Video Gamers Podcast - [Bonus Round] Our Top 5 Favorite Shooters - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

The Video Gamers Podcast is back and gaming hosts Paul, Josh and Ryan are diving into one of our favorite gaming genres - The shooter! Whether it’s 3rd person, a FPS or an in-depth RPG Shooter, We each give our top 5 list and talk about why they belong there. It’s an awesome, gaming packed episode you need to check out! Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Disratory, Ole Jake and JigglePuff Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Captain America Brave New World. See it in IMAX this Friday. Hit tickets now. Grab yourself a piping hot mug of Liberty. I'm Epic supporter Ace of Shame, and this is the Video Gamers Podcast. We are three lifelong gamer dads here to talk today about our personal top 5 favorite shooters of all time. Make sure to stick around, should be a fun one. I am your host paul and joining me for christmas he just wants an official red rider carbine action 200 shot range model air rifle but santa told him no because he'll shoot his eye out it's josh okay first of all my aim is impeccable all right and

second of all you guys should know that there is never friendly fire or collateral damage involved when I am playing. Never, never. It's never happened. All right. And then joining Josh and me, we might be in for a wild episode because he told me that his favorite all-time shooter is Shooter McGavin. It's Ryan. Oh, absolutely. And you know what?

He told me he's going to meet me on the ninth green at nine tonight. So I'm pretty excited. I'll be at the Red Lobster shooter. I'll pay. I haven't seen Happy Gilmore in a while. It might be time. Dude, I watched it like two weeks ago. Oh, yeah.

It's so good. Yeah. You hit that guy. He shouldn't have been standing there. All right. Before we start our top five shooter lists of all time, Josh, I think you've got a couple of reviews to read. I do have a couple of reviews. First of all, thank you to every single person out there that has taken the time to leave us a review to rate this show five stars

on Spotify. You are doing just fantastic work out there to help us get the word about the podcast out there. And when people leave us reviews, we love to just say thank you and read them on the show as well. This first one comes in from Jolio Sific CFK, and it's titled Awesome. And it says, this is an awesome podcast. My family is absolutely obsessed. My dad even plays it on family road trips. Oh, that's cool. I love hearing that. That's the coolest family right there. road trips, we would always take scenic routes and no one was allowed to listen to music. You had to appreciate the scenery. So any idea of like listening to pods or playing music as a family

growing up was a no-go, but I'm all about it. I love putting on stuff like Jim Gaffigan or like family-friendly podcasts with our kids. You got to have something to listen to on road trips. Absolutely. We do a thing where we rotate. Each person gets to pick a song. And so you just go around the car over and over so people can pick which song they want to listen to. Well, yes. Thank you so much.

I don't know how to pronounce that name. Jolio CFK. There you go. Yeah, thank you. All right. And then this next one comes in from the one and only Lovely Lacey. And it's titled Gaming Pod for Everyone. And it says, I'm a 46-year-old gamer

who also happens to be a busy mom. Most gaming podcasts are absolutely not for me. This podcast is different. These guys are my people. Older, more mature hosts who don't need to drop F-bombs or trash talk more casual gamers to get their point across. The only thing that would make this pod better is including a gamer mom host. If you love games of all kinds, I highly recommend this podcast.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Older, more mature. I don't know how I feel about this one. Okay. That's directed at me and Josh. Well, I mean, I will say Lovely Lacey and I are the exact same age. So power to the veteran gamers, by the way. I may be a little sensitive.

I got some gray in my beard and my sideburns and stuff. So I'm a little touchy right now. Don't worry, Ryan. Your beard will grow in someday. Yeah, maybe. Oh, well, thank you so much, Lacey. What's funny is I've even joked with Josh that it would be great if we could have a female host. In our circles, we just don a female host in our circles.

We just don't know any women who game it's, it's none of our friends, wives really game other than like very casual stuff like among us, but I'm with you. They see, it would be great. Dude. I got to say this too.

I absolutely love this where we have had more and more women gamers kind of like coming, coming out of the lurking area on our discord server. Um, so shout out to Allie, not to put you on the spot, but we see you. Yeah. It's awesome to have you participating. Um, I know we had miss Jen who is still around and listens to the show, uh, and lurks, uh, as well, but I mean, I absolutely love seeing this. So, you know, come, come join us. Don't be a lurker. Say hi. But yeah, nothing but mad respect. Absolutely. All right. And then one last little bit of housekeeping. So we would love if our listeners would rate our show five stars.

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Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So guys, top five shooters of all time. This is a very broad category.

There are about 7,000 nominees that I think anyone would be able to list in their top five and you wouldn't really bat an eye. It's also a little tricky because we talked a little bit about how do we handle games that kind of skirt the line between genres? Does Bioshock qualify as a shooter? What about the deusuce x games i don't know about you guys i tried to keep mine relatively conventional try to stick with games where shooting is absolutely the first thing you think of when it comes to that game i have a feeling we might have a little bit of overlap we might hear a couple halo entries or battlefield entries i'll be i'll be very curious to hear we might pick different entries, but maybe we'll

cover some of these at the same time. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I should also mention that we are not trying to list the five shooters that we think are the best made or are like the critical darlings. These are our personal favorites. So it might be heavily skewed by nostalgia or whatever it may be, just games you spend a lot of time playing. So we're not trying to say these are necessarily the best five, but they are our personal five favorite over time. So I wanted to kind of ask you guys as we start out here, would you say you're a fan of shooters? Like, is this one of your favorite genres or what would you say? For me?

Absolutely. I love the challenge of a good shooter. I love the, um, the action. I mean, I've always, I say it all the time, but I love chaos in my games. The more hectic they are and the more challenging they are, the more I tend to like them. Um, if you give me that co-op nature or that competitive nature in a shooter as well. They will absolutely resonate with me. You know, I mean, I,

