An FPS with a nasty twist

For the past 15 years, we've become flooded with run-and-gun first-person kill-a-thon gore-fests, stuffing our every orifice until we ourselves have exploded in an unsavory mess of blood, viscera, bone, sinew, with a dash of piss and shit because we HAD to have the rest of the pizza and cola that night. But very few FPSes have really offered anything new to the mix, for example:

• Wolfenstein 3D offered the basics. Very patriotic, what red-blooded American wouldn't want to cut through Hitler and the Nazi SS with a gat-gun? This was a new thing at the time, so why not?

• Doom offered the first online multiplayer experience, as well as the first MOD community.

• System Shock was the first of offer minigames within an FPS.

• Quake offered GL-rendering support as well as the first game to let you fire wherever you want (I know that Descent came out before Quake, but you're piloting a ship in a zero-gravity environment, much like any space sim. So it doesn't count).

• Goldeneye was the first console FPS to offer multiplayer, and quite arguably the greatest movie licensed game in existence.

• Rainbow Six was the first "Tactical FPS" that required you to be as silent as possible while sneaking up from behind, and sadly....NOT to simply go "BOOGYBOOGYBOOGY!", although that would have been original........and hilarious. :-D

• Half-Life offered the first game with the cutscenes taking place while actually playing, as well as very few level breaks whatsoever. We'd see this done again to near-perfection in Unreal (Which is forgotten by most in favor of the spinoff), with no level-breaks of any kind.

• Tribes was the first FPS to properly utilize vehicles, as well as broke the bank on the limits of online participation with a maximum of 128 players.

• Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament took the deathmatch FPS genre to the mainstream, and made it a requirement to run around like a PCP addict, blasting anything that moved.

• Counter-Strike was the first MOD that spun a whole franchise onto its own, requiring team coordination.

• System-Shock 2 and Deus Ex were the first FPSes to merge with RPGs, requiring you to level up, take on sidequests, and make conversation with total strangers.

• Halo. I want to be kind about this one, but I can't. There's nothing new about Halo except the fact that it was a launch title for an American console. That's it. Moving on.

• Half Life 2 was the first game to utilize voice-recognition and made us realize that little thing call gravity......actually applied to everything.
  

Granted, Wikipedia, which helps a lot on the history aspect, doesn't really help us on where the FPS can really go from here. I know I left out Warmonger which came out last year and offered destructible terrain, but I haven't been able to get my hands on it, so....yeah. But is there really anything left that can really surprise us, or at least offer something new? I'm going to try to answer that with a potential scenario:

The game is called "A Day in the Woods". You're a former Marine, a Vietnam veteran if you will, and you're taking a week off from your job at the office to get out into the woods and hunt some decent game. Sounds like any game you'd pick up at your local Cabela's, but there's a problem: You're also suffering from Shell-Shock (Some would call it Battle Fatigue or Operational Exhaustion. Lately, it's been called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but they're all the same), and the sound of a woodpecker high up in a tree makes you begin to have nasty flashbacks. Suddenly, you don't know where you are, who's shooting at you, or how to get out alive, but you're going to take those bastards down in a blaze of glory. All because you wanted to shoot at some potential dinner (Seriously, try some deermeat. It's not bad).

Building on the concept of parallel worlds (Seen first in Metroid Prime 2), real-world events will cause the player's perception of the world to change from normal, to war-zone, to cuddly pink rabbits and cartoonish bears, to chatting with your squadmates who aren't really there. Kinda like a wide-range Doom3 flashlight that shows a random overlay of the environment, eventually settling on what you're supposed to be seeing, but not for very long. It also ties in to my original blog post about the need for games that are not meant to be fair (I regret the fact that I didn't go further into detail on that notion). But I have to confess: There's an alterior motive to this line of thinking........

For the past several years, we've been seeing our friends and loved ones coming home from Iraq, missing limbs, brain-tissue, even the greater amounts of their own flesh, only to be re-deployed over and over again until they're either in body bags, or as completely-different people with hardly any sense of reality. This is what war does to people, and we take it for granted. George Carlin once said that if we were still calling PTSD "Shell-Shock", that the Vietnam vets probably would have got the attention and care that they needed. Whether we choose to accept it, it's happening again with those that have served, or are serving in Iraq right now. And it's about time that a game was made to address this fact.

I know that such a game would probably get nothing but negative press due to complaints from special-interest groups, talking heads, and pro-war shock jocks over the airwaves. But the gaming industry is kinda special about that kind of thing where the opposite always happened. Bad press only strengthened Doom, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear, Manhunt, and Halo. Gamers know what they want, and non-gamers usually check out the controversial stuff for the sake of curiosity, and then become casual gamers.

I think it's time. What do you think?