I don’t play video games. They’re too good and I have too much to do. Like reading the book, Men Who Game Too Much and the Schnauzers Who Love Them. My addiction began with Battlezone, a polygon-based tank game that sucked down quarters like INSERT QUASI-MISOGYNIST METAPHOR HERE. It ended with Call of Duty, when I heard the call of duty to raise my daughter as a single father. But I still love gun games from afar. Not Jafar. If Jafar was driving a tank, his ass would be mine. Just sayin’. What gun games are you playing and which ones do you recommend as Xmas gifts to yourself or others?

55 COMMENTS

  1. Far Cry 4 is the only time-waster I’ve been wasting time on now that I actually have a budding career in the firearms industry, which takes up most of my life these days.

    • To add to my original comment, imagine shooting an MG-42, .700 Nitro Express double rifle, Mk.48 GPMG, SOCOM 16, M3 Carl Gustav with top-down air burst munitions, or any one of the around 75 weapons available, while riding on the back of an elephant through the foothills of the Himalayas, ripping through an enemy outpost, tearing up everything in sight, with your elephant (that you just find in the wild and ride after a certain skill is acquired) grabbing enemies with it’s trunk and tossing them in the river. With the most beautiful scenery imaginable.

      Yeah. That’s this game.

      • The next Far Cry should be set in the United States, where you join a revolution and do similar stuff.

        • I meant the more rural regions in America, with canyons, forests and mountains and lakes. Away from the cities. Besides, wouldn’t it be cooler to take on the might of a first-world military force?

        • I am going to have to agree with this. Like, some terrorist group(ahem) has taken over a region of the US, and you have to do something about it. Fight your way to the big city, rather than the Himalayas.

  2. Only game I play is MechWarrior Online…. I don’t like ‘do’ the console thing. And my primary computer is a somewhat dated HP laptop. So I don’t don’t even consider playing any of the new AAA games.

    • Ah, Battletech. My love of that game runs deep. From the old table top from FASA to MechCommander and MechWarrior.

      The 100 ton Marauder II is still my favorite ‘Mech. Wolf Dragoons all the way.

      • Heh. You know I always found myself more interested in the Mercenary units in the universe than any of the successor states. Wolf’s Dragoons, North Wind Highlanders, and my favorite the Grey Death Legion. My interested has waned a little since Battletech is drifting into the new Dark Age time line. WizKids completely wrecked the game when they tried to turn Battletech into a collectable mini/trading card game. :/

      • And I can’t say I have any one single favorite mech… But more often than not I gravitated towards some of the more odd and less popular mechs. Like the Akuma

        • Another battle tech lover here. Grew up on the role playing game, though I never played as much as I would have like because IMHO the game was too detail orientated for the friends I had.

          I was always partial to the 70 ton warhammer.

          I also really liked the novels, at least the older ones. At some point the new ones were a little too “teen” for me. I thought it was a great universe. Shame it never made it into a real movie. That transformers cgi capability could really make a hall of a visual battletech movie.

  3. It’s pretty old now but I was pretty impressed firearm wise with Fallout New Vegas. There is a hell of allot you can do with the guns in that game. You can mod them to have different optics, barrels, mags, stocks- with each having a different effect on accuracy or weapon wieght. You can also use a variety of different ammo from fmj’s to HP, AP, API, buck shot, slugs, and magnum rounds. You can even reload your own ammo and have to keep repairing your guns to keep them functioning.

    • Agreed on that one! I love that game. Been a long while since I’ve played it. Guess I should load it up again.

      • Don’t be a prick. AW is actually really good. Sledgehammer games changed enough that the gameplay actually feels really fresh.

        • I liked the gameplay, but I play games for the story, and the “evil capitalist is doing evil things” concept was far too predictable… I was sorta hoping the “bad” guy was right about politicians being useless

  4. I’m in the same boat. I don’t play video games for the same reason I never tried heroin; I’m afraid I’d like them too much.

    Pretty sure my marriage couldn’t take me sitting in front of a game console 9 hours a day.