I was alive before the first shooter was ever on a gaming console or a PC. So when doom and Wolfenstein came out, these were, had never been seen before and they were mind blowing, you know, to be able to kind of run around and just shoot monsters and stuff was like this is one of the greatest things ever and it birthed i mean quite possibly one of the what i mean what is it shooters and rpgs would you say those are like the top two

genres that exist in gaming yeah i mean that's what that would be my two first choices anyway. So I mean, I love I love that we have these pure shooters like Call of Duty. And then we have these I don't even know what you call them like epic adventure story shooters like Half-Life 2, you know, or something like that, where it's still a core mechanic of the game. But there's so much more beyond that. So for me, shooters are absolutely one of my favorite genres. Nice. Yeah. It's hard because I'm real big into those action RPGs. I love a good story, but all of them that I love, all of my favorites also have shooting. Last of Us, Red Dead, even though the game plays only like a seven out of 10 for Josh. It's okay. The rest of the game plays only like a 7 out of 10 uh for josh but it's okay the rest of the game's great but uh i mean i was you know growing up and in like the late 90s early 2000s when shooters kind of really took off that was my youth of just having no responsibilities and all the time in the world to video game or play video games so that really kind of put a foothold on on

my love for gaming and my love for shooters. So I think shooters for me is just that step above just because that's what made me fall in love with games. Yeah. I would say I'm pretty much there with you guys. I would say I definitely like RPGs more. I would say that's my number one genre. Shooters, I can really love as long as there's some kind of twist or grab with it. And maybe that's just having co-op or being able to play online in squads or whatever it might be. For me, the only kind of shooters I don't like is when it comes down to Valorant, where it's just technical clicking and who has faster reflexes. To me, that's when I start to lose some of the entertainment value. So for me, I prefer when you have shooters that also have something else with

it, whether it's using certain abilities or a good story, just something else to go along with it. All right. So let's go ahead and start sharing our lists. The way we're going to do this is, by the way, do you guys have them in order from five to one or do you just have them in no particular? I just have them in order. Dude, number one, asking me to pick five and only five was a Herculean effort for me. I'm still staring down a list of 10 and I really don't know how I'm going to decide amongst these 10 which ones I want to talk about.

There's a few that I know for sure, but this is hard for me, man. Got some Sophie's choices coming up. All right. So I have mine in order. However, whatever order you guys want to share is perfectly fine. We'll just go around in a circle. You can share your first game. The other two can say if they have that on their list or not then we'll spend a couple minutes talking about it go around until we have shared all five so uh ryan do you want the honors do you want to go first here sure i'll take it so we're gonna start off with just uh come out coming out the box hot we're gonna go with an all-time banger that honestly made one of the biggest impacts in shooters and and uh the whole genre for the last two and a half decades um i'm gonna go with counter-strike og counter-strike

cs 1.5 that was the right in the heyday for me like i said when i was kind of growing up i graduated in 06 so those early 2000s were my my teen years and we used to go and play at a cyber cafe we'd go and all of us after school would all walk there we'd get candy and drinks and whatever and and just play for hours until we had to go home and then go play more at home um playing in clans doing all that stuff there was just something about that game that just clicked and you could play and not get tired on the same map for three four hours straight so uh it's just there's just too much nostalgia and and just great memories of gaming with uh counter-strike dude i played i was gonna say i played a heck of a lot of counter-strike back in the day

oh yeah i i mean that is one of the most pure shooters that I can think of. I mean, Call of Duty is another one. Battlefield is another one. When you think of what is just the core of the shooter genre, those are the ones that jumped to mind instantly for me. And Counter-Strike was one of those games that was insanely fun to play. And at the same time, might have led to some of the most frustrating moments in a game, too. But yeah, I'm with you. I played the original Counter-Strike. Then it was, what, 1.6?

And then Source. And then Go. And then now we have 2. I mean, they haven't changed.'s be honest no yeah but and it just works so well for esports like it's fun to watch it's fun to play i'm i'm only a little bit older than you ryan i graduated in 02 and so this was when my reflexes were like at their peak and i remember getting pretty good at counter-strike spending a lot of time uh if i tried to play it now i i don't even know that i'd be able to get decent let alone to get good by the way side comment josh if ryan says he used to game in gaming cafes i think he automatically qualifies as an older mature gamer at this point yeah i mean the only thing beyond

that is saying you you used to go to the arcade Yeah. Gaming cafes. What a relic from the past. I love it. All right. Counter-Strike's a great pick, Ryan. I'm all about it. All right. Josh, you want to list your first game? I'm going to go a little outside the box, but people have heard me, but I'm still just spreading the word on this. Remnant 2. I mean, this is not just a fad for me. This is not a flavor of the month. I mean, I just got done playing the DLC on this game. Remnant 2 is one of the best shooters that I have ever played, honestly, in my life. Now, I say that with the caveat that it is tailor-made for my tastes in a game.

I love good variety of weapons. I like insane boss fights. I like good graphics. I like polish and audio and all that stuff. Paul, you kind of mentioned it, where it's like that we started to see this blend of shooters and RPGs. And it's funny because literally today, Dissertory, longtime supporter and listener of the show, said, oh, I would consider that an action RPG.

And initially, my brain was just like, no, it's a shooter, man. You're shooting guns the whole time. Yeah. But it does such a good job of introducing and utilizing those RPG elements. You're not leveling up and you don't have a party and that kind of stuff. But what you do have are different skills that you can use. You have a huge variety of weapons, attachments, characters, builds. I mean, all this stuff that goes into the game. I know neither one of you have played this game. And

honestly, it breaks my heart. Literally the other day, if my wife hadn't shot me down on this idea, because I actually brought it up to her, I said, I want to pretend to go legendary as a fake person and then do it again and make Paul and Ryan both have to play remnant. And then she was like, cool, is that going to be paid for by the podcast? And I was like, no, that wouldn't because then they'd know. And then she was like, yeah, that's not going to happen. But I mean, this game is it's perfection for what it is. I don't it's hard to explain, man, but people that have played it understand. I love seeing people in our Discord server talking about it. I know some people have

picked it up recently and they're like, yo, this game is a ton of fun. The co-op nature of this game as well is absolutely phenomenal. If you are a Dark Souls fan, this is a no-brainer of a game. If you are not a Dark Souls fan and you're just a fan of shooters, it's still a no brainer of a game. Yeah. You know, if I didn't hate the opening hours of Remnant from the ashes, I would have been willing to give Remnant to a shot. It's completely different. It's completely different though. Like it is everything that was good about that game and they took away all the bad, like all of the drudgery and the dreariness and all that is just gone now well you'll have a chance one of these days with force a friend josh maybe maybe we'll get around to it that's what i'm

gonna do i'm gonna force one of you and then i'm gonna go legendary out of my own pocket and make the other one play it we know how much ryan hates souls games so for a game deemed souls with guns i wonder if the guns would be enough absolutely draw absolutely lose his mind over this game i guarantee you i i would put any amount of money that ryan would play remnant 2 and just be like yo this game is unbelievably good i'm i'm sure i would it's almost kind of like uh akin to like paul with uh ghost of tsushima like we know he'd love it it just he hasn't got around to it yet right you know and he'll he'd love it when he, but I'm sure I would love Remnant 2, but just hasn't, you know, clicked for timing yet. Yeah.

All right. Well, good pick, Josh. One of these days I'll have something more to add to it. All right. My number five on my list, it's a little bit of an older game. I think it's something that you may not immediately think of when you think of shooter, but it really set a lot of trends. I want to talk about the first Left 4 Dead. Now, there have been so many copycats of this game that I feel like

you think about Left 4 Dead now and it seems overdone and it's oversaturated the market, but it's really hard to explain how revolutionary it was in 2008 when this first dropped. I mean, I looked up some critic reviews just for the fun of it, and this was the bottom line written by IGN. There's absolutely no doubt that Left 4 Dead is one of the most social and exciting multiplayer games that we have ever played. It's almost pitch perfect in how it captures the tension and the action of a Hollywood zombie movie.

