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Comment by Goronmon | Hacker News Reader

"Poisoned"? Or just more competitive? If you thought Half-Life was a "7/10" back in the day, what would you play instead? Quake? Unreal Tournament? Both were mainly multi-player games and not really a direct alternative.

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Other games that released in 1998:

- Ocarina of Time

- Final Fantasy VII

- Baldur's Gate

- Starcraft

- Metal Gear Solid

- Resident Evil 2

- Pokemon Yellow

If only it was as competitive as 2023, in which some of the top games were:

- A Zelda game

- A Final Fantasy game

- A Resident Evil remake

- A Baldur's Gate game

He is talking about first-person shooters.

If you had a taste for a certain kind of game in the late 90s you didn't have many choices that were done by a full studio and polished. Most of the games you listed had the same "problem" of being unparalleled at the time.

Now you have a lot of clones of the same idea, plus so many of the classics are still replayable or remastered and rereleased. A good-but-not-great game has many substitutes with a similar scope and feel.

In 1998 we still called them Doom clones. Goldeneye didn't even use conventional twin-stick aiming. There's a reason there weren't many. How many non-Nintendo 3D platformers are there today?

We were calling them first-person shooters by the mid 90s (though I also remember ___ clone.) Interesting recent thread about it on another forum: https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/our-favorite-old-magazine...

Unreal, Quake 2, Jedi Knight, System Shock 2, SiN, Blood 2, Hexen 2, Rainbow Six, Turok 1 & 2. There were a number of great FPS games available at the time.

I did enjoy most of those games, but wouldn’t use them as examples of equivalents of Half-Life. Some did some things better than Half-Life but others were worse in every category and were superseded (e.g. Unreal.) Great list of memories!

1998 was a great year for gaming... as a N64 and PC gamer (voodoo2 graphics)

Thief, Sin, Shogo, Delta Force and Rainbox Six were 1998, and if you go out to 1999 there's system shock 2. 1997 had some classics also like Dark Forces II though they're more of the doom clone variety like Blood.

There were plenty of single player FPS games then. And I don't think anyone was arguing that Half-Life was an example of a 7/10 game. Quake 2 and Unreal were both games with great single player campaigns when Half-Life came out, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 didn't come out until the following year. Dark Forces II Jedi Knight is another good example.

Unreal Tournament didn't exist yet, and both Quake 1 and 2 were very much single-player focused games.

laughs in quakeworld

You know, I was wrong on this. I had forgotten how many games were available around that time. Plenty of competition was available in that space around when Half-Life was released.

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