  5. Battle Zone…

    Yeah, that’s one of the good ones…

    For addicts of the old upright and cocktail video games, MAME is just for you.

    MAME – Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

    This is a fairly lightweight emulator that you load up with the ROMS of the old games.

    http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/arcade/mame.html

    Use Google-Fu (MAME ROMS) to find the ROMS, a total of about 60 GB are floating around.

    Everything from Frogger to Battle Zone to ZAXXON to Ms Pac-Man are out there

  6. Getting myself Farcry 4, then Dying Light in January.

    Other than that my gaming will be wandering through the blood soaked streets of Yarnham in March when Bloodborne launches.

    • Ah, the mystical land of Kyrat. If you take the Australian stereotype of “everything wants to kill you” to the extreme, then you have Kyrat.

      • Play a Souls game and get back to me.

        Everything wants to kill you, and will likely succeed at one point or another.

      • Honey badgers! Only reliably way to kill one is RPG or C4. Never played (still playing last gen) but having a blast watching vids.

        • MG42, DA DEAGLE BRO, .44 Mag and Vector SMG in either of their available variants will shred them in a split second. You can even take out Rhinos with the ’42 without getting demolished.

  7. Personally, I’d just gift a steam, PSN, nintendo, or xbox live gift card. I’m way to lazy to take into account someone’s preference in games and give them something they’d enjoy. If i had to gift actual games though…

    Games that actually have gun mechanics I’d gift to someone (some old, some new) would probably be ARMA III, metro/last light redux, Fall out NV, STALKER, Red Orchestra 2 and so on.

    Other related stuff I’d gift based on my own tastes would be strategy games (Civ, Total war, Valkyrie chronicles, XCOM, World in Conflict, Dawn of war, wargames, nothing too in depth).

    If I was to gift a someone a new game console, I’d get a Wii U plus a few games (mario, mario cart, pikmin 3, donkey kong tropical freeze, etc). The two games that I would include for sure is The wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 2. Feminist can criticize bayonetta 2 all they want, but judging it purely from a gameplay perspective, it is nearly flawless and is definitely my game of the year.

    If someone had a PS3 or PS4, I’d gift them Guilty Gear Xrd, even if they didn’t play fighting games. I don’t care how niche it is, how anime it looks, or how difficult it plays. It is a superb game that definitely needs more exposure.

  8. I’m mostly into RPG and single player stuff. I got tired of FPS games. I just downloaded Dragon Age: Inquisition with a 20% off coupon and will see if it is better than the last one, which was crap.

  9. I’m surprised the PC game Receiver has never been mentioned on this site, it’s about the gunnest game there is. It’s an indie game that was designed around the idea of giving control over every aspect of the firearm.

    See, most shooter games have the approximate controls of ‘Fire button shoots, and when fire button doesn’t shoot press reload button to make fire button shoot’. Receiver gives you control over the mag release, slide and slide release, safety, hammer, and loading/unloading individual cartridges from a magazine, and you use the appropriate controls in the correct order to reload and otherwise handle the firearm (lest you end up with a full magazine inserted and an empty chamber). I mean, name one other game where you can do a press check.

    The enemies are auto turrets and little flying killbots, and both are pretty good at what they do. The ‘beep!’ sound they make when they spot you will be your new most hated sound.

    Also the game’s like five bucks. Even if you don’t want to play it, it’s worth the time to look it up on Youtube and see players trying to lern2gun.

  10. Being a collegiate, my budget is limited for vidya games and my laptop is too much of a potato to run today’s PC games. It’s pretty much Doom, Wolfenstein and Roller Coaster Tycoon for me.

  11. Been playing Civilization: Beyond Earth this week as it finally went on sale, quite the time thief so far. Im with BB above, accounting for personal taste is a PITA sometimes, giftcards are usually a wise move.

  12. I don’t play FPS games. I think the last computer game I played was Zork. As an old coder, I do have an interest in how they are programmed, though, like the early fast inverse square root calculation used to compute angles of incidence and reflection. All hail the magic constant 0x5f3759df. Hail.