I mean, I loved Left 4 Dead. I remember buying it when it released. I loved playing in four-person squads. I loved being able to communicate your way through it. It had fun characters that you played as. It had fun weapons. It had really clever bosses. Do you remember the witch and how the witch, you could see her, but if you got too close or made too much sound, you'd wake her up and everyone in the group would start yelling? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just remember playing match after match,

and it never grew old for me. So I feel like Left 4 Dead, no one really ever talks about it anymore because there's been so many knockoffs, but they invented the whole genre of squad based PVE, like deep rock galactic wouldn't be around if we didn't have left for dead doing this first, let alone vermin tides, dark tide, back for blood,

alien extraction or whatever that was, or rainbow six extraction. I mean, so many of these games came because Left 4 Dead did that first. And they had the AI director. So even adjusting your difficulty on the fly, adding enemies or taking them away, so revolutionary. I mean, Valve has always been one of the best developers, and Left 4 Dead was one of their best. Yeah, that game, I mean, it was everything that you needed it to be. It was fun.

It was chaotic. You had to rely on your friends, which made it even better because I don't like games that are like co-op in nature, but you all just split off and go your own direction. Yes. Because it's like we're not playing together. We're just playing at the same time kind of thing. And so Left 4 Dead forced you into that teamwork kind of mindset, and you had to rely on your buddies. You'd get snatched. They'd have to come save you. You'd be low on ammo. They'd run over and res you. I mean, I loved that aspect and what they, and they pioneered it, man. And it's carried on forever since then too. So even as dated as that game feels i'm with you and that it was honestly like genre defining game and and still is to this day guys want to hear something crazy

you've never played i don't think i've never played it oh i missed that one man what a great game yeah i don't think i'll force you to play it ryan because it's 16 years old but what a classic yeah so much fun all Well, let's go ahead and take a short break and we'll come back and we'll continue in our lists. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. All right, Ryan, coming back around to you, what you got next? This one probably has one of my favorite all-time levels in any video game, included with all the other gameplay with it. But Halo 3 is just an absolute all-timer for me. That end Warthog run.

Dude, it's the best. It's the best level ever. It really is, man. Dude, when you think about an epic moment in video games, the end of Halo 3 trying to escape is honestly like right there at the top of my mind. I remember sitting on the couch with like a few friends and we're all just – and everybody's on the edge of the seat like you would watching a sporting game or something. The guy is going to kick the last field goal to win or make the shot in a basketball game or something. It was just like that where every turn, as the panels are falling,

you're running through. I played so much Halo 3 online with my buddy Sean when we were younger. It was just one of those that I just could never get sick of it. I know I said that with Counter-Strike 2, but it was just flawless for me. Well, and you guys know what mode got added in Halo 3, right? Forge. Forge. I was going to say, because 2 had the multiplayer.

I'd say 2 is probably best known for its multiplayer, but 3 introduced Forge, which really changed the game. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and really added the longevity to it yeah i think a lot of people would say halo 3 was their favorite one yeah i have a different halo on my list coming up later so i'll save that for now but yeah you you it's it's hard to make a top five list of shooters and not include a halo game absolutely yep i figured halo 3 would come up

somewhere absolutely all right josh swinging back your way all right um you know i do have a halo game. Absolutely. Yep. I figured Halo three would come up somewhere. Absolutely. All right, Josh, swinging back your way. All right. You know, I do have a Halo on my list, but since Ryan just mentioned one, I will veer off a little bit. Let's go with Battlefield 2. I mean, we've had a lot of Battlefield in the news. I just got done talking about this on a recent Twig episode. I was not a Call of Duty guy. It's funny. I was talking to my coworker today. The first, literally the first Call of Duty game that I played was Black Ops Cold War,

which released three years ago. Really? Something like that. Pretty recent. Yeah. Legitimately, I know Ryan looks shocked right now, but he's like, wait like wait really i was always a battlefield guy and that was the thing right i i had nothing against call of duty like i'm not anti-call of duty it's just that you know call of duty and battlefield were always lockstep in their releases and i was always just into battlefield man i loved that large-scale

nature i like the fact that they had the smaller maps. If you just wanted to do infantry combat, I liked the fact that they had the different classes, you know, medic for life for me, because a good medic could change the tide of that, that game. Battlefield two was just perfection for me. The maps were great at the time that I was playing. It had the server browsers. So I don't know if you guys remember, but you know, you had these list of a thousand servers. Do you remember what it was like to find a really good server? Oh yeah.

There was mods in the server and you'd wind up playing with the same, like 60 people, because once you found a good server, you would favorite it. And then you would always try to get it. And if your server was full, you'd keep refreshing. Yes yes you literally just keep refreshing yeah occasionally you'd like you'd venture into a different server and they'd be like oh gross like you know i'm going back to the other server like sometimes they would say 63 out of 64 you double click it and it would

take too long to load and say server is full yep it. You'd have to go back and start over. So for me, that was the height, the pinnacle of Battlefield 2 for like, again, the reason for the server browsers, people would start to know you. They would squad up with you. You had the commander role in Battlefield 2, which I absolutely loved because a good commander could change the flow of the game. Some of them sucked and they just didn't do anything. But man, you had a guy that was actually paying attention and would supply drop you or point you towards a point or call a UAV

when you needed it, that kind of thing. I mean, I loved that aspect of like, I don't have to do the fighting right now. I just have to kind of like oversee and direct. And it was fantastic, man. So also I, I still claim it to this day, best helicopter pilot you've ever seen in battlefield too. Man, it was so good. I,

that to me that it was just, that was peak like first person shooter, competitive, just fun gaming. I have battlefield two at number one. It's my number one shooter of all time. Yeah. I hands down agree with you number one. It's my number one shooter of all time. Yeah, I hands down agree with you. It's as much as I loved 1942 and Vietnam, the problem or one of

the problems with those games is that you had so many people on the battlefield, but everyone kind of ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. Battlefield 2 is the first one that introduced squads. And how ingenious is it to say, we need to force people to play together. Let's put them in squads of six. And of course, later they paired it down to four. But being able to spawn on your squad leader forces you to stay together. Now, all of a sudden, you're playing with teamwork. You feel like you're an actual squad out there in battlefield i mean it totally changed the game i remember loading it up and just actually playing with squads and for the medic which i loved playing as well this was the first game

with the shock paddles so instead of just being able to heal someone which was hard because a lot of times if you're taking damage you're gonna die but if you actually died here comes the medic hit you with the paddles bring you back up but what a fantastic game man battlefield 2 is is way up there it was peak honestly like i wish i could go back to those days um which is you know one reason that we get so disappointed that battlefield is just a shell of its former self at this point too. I mean, there's a reason that we care because we know how good it can be and it just hasn't been that in so long. Yeah, I'm sure we've all played it. I mean, I think we've all played every Battlefield that's come out and yeah, two's way up there. I personally probably prefer four just because I think I played a lot more of that. But yeah, same thing having the

commander role and then the paddles. I would love to go and just. But yeah, same thing, having the commander role and then the paddles. I would love to go and just see how many reses I could get or revives you could get in a match, just to climb that number up. But just one of those just pure fun shooters that just changed the game. People knew how to play too, though. Yeah. You mentioned it with the squad you were playing, but like, I still remember the days when you were trying, you were really pushing hard to try to capture a point.

