

Development teams consist of a single highschool dropout and his 3 virginal friends, all of which are clinically autistic and incapable of writing anything more engaging than a Twitter post.

Large variety of weapons

The player character carries on him an entire military arsenal at all times. Not that it matters, because players naturally gravitate towards using the one or two actually useful weapons, with the 30 other dildo gadgets relegated to ammo-conserving roles.

Why was it used in the 90's?

With no experience or formal theory in what makes an FPS good, developers simply threw every brain fart they had into the game with no regard to logic or usability, letting players figure shit out for themselves.

Why would anyone use it today?

Having three superfluous submachine guns, eight varieties of shotgun and four melee weapons (all equally useless) lets you boast about having "over 20 unique weapons!" in the Steam store page.

Labyrinthine levels

Too bad none of the retards who make these games ever bothered reading this.

Levels closely resemble IKEA stores in layout and accessibility. There are plenty of pointless side paths to confuse the player, and hidden areas with stashes of drugs and ammo presumably left behind by a passing hobo.

Why was it used in the 90's?

Back in the day most gamers were denied access to the parents' credit card. The average kid only got new games on special occasions like Christmas, or when mommy wanted to bribe the little twerp into lying about what he saw her doing with the TV repairman. As a result, when kids got new games, they wanted them to last for as long as possible. In the days before Blizzard perfected the art of synthesizing digital crack, best way to do this was to bloat level design into absurdity. Developers would ctrl+c ctrl+v entire sections to hit quotas.

Why would anyone use it today?

Having secrets and rewarding players for actually paying attention to their environment continues to be good design practice, one which the developers of Cawaduty still struggle with. However, the monstrously confusing labyrinths of, say, Quake II have been endlessly glorified by hordes of nostalgic retards who haven't played any of the games they masturbate to in over a decade. The modern developers who cater to this market blindly follow the demands of troglodytes without thinking it through.

Should You Buy Them?

No.

Notable Examples

TRUE and ORIGINAL

• Wolfenstein - The first.
• Doom - The big one.
• Quake - The one everyone ripped off.
• Duke Nukem 3D - The one that added tits.
• Unreal Tournament - The one played at your cooler older brother's LAN parties.
• Half-Life - The one that actually killed the genre by demonstrating there is a better way.

Afterbirth

• Dusk - Will
• Strafe - This
• Amid Evil - Shit
• Wrath: Aeon of Ruin - Fucking
• Ion Fury - Stop?
• Nightmare Reaper - Just
• Forgive Me Father - Look
• Project Warlock - At
• Dread Templar - All
• Graven - These
• HROT - How
• Doombringer - Many
• Post Void - More
• Hedon Bloodrite - Of
• Vomitoreum - These
• KARM - Do
• White Hell - We
• Berserk Mode - Really
• Hands of Necromancy - Need?

See Also

• Nostalgia
• NEDM
• Boomers
• PC Master Race

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