The Glory of the Shooter

Ah, nothing like a bile-clearning rant to kick-start a Monday. Clive Thompson's latest column is all about the pure, simple, violent pleasures of running-and-gunning first-person shooters. Screw plot, screw game mechanics, screw intricacies, screw complexity, sometimes all you really need is to deliver an up-close-and-personal gut shot to a friend with a sawed off.

Let us now praise insanely violent first-person-shooters.

Let us praise the joys of double-wielding a pair of Uzis with unlimited ammo; let us delight in the gorgeous fractal carnage of a rocket launcher as it slams into your target. Let us talk openly about how just totally awesome it is to grab a fully loaded railgun in Quake 4 and wade into a mass of gibbering Strogg aliens and kill and kill and kill again, until there are guts on, like, the ceiling.

While we're at it, let us meditate on the subtle joys of deciding, while playing Far Cry, that this sneaking-around "stealth" stuff is for the birds, and it's way more excellent to just barge out into the open with fully loaded machine guns and slice through waves of oncoming mercenaries with the crimson fury of the angel of death himself, blasting and blasting until your trigger finger is aching and you are basically tripping over the corpses, and the battlefield is silent but for the distant plaintive cawing of seagulls on a far-off beach.

I probably sound like I've lost my mind.

I haven't. No — it's just time to defend the indefensible: The allure of grotesquely violent shoot'em-ups.

Amen. And now, let us gib.

The Glory of the Shooter [Games Without Frontiers]