Your squad leader would hide because he knew that he was the key, right? Like I'm the squad leader. You can only spawn on me or you have to spawn way back at whatever other point it was and then try to hoof it back. So your squad leader, if he was good, would actually stay out of combat to a degree. I mean, sometimes they had to participate, but having that guy hiding in a room that you could just keep spawning on until you eventually overwhelmed the defenders on that point was strategy, man. I love the fact that you got to use your brain on some of this stuff not to count like man the

sniping in that game like popping the enemy sniper that was perched up somewhere i mean there was just so many good moments oh yeah it was one of the first games i remember buying and playing at release like eight hours a day for the first month because this is before my kids were born i had a lot of free time my wife and i were working like opposite shifts and i just remember crushing match after match after match and it was really fun to sometimes just get a break and be the commander and then sometimes you would just you know go back and play as you know medic or you know whatever else but yeah i battlefield's great it we got to get another good battle. It's been too long.

We need a class. All right. So since I have battlefield two as my number one, we can just skip me. We can come back around to you, Ryan, what you got up next. Ooh,

okay. Um, I'm going to go with a game that I actually poo-poo on quite a bit, and I'm very vocal about it, but it also is very near and dear to my heart. I just hate what it became. I'm going with Destiny 2. Oh, I wasn't sure if you'd go 1 or 2,

but I figured it would come up. Well, the thing is, I was actually talking to a buddy, and I was asking him, you know, what would you think, you know, because we would play every night for hours. We would raid every Tuesday. Within the because we would play every night for hours. We would raid every Tuesday. We'd win the reset.

We'd do all three characters. Like, we, that was our life for years. And they, I mean, a lot of Destiny 1 is in Destiny 2, you know, remade and everything. So, I went with Destiny 2. But it was just one of those where, you know, Bungie was just, they were on their A game in the beginning, and they just made such a fantastic game where all the raids were amazing, the boss fights were great, the combat, the guns. Everything about it as a looter shooter was just perfect for me. Like I said, it definitely helped that we had a full squad of six that we would, you know, raid every week on the same time we'd all get on and play. And so it made it easy to enjoy and then it made it easy to level up and get all the gear. So it was one of those that I think I literally have over a thousand hours.

Look at you picking two Bungie games out of your first three. I know, right? What is this? You know, I slam Destiny 2 a lot but i have me too on credit i mean i never really loved destiny 2 and i never played destiny 1 because if i remember wasn't that playstation exclusive for like the longest time or always if i remember right but that game did so much right in the level of polish, the worlds, the raid mechanics. I mean, I get why people enjoy it. The thing that really disappointed me on that was the amount of bloat and fluff.

And I don't want to say disorganized, but why was everything instanced? Why was it like, oh, you have these bounties, but then you have to was everything instanced why why was it like oh you have these bounties but then you have to go into your inventory to your bounty token it just became so convoluted and it didn't need to be that way because the core of that game was absolutely incredible the classes the worlds the shooting mechanics were freaking top notch man like some of the uh what do they call them not the the the night raids the what do you call night falls night falls there you go like just i loved so much about that game but it was really just ruined by some of the bloat and the convolutedness of it and

stuff like that where i just kind of went you're so close but like it's just not there for me either you know well and that game played best if you played it along with each update if you tried to pick it up too late that's when it really felt kind of stupid and bloated gta online fell prey to the same thing after a decade of all these updates and added content it just gets to be too much like i'm still getting ads all the time where they're like you can buy a super yacht in gta online i'm like really they're still adding more stuff to it but to destiny's credit if you're just talking pure shooting mechanics yes destiny 2 like that's the first game i usually think of like no other game shoots guns better maybe some do it on par but i don't think you can definitively say any game has better feeling shooting than destiny

2 dude so good i mean you come out with that thorn hand cannon with the poison uh bullets and you just get that to pop on the head dude oh there's nothing like it from across the map. So good. Yeah, really good game. I remember when we did a deep dive, Josh murdered Destiny 2, and you were shocked that I married it. And I said, this is one of those games where if you could only play one game and nothing else, like Destiny 2 is a pretty good pick, especially if you love shooters, because there's just so much content. It's way up there.

And there's just so much content it's way up there and there's vex milk so i always thought that was super weird man well there's a lot of weird things good old vex milk all right josh we're back to you back to me okay i i mean i i know this has got to be on somebody else's list but but let's talk about the original Overwatch. Oh, okay. You know, I mean, man, dude, when Blizzard announced Overwatch, we all lost our minds. I mean, we were so hyped for that game. We counted down the days to release. I remember just telling my wife and family, it's been good knowing you.

You're not going to see me for the next four or five days because this game is coming out, and I am going to crack out on this game. I will never forget the first time entering a match ever and seeing that cast of characters with the little head icons. And it's like, which one do you pick? Who do you go with first? And I remember picking Zenyatta. I went Zenyatta because he looked cool, right? Like in the character portrait. I was like, what is this guy? And then I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. But the original Overwatch is second to none in gaming to this day. I'm not going to go down the road of complaining about Overwatch 2 and where this game went. I'm just here to celebrate how great Overwatch was.

I mean, Paul, you and I played the heck out of this game together with our extended friend group. This is, you know, before Ryan, Ryan was probably still playing destiny at the time, but yeah, it was on console. Yeah. Ryan didn't have a gaming PC at the time. And I mean, there were more nights than not where we had a full six pack playing overwatch laughing, cracking up, having the time of our lives, it honestly kind of reminds me of the old days of Goldeneye with your high school buddies and things like that. Legitimately, it captured that feeling. I love character shooters. I love learning new characters. As soon as the gameplay starts to feel a little stale, I just go healer or I go tank, you know, or something like that. You know, this game lived a very, very good life.

And I am still to this day, like very thankful and grateful for the fun that it brought to our friend group. And in my opinion, one of the best shooters ever made in that regard. I mean, if it's not at the top, it's super, super close to the top just because of how great the mechanics in the game were, the characters, the polish, the competitiveness. They had characters for everybody. If your aim sucked, how many times did we have friends that were like, dude, I'm terrible at shooters? And we're like, play Winston. Go Junkrat.

Go Torb. Yeah, there's characters for everybody. You don't have to be good at shooters. And we're like, play Winston, go Junkrat. Go Torb. Yeah, there's characters for everybody. You don't have to be good at shooters. If you're good at shooters, then there's characters for you as well. And then it was like, yeah, but I just like, I'm a good healer. And it's like, great, we need a good healer too. I mean, it literally had something for everybody. See, this is why I didn't include overwatch in my list because i almost exclusively played reinhardt junkrat early on i played a lot of symmetra back when you would be able to put out the six turrets you could lock her beam remember yep the lock on beam yeah how many times would you

wipe the other squad of six once sim got that beam charged up it was nuts yeah i mean some of my favorite gaming memories of the last like eight years is when we had so many friends playing overwatch we would do custom matches we would assign team leaders like playing basketball on the basketball court take turns picking teams go into different discord channels and go play matches and that was so funny because as fun as overwatch is nothing feels better than being like lucio and booping like one of your buddies and then being able to brag about that after like we used to go crazy so much fun gun game gun game i was less of a. Like, once they brought in, what did they call the Overwatch custom builder? The browser, I think.

The game browser or something like that. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. The Forge version of Overwatch. Everyone started playing Gun Game. That I did not like as much. That brought out, like, the whiny competitive side of me where I would quit because I would just get smoked and i'd be like this is boring uh but yeah overwatch is way up there what a fun game yeah i didn't play nearly as much as you guys did but there's something to be said for like what you said josh where you could switch classes and get a refresher like a game that not only has a type

of playable character for everyone's one's play style when you get bored within the game you don't have to go play something else to get a palette cleanser you can just pick a different character and so there's something to be said about that that gets the longevity out of the game and makes it just so much more of an enjoyable

experience so yeah I didn't get to like I said I didn't get to play as much as you guys did but it was definitely, it's way up there. I can obviously state, you know how amazing it was. Yeah. I'll,

I'll just never forget my first match picking Genji and being like, oh, I throw shooting, uh, ninja stars. I guess I'm a range class because I was excited for overwatch, but I didn't follow it closely. So I remember like standing behind tanks,

just chucking the shurikens over and over. And then finally someone's like, are you going to go flank? And I'm like, dude, I'm new. I don't know what I'm doing. And then I started watching guides and I was like, oh, I am playing this class very wrong and I am not good at it. Paul, do you remember the early days there were no character locks? So you could have a team of five Winstons or something like that. Were you with us when we did six symmetries on hanamura and we just put all the turrets that was one of the funniest moments i think in gaming i've ever experienced there's 36 of them out there with a hard choke point yeah so it was just the funniest thing in the world absolutely yeah good times man

great game rip overwatch yeah all right let's go and take a short break and then we'll come right back all right coming back around to me this this is probably my most controversial game that i'm gonna list here today i felt like i had to include a battle Royale and I'm going to include pub G. Yeah, I don't, I don't, it's on my list. Yeah. I,

I don't care how bad things got for a while in particular when the cheating and it was especially was out of control. I think pub G is actually in a really nice place right now. Uh, to be clear, I have always said apex legends is the best made battle royale but pub g came out earlier i played it way more i clocked a thousand hours of pub g when it was just the first map it was just erangel oh wow and it didn't matter just played it over and over and over we would play

with our friends in squads. I would play duos with our buddy, Andrew. Every day, we would log in and play several matches of PUBG. I think that it totally changed the gaming landscape. There's no arguing about that. And that was even when the game played so bad with the rubberbanding and all the issues. But all of the fun memories of us getting into vehicles and running around engaging in vehicle combat with other cars while we're all just laughing and cackling and calling out targets. I remember buying my first set of 7.1 headphones or whatever to have better directional audio. So when you hear the gunshot,

you were more likely to know where the enemies were. All of that felt so new and fresh. I felt like I had to put PUBG on my list. It's on my list and I am with you 100%. I pick on PUBG. I call it janky all the time. It's just a weird pacing to this day when you're used to like Apex and Warzone and things like that. But dude, again, some of my favorite gaming memories are exactly what you said. All of us hopping into PUBG, people were playing it every single night. You didn't have to question. You didn't have to set up and say, hey guys, how about we all hop on Friday night and play PUBG? People were just playing. it was that good i mean the stories that we get from that game i'll never forget you with your uzi finish where you took out like four guys and we were all losing our minds the todd panning andy in the back of the head story that you never

fearing a red zone and going no man just drive through it of course the course the one time like you know we get just absolutely obliterated when we were completely decked out, pulling out your first win, the winner, winner, chicken dinner. I mean, that game did everything so well in such a bad way. Because again, it was janky, man. But that just goes to tell you how good the game itself was. Dropping at, oh man, what was that town in the top left? Uh, see, I, Georgia, Paul, Georgia, Paul, that was it. We used to drop a Georgia,

Paul all the time. I mean, you had your drop zones, you had your strategies. Like you said, it was, it was like a car chase out of like a movie when a squad in your squad would be driving around shooting at each other. You know, I mean, just so many good memorable moments in that game. I don't know how they did it. I don't know what the magic was at the time, but it's on my list. And you guys know, like I said, I pick on PUBG a lot, but it is, it is up there, man. It's funny. Cause I actually checked, I have 500 hours in PUBG, you know, that's a lot, that's a lot of play time, man. But it wasn't always great,

but it was better more often than not. I'm afraid to look. Let's see my hours. Oh, my gosh. Paul's going to... 1,500. I was going to guess like 13. I was going to say,

because even now I know we had hopped in maybe a month or two ago with Paul. But sometimes I'll have a short day and I'll be on the computer doing some stuff for some business work. And my Steam will pop up and it's Paul's playing PUBG. And I'm like, what are you doing, dude, in the middle of the day? He'll say that he goes and he has a minute or two, he'll hop into a match. So I fully expected PUBG to be on paul's list today i still play it almost almost every day at least one or two matches i will say they have done so much in that game

over the last couple years there are now i believe nine different maps and kind of like earlier how i said i like shooters when there's another twist to it. I love all the strategy. Like, are we going to follow the blue zone in or are we going to go set up in that high ground? Are we going to go for the drop or should we set up here and use it as bait for someone else? Are we going to go hide in this building or like having all of those decisions while shooting at the same time is what I love. They've also added a lot of tech. So I love the fact that they have the blue chips. So if you get eliminated, you pick up your partner's blue chip, you can go bring them back in. You can now loot all these coins and share them on certain maps

and go buy guns or armored vehicles. They've added a lot of stuff like that or like self AED kits. So if you get downed, you can can res yourself all that stuff has just made it so much more fun the shooting itself of course is nothing as good as apex or war zone or some of the others but it's still my personal favorite warts and all all right so let's see coming back around to you ryan what you got well when you're looking for a purpose in life, you want to be part of something bigger. And so why not fight for Super Earth? Yes, it's on my list.