  13. Do any of the Borderlands series count? It’s science fiction setting, but boasts the claims of “baziillions of guns”.

  14. Arma 3. The answer to every time you’ve ever been disgusted with the lack of realism in a gun game. The mission editor will eat your soul if you’re not careful though. I don’t actually play the game that much (having almost nobody to play with), but I spend hours carefully crafting scenarios in the editor.

  15. Battle Field 4, the most recent maps are very large, I like being able to find hold over with a sniper rifle. Cod has become crap over the last few games and I can only stomach it for short periods of time when my clan has a full party. Otherwise the ” gun game” I’m playing is shoot the whitetail deer in the woods with the temperature in the 20’s.

  16. Far Cry 4 and Advanced Warfare. If you haven’t played AW, don’t tell me that it’s crap. I was done with COD after MW3, but AW changes it up enough for the gameplay to feel fresh. The enhanced mobility totally changes the way the game plays. I look forward to seeing what Sledgehammer games does in the future (yes, it’s made by a different developer; the others have been made by Treyarch or Infinity Ward).

  17. Two words: One word: Destiny.

    I know it doesn’t have “realistic” guns, but Destiny has the tightest gunplay of any FPS out right now. The guns “feel” satisfyingly powerful, unlike quite a few other games I’ve played.

    As an added bonus, it has elements that have been designed specifically to be literally addictive. I hate it but I can’t stop playing…

  18. Cult game: I play Natural Selection 2 (siege mod, specifically) 95% of my gaming time. We need more people playing NS2. Other times I just play CoD, CS:GO, or some AAA game.
    We need more 007 games that are good. And Splinter Cell needs to go back to Chaos Theory style.
    And who the hell threw that blue shell?
    Ugh, don’t get me started on video games.

    • I burned out on Insurgency in a quick hurry… They still haven’t fixed the party/friends system and the nigh maps are tragically bad.

      Battlefield 3 and 4 soaked up a lot of my time, but the FS expansion for 4 was underwhelming at best. For a game that seems to have been geared toward infantry play the weapon mechanics and hit registration issues are a big problem.

      I’ve gone back to America’s Army (Proving Grounds)… While the map design/selection leaves much to be desired, the gameplay is as solid as any shooter out there right now, imo.

  19. Wasteland 2. Especially for all the fallout franchise fans this is a great game. Fallout was essentially and spiritually a successor for the original wasteland (which at 25 years old is unplayable today but amazing at the time). If you have any interest in a post apocalyptic RPG I highly recommend it.

  20. I game, but I’d rather shoot real guns than fake guns modeled after airsoft toys. Give me RPGs and Nintendo games over cowadooty any day.

  21. Metro 2033 and its sequel Metro: Last Light.

    I love the athmosphere in them. The little things like guns overheating (assault rifles, not MGs), wind causing you to shiver (especially while aiming), the gasmask fogging up, etc. really make the game for me.

    Other good games in regards to guns are:

    -Mafia: City of Lost Heaven (old but good. Has things like finite ammo for enemies, ammo in magazines getting discarded when reloading, really good car physics, cool missions and a really good story)

    -Fallout: New Vegas (Get the Game Of The Year edition. Cool stuff like handloading, having to repair your guns, and of course weight limits for both guns and ammo makes it cool)

    -S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (has stuff like: small weight limit, realistic guns, bleeding and with misery mod even gets the noise right as in you get deafened when shooting).

    Also, most of these games are on sale right now on Steam (except Mafia, you will have to hunt that one down). Making an account is free and easy. Also, having games on a Steam account allows you to install the game on multiple computers and you have no disk to worry about losing or scratching. And by on sale I mean ridicilously low prices, You could get all those games I listed for less than a 50 USD.

  22. Planetside 2, free FPS MMO… thousands of people engaged in large and small fights.

    Game is CPU bound due to the large number of people fighting.

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