What has happened to the SPFPS?  What am I talking about?  Well FPS stands for First Person Shooter, and SP stands for Single Player.  When FPS games first came out, the only thing that they could be is single player games.  Multiplayer or Player vs. Player (PvP) style FPS games took a while to arrive.  Wolfenstien 3D and other early FPS games had no hint of PvP at all, and this was great.  Nobody had any problems with it because they had no idea of what multiplayer could be like.  Once multiplayer was introduced into games, things started changing.  LAN parties started popping up, the internet sprouted websites for clans and gaming organizations, duct tape was used in new and hilarious ways.  Today, a company that dares to release a game with no multiplayer suffers criticism for their ?incorrect? decision.  It is almost as if it doesn?t matter how crappy the multiplayer is, as long as it exists.  That was phase one, and we are now beyond that.  FPS games have been refocused, or at least had the focus divided between the single player and the multiplayer experience much more than ever before.  This even applies to other categories such as games like Warcraft III and ?insert flight sim with guns here.?  I have seen many people say ?Who cares about single player?? on messageboards and elsewhere.  Things have changed so much that the single player experience has less of the focus than ever before.  Now it seems that multiplayer games have single player games tacked on just so they are there.  Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament are great examples, as is Return to Castle Wolfenstien.  Though what these games lack in single player, they more than make up for in multiplayer.  So it?s okay, right?  I don?t think so.

Personally, the single player experience in a game is very important.  There are only a handful of games that I really enjoy playing in an online/LAN situation.  It may be the fact that I?m really picky.  It also may just be that I like to win, and if I?m horrible at playing a particular game online, I?d rather not play it.  I hate counterstrike because of this.  It seems that a pistol can beat my MP5 every time.  I much prefer Quake 3 because when I fire a railgun, it hits exactly where I?m aiming.  It doesn?t, as in counterstrike, have the shot mindlessly swerve around every player.  Okay that?s a bit of an exaggeration, but I?m entitled to do a little ranting.  Well, back to single player!  Maybe single player is important to me since I come from the Nintendo generation, but I find that it is more fun to play a well thought out single player game than a basic multiplayer game.  Still to this day, Half-Life is my favorite single player game in the FPS realm of things.  So what?s wrong with all these other games?

Story is a big key to a successful single player game.  You need a good plot and a well thought out storyline.  It also helps to feed this story to the player through a means that?s a little less traditional than scrolling text or printed text with a voice over.  One thing that made Half-Life unique was the way it told the story ? through other characters.  It set the standard for having more realistic characters ? characters who could talk and their mouths would move rather than maybe switch to a different texture or something.  Also, you can?t just toss a ton of monsters at people and let them go on a shooting frenzy, though it worked okay for Serious Sam and Doom.  Even so, these games were all just shoot up monsters, find switch, shoot up monsters, find key, open door, shoot up really big monster, and you?re done.  You can only do that for so long before it becomes boring.  Half-Life, on the other hand, kept me glued to my chair wanting to go farther and farther in the game.  It?s not just the fact that it had a pretty good story and more realistic characters that kept it going.  But what else made it keep you tied in and not wanting to quit or even cheat a bit?  One thing was the mood that it created.  Playing Half-Life with the lights turned off and the speakers turned up was a great experience.  Crawling down a air conditioning duct when out of nowhere a headcrab jumps up and makes you literally jump in your chair ? that?s a great and fun game.  But there is one other key to making a single player game successful.  First you need a good story, followed by setting a good mood, but the best thing that a game can do is make the player care about the character they are playing.  If you really care about the character, you don?t want them to get killed and you usually won?t want to cheat to make the game easier either.

Since Half-Life, there have actually been only a few games that have come close to standing up to its single player experience.  One of these is the renowned game of Daikatana.  Okay, that?s a joke.  Seriously, the other single player FPS (third person is included here as well) games that I have found worth the time to play would be Medal of Honor, System Shock 2, Max Payne, Oni, and Splinter Cell.  Others that I have not played but have been suggested to me were the Hitman and NOLF series, Red Faction, and Jedi Knight II (for the saber battles).  Overall, while these are some good games, they just don?t quite match up to Half-Life in my opinion.  It does depend on the type of gamer you are of course.  But if a couple of them do compare to you, which ones are they?  It?s been five years since Half-Life and since then we have only a few games that can even try to compare.  The rest of the market has been flooded with games which have been overdone, ripped off and had lame single player experiences, and then we have the other FPS games which have great multiplayer, but single player will be added in the next patch?

So what are your favorite games?  Do you think any of these mentioned surpasses Half-Life?  Why or why not?  Discuss this in our forums.

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