I was bringing it up next, Ryan. If it made it past you, I was totally bringing this up. I was going to say, I was like, I know somebody's got this. I was like, I better snatch it now before somebody else gets it. This, I know we've talked a lot on these on these different games we've brought brought up just about the fun and the enjoyment and laughing and stories and this is one of those games that brought that back in just force for me where like you guys said in the other ones you know there wasn't a question you were just getting on on Helldivers and seeing who else was on.

And you'd sign up and then you'd start playing together. And then you'd get somebody else on when they hopped on. And it was just an automatic, full of fun, full of chaos, full of craziness. And it was just that camaraderie and teamwork. And you had to play together. You had to coordinate. And again, I know I said it a second ago, but chaos. It was just madness out there.

And I was 100% for it, completely taken back. I think I only have, I haven't played it, unfortunately, in like two or three weeks. I've just been so busy. I think I have like 150 hours or something. But it's just one of those that came in and just took over the landscape. Even with, I mean, you saw how passionate everybody was with all this Sony stuff because this

game meant so much to so many people. So it's definitely going to be an all timer. Yeah. It's, it's on my list. And like I said, I was literally going to bring it up next. It is very rare that a shooter,

because let's be honest, a lot of shooters, especially the competitive ones are super toxic, right? Oh yeah. Like, you know, but hell divers bringing gamers together is part of the secret formula for that game. And you have to credit Arrowhead studios for that because the approach that they took was

saying, Hey, we're all working together. And the humor that they inject into the game, over the top, it kind of like gamers just kind of latched onto that, man. You know? And we said, yeah, like I'm here for this. I am with you. And we're talking a top five games. This isn't like recency bias for me. I mean, I haven't played hell divers in about two weeks. I'm kind of near the end of my cycle with that. It doesn't mean that I won't play if people are hopping in, but it's like, I've done everything there is to do in Helldivers at this point. I mean, I've beaten Helldiver difficulty multiple times.

I've done every mission. I have every unlock. So I'm just kind of at the end of the content portion and I've done enough of the gameplay to where it's like, as much as I still enjoy it, I'm just ready for something different at this point. But that doesn't mean that the second they release a third race that I won't be diving right back into Helldivers and going, guys, who's getting on? The Illuminati are out or the Illuminate. They're out. Let's go. There's a new threat to Super Earth, right?

And so this game is, is again another one of those games that's just tailor-made for me the camaraderie the chaos the teamwork involved the moments right like again i mean everybody's dead you have no reinforcements left the the extract shuttle has 60 seconds to go and there's your one buddy that is running around against an impossible horde of three bile titans like five chargers and a thousand other little bugs and everybody is just cheering him on going like go go you know and watching him dive into the extraction shuttle at the end and actually making it and everybody losing their minds is gaming perfection it's just bliss to me to have that happen and hell divers 2 provides that opportunity It's just bliss to me to have that happen. And Helldivers 2 provides that

opportunity. There's definitely something to be said for the game when, Josh, we started this pod over four years ago, and I would say there are only two games that grabbed a huge group of friends long-term, and it was Valheim and Helldivers 2. we had other games that were very popular for a short period of time but these two had real long lasting impact and hell divers too it's just way up there the use of the stratagems is genius running around inputting these codes is great we talked about in our deep dive how i said it sounds so silly but the dive mechanic is so central to how you play the game and that sounds so dumb but it's so well made and adds to the immersion and the comedy the humor all of it's there even the opening tutorial is like truly hilarious i

mean there's nothing you can say bad about hell divers do you have like a single actual criticism of the game i don't no i want more content and but to be fair they've been feeding us content since the game released you know so like i can criticize it but at the same time i can say well i mean you're kind of doing that i just i'm ready for the the third race like that to me will refresh the game enough that it'll like i want to i i will be like drawn back in versus the occasional like let me play one round of hell divers kind of kind of point where i'm at right now and again that's nothing against the game it's just that i've put in i put in my time at this

point they they got a new race coming it's they're called the uh the sony suits yeah all the executives i will say i i was heavily disappointed that you can't dive on your ship because when you're you know they're everyone's setting up there oh because you fall through it no you can't you just can't do it yeah it just doesn't let you because i i want to just run in circles waiting for everyone because i'm like let's go let's go i want to kill bugs and i just want to dive down the stairs or dive into people and it doesn't let you dive on the ship and that's oh i'm sorry. I thought you meant like while waiting for extraction.

No, like on your actual command ship. On your actual home ship. Okay, I hear you. All right, coming back around to you, Josh. You got what, two left to list? Yeah, well, hell, I mean, we've got some overlap going on here. I'm going to bring up another game that I feel like is custom made for me. This one is probably going to make people go, huh? But again, there are certain games that

just click with you. And I feel like it had everything I wanted in a game. Paul, you played this whole game with me. And it's a game called Outriders. This is my number three. Is it? Yes. Yeah, you keep stealing mine. Right on, man. Again, dude, people are going to say Outriders and they're going to look up a review score and they're going to say, well, this game wasn't reviewed very well. How can this be a top game for you? Outriders was everything that I wanted it to be. I remember seeing the trailers for this game. I remember getting excited for it.

They did the big previews and all that kind of stuff, the different classes. We got very amped for it, Paul. I remember before the game ever released, we were talking, I was like, Paul, I kind of think I might want to play Trickster. Like, what are you going to go? Because we didn't want to pick the same class.

Our buddy Andy played with us. Andy was like, I think that pyromancer looks cool. You were, what was the earth guy called the devastator you know and so but these classes were bananas dude the armor the the abilities to this day some of the coolest abilities i've ever seen in a game i mean hands down dude like with the devastator you could punch the ground and then spikes would come up out of the ground and lift the enemies up on the spikes. And they'd sit there and dangle for a minute. And you could shoot them like while they were on the spikes.

My trickster used time to manipulate things. So I had this like time blade where if I slash something, they would turn into a skeleton as if they had aged like four centuries. And then like and then explode for massive damage. The mission structure, the loot in that game, the boss fights, the RPG elements, the levels, the skill trees for your classes, the builds that you could do. You could go skill-based builds. You could go weapon-based builds. It had everything you could want in a game. It had a little bit of grind, which was great because you wanted to keep playing. They had harder and harder difficulty levels. They called them world tiers, if I recall correctly. We were beating the highest and hardest world tier and the final boss

fights and all that stuff. I mean, Outriders was magnificent. It came with a lot, a lot of flaws. So when you look at review scores and you say, huh, Josh, Outriders? I'm going to say, yeah, because it was buggy as anything. You guys remember, my guy would get stuck to where I couldn't run because of abilities that I would use. And you know what? It didn't matter. The game was that good with friends that it just didn't matter to me. So for me, Outriders is a top five game. I wish I could go back and play it all over again. There was an expansion. I tried to dive into it. I had been out of it for so long. I didn't remember any of my builds or gear, kind of even the flow of the game anymore. And so I just kind of went, I'm just going to keep my good memories of this and not try to force it. But what a masterpiece, man.

Outriders for me is kind of like Helldivers 2 for Ryan. Outriders was kind of like Remnant 2 for you. This game felt custom made for me. It was part sci-fi. It was part action. It was part fantasy. You truly had RPG elements. To the extent that if you look up this game on Wikipedia, they have it as an RPG, which I think is nuts. This is a shooter, first and foremost. But it does have very heavy RPG elements. And it's one of the best cases where you have action shooting with RPG being married together in a cohesive way that makes sense. Like you mentioned the different skill trees, you had three main different builds within each of the four classes. So in essence, you had

12 different classes or way of playing, but they all played completely different. I would go so far as to say, I think this is the most inventive shooter ever made. I think that like the Halo games and the different abilities they gave you every ability was like something i had never seen in another game outside of the class that would plop down some like turrets okay what was that class engineer it wasn't technomancer technomancer that was technomancer yeah that was and that's what i started with and hated it so like other than that pretty much everything else seemed very novel to me. And the fact that you didn't just have the skill trees, you had a million guns, which all had different attachments. So part of the grind was, oh, I just unlocked this new attachment. Now I have the ability to

completely rework my character because that attachment is central for this other build. And next thing you know it's like you're playing a different game i mean outriders i had zero of the bugs that you guys did i never got stuck i never had issues sprinting i never had the issues like our poor friend jared whose inventory all disappeared and couldn't play you know i didn't have any of that. I just trudged along and played a perfectly made game, and I could not have had more fun. I think it's number 13 on my leaderboard, and honestly, it might be a little low. The longer time goes on, the more fond my memories are, and maybe that's rose-colored glasses, but what a fun game. Fun bosses. Everything about that game

was just awesome. You talk about raid-type mechanics with Destiny or something like that, or Remnant 2 even. Outriders had that. You had to strategize with your teammates. You had to figure out these fights. And I just remember thinking, this is crazy, man. What a cool mechanic or encounter, the level design, the fact that you could just keep increasing the

difficulty of the world tiers so that yeah even though your build you were doing a million dps a second you know it still felt new and good because you were still then getting gear like you said would be build defining at that point and the time goals so it's like not just can you beat this world tier can you do it in less than nine minutes and that's when things would get nuts when we would strategically split up and grab different mobs and have all these different strategies also don't forget the fact this was one of the earlier games that had the mechanic where you could only heal if you were out there doing damage yes so instead of hiding behind cover like every other game used heal if you were out there doing damage. Yes. So instead of hiding behind cover,

like every other game used to do, you were encouraged to go out there and fight because that was the only way you could heal. Ryan, I don't think you ever even played out Riders, right? I was going to say, I'm still here, guys. Does this make you want to play it? Yeah, go get a room. Geez.

I mean, hearing you guys gush over it, and I'm looking at a lot of stuff now. I mean, this looks like my game. I don't know how I missed this one, but it just seems like it hits on all the targets that I like. Dude, I would almost be willing to just play it from the beginning. Like I said, I tried to go back and play it, and my builds, I don't remember a thing. But Owl Riders is that much fun that I would totally be down to just say, let's start all over and have some fun.

I finished Spiritfarer today, Josh. Let's do it. I don't know. I got some time. Is this happening? Is this happening? Oh, man. Maybe.

I wonder if my trickster is still bugged. You think I'd be able to actually teleport? Yes. I'm sure it's fixed by now. It would have to be. We haven't played it in two and a half years all right well let's go ahead and take one last break and then we'll come back and share our last game each all right ryan coming back around to you what you got left

oh man save the best for last i guess i mean like said, I didn't really put all these in order, but this is a big, big one that was, again, right in that wheelhouse and right in that timeline. And I think it was very impactful on gaming as a whole with the new engine, but I'm going to go with Half-Life 2. Yeah, it's on the list. That was one where not only was just the the story and the gameplay and the mechanics and everything was just out of this world i remember watching the original like

trailer where you just go through the cave and you see the water reflections and you see all the new world and how absolutely breathtaking you know we thought it was at the time and how amazing it looked it just it changed things for me is what 2004 so i was like 16 so i had a car i could go out hang out i was just playing a half-life man that's all i wanted to do like me and my friends again we'd go to the internet cafes or we'd hang out at home and and land and or just do whatever we would build maps we'd get the map builders. It was fun online. It was an amazing story.

It was a great campaign in single player. And I think it just made such an impact. I mean, look at this. 39 Game of the Year awards. One of the best games ever made. There's just so much to be said about it. And yeah, it's an all-timer. It was the game that blended every element perfectly and it was

very technologically advanced with like the physics of the game and like if you smashed a crate you could see all the little pieces of wood like fall down and stuff like that gravity gun gravity gun again played into the physics of the game which people really hadn't seen before picking up the saw blades and launching them and sticking the wall like you're just like whoa incredible story great like protagonist really cool world i mean the striders dude watching the striders walk over the city like it was mind-blowing um yeah i mean it that game did literally everything right. Citizen. Yeah. And for those keeping score, that means that we've now listed three Valve games.

Dude, Valve knows how to make a game. Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, and Left 4 Dead. Wait, wait. Three Valve? Half-Life 3 confirmed? Portal 3? Portal 3? Yeah. Yeah, Valve knows how to make them.

Those are some classic games even like team fortress you know i kind of wondered if that might pop up or something but it's awesome yeah i mean valve made such great games i mean half-life 2 i think if we had to sit down and make our mount rushmore top four games of all time i kind of feel like diablo 2 and half-life 2 are probably the first two games that all three of us would agree on because we might argue a little bit about like red dead 2 josh doesn't like it quite as much i don't quite like uh god of war 2018 quite as much as you guys but i think all of us would agree half-life 2 it's a 10 out of 10 yeah all time easily it's five on my leaderboard what are you gonna say bad about half-life 2 it it's a 10 out of 10. All-time game. It's 5 on my leaderboard.

What are you going to say bad about Half-Life 2? It's so well-made. Everything about it is almost perfect. Yeah. Alright. Well, coming back to you, Josh, what's your last pick? Here's the problem. I'm really torn here because I have... I don't want to steal one from Paul, but I mean, I'm thinking Borderlands 2,

but then how do we not talk about a Doom game when we're talking about top five shooters of all time? You know, there's another Halo that I wanted to mention. I am going to say Doom Eternal. Okay. You know, and again, I don't know that Doom Eternal is going to top a lot of people's lists, but if you were looking for a pure shooter with, I mean, we talked about the mechanics of Destiny 2 and I'm with you. I think Destiny 2 is some of the best gun mechanics you've ever seen in a video game, but there's another game where the gun mechanics are absolutely on par with that. And it's Doom Eternal. I mean, for what that game tries to do, which is just be a simple, pure shooter that is fast paced,

fun and challenging. Doom Eternal accomplishes everything that it set out to do. Banging soundtrack for that game. Incredible optimization and graphics and all that stuff as well. But when you come to the speed and the weapons and the different monsters that you encounter and the different level varieties, the jump puzzles, that kind of stuff, it hits on all cylinders. It's one of the few pure shooters that I actually went back and played again. I don't know if you guys remember, but maybe about six months ago, I was like, I'm playing Doom Eternal again, guys. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. And I upped the difficulty level and it's hard. It's challenging. There's secrets everywhere. There's all kinds of exploration

that you can do to find the little, the skulls or the little character, like the little bobblehead guys and stuff like that. Incredible boss fights. It's got everything, man. So when we're talking about just at its core, like the elements, you know,

on the periodic table of what a shooter is, doom eternal for me stands out as like, it's, it's hydrogen, man. It's the perfect like base for any other shooter, like mechanics out there. And id is still out there crushing it all these years.

If anyone said in my top five favorite shooters of all time, you wouldn't blink an eye if someone said Doom 1, Doom 2, Doom 2016, Doom Eternal. Any of those are valid nominees. I'm not surprised at all. I did not beat doom eternal i did enjoy my time with it which was only a couple hours and i just had to move on because we do this podcast and i didn't play it at release um but yeah i feel like we would be remiss if at least one of us didn't bring up doom yeah got to yep yeah all right paul bring us home all right well this was

officially my number two since you know battlefield 2 was my number one and we covered that early all right i said earlier i had a halo game that we haven't brought up yet and i'm gonna go with the one that i think evolved combat of the shooter genre i'm going with halo combat evolved yep mean, I'm not necessarily saying it's the best Halo, but I am saying I bought an Xbox solely to play Halo, and I have never done that with any other game in my life. It was that good. A little bit kind of like how I said Left 4 Dead made so many clones.

I mean, Halo, how many games have been called halo clones or the or a halo killer and none of them live up to the hype i mean halo was just so freaking good ryan you and i played so much of our teenage years just playing 2v2 or 1v1v1v1 on a single TV. I mean, sniping on Blood Gulch? Like, how many hours do you think we did that? So many hours. Snipers, pistols only. Yep. Yeah.

Snipers, pistols on Blood Gulch. Like, we spent so much time doing that. I don't know if they invented the sticky bombs, but it's the first game I remember having sticky bombs. Nothing was more satisfying than landing a good one. And the campaign was fantastic and you could do that co-op. So here you got a fantastic story, fantastic music, fantastic gun play. That was another big thing too, is the different kinds of weapons. This is not like,

well, here's a battle rifle and here's a sniper and here's a pistol. I mean, you had stuff like the needler, which would home in on the target. You had your plasma pistol, which was more effective against shields. And that was part of the strategy too. You might use one weapon to work down the shields and then switch over and get a headshot or two and kill your enemy. All that stuff worked so incredibly well. I mean, even the fact that all the red versus blue stuff took off oh so good and i i know that we've mentioned it on the show once or twice

before that's pre-youtube days like this is when you would have to find these videos on the web and download them and i just remember like ryan how many times did you and I yell to each other? Do you like Angelina Jolie? She's got enormous lips. I was just saying, I like Angelina Jolie. She's got enormous lips. Like we would just run around and quote Red vs. Blue. I voted for Nader. No, Donut.

Yeah. So I feel like we had to have a couple halos. So Bungie and Valve here valve here i think are the big winners having three games each that we listed dude for sure and then i mean even with um remember when we got those multiple xboxes and we had a few tvs set up at your parents house when we came over and we did that land like that took a lot of work back then it wasn't as easy to link up with people and just play together and you know to to do that in the amount of fun and and it it wasn't you know it wasn't anything that that you got bored of or just dragged on and and like you

said the music so many of these games all of those factors when they come together you know just make just something that's legendary and perfect in that and that is is so significant in a point in your life that you just think of fondly every time you think back to it you know man that was some great times playing this remember when we do that remember when we do this so yeah that's got it it's got to be up there for sure halo was the console seller i i'm with you paul. I, I mean, I'm a little bit older. So my wife and I, Halo came out in 2001. All right. And my wife and I had just gotten married in 2001 and we were poor. I was just graduating college. Um, so I mean, no money college student. And here's me trying to convince my wife that we need to spend $300 on an Xbox so that I can play Halo.

And she was just like, what? What are you talking about? Now, thankfully, my wife has always supported my gaming. So she was ultimately like, yeah, okay, if you want it, get it. But Halo was the reason. This was what sold Xbox, man. And you know what? Didn't regret it one bit. That game was absolutely mind blowing, dude. I remember thinking like, this is the greatest experience. I'm so glad I got an Xbox, man. I can't believe how great this game is. Well, and it's so crazy because Microsoft was not confident in the project. They did not think this was going to be a console seller. It just caught on. I mean, Bungie even had fights with

Microsoft over the name Halo. Microsoft was like, people are going to think it's a religious game, or it's about angels or something. You can't call it Halo. And that's why they called it Halo, colon, Combat Evolved, which is so much worse than just calling it Halo. Can you imagine now in hindsight that they had to fight that battle? Bungie, they had to fight and win and say, we're not changing the name. I even read today when I was looking at some facts you may not know about Halo, that they even had research done that told them that their artwork was wrong. The logo for Halo was bad. They said, you have to change all this because it's not

going to sell and bungie just covered it all up they didn't even share the reports with microsoft and it's one of the best games ever made so you know it just shows to it just shows bungie especially at the time had incredibly talented people with a clear vision and man did they give us a great product that defined the entire generation of that xbox yeah hello i mean man what name name a more iconic gaming franchise i mean call of duty halo battlefield these are like your your upper echelon you know you can't say halo and somebody's like what what game exactly like or even my kids know what halo is yeah or you play you just play those monks the music you know and everybody everybody knows what that is and like i was always my family we always had playstations but i remember

because i would play with paul and stuff over at um at nikki's house and and i wanted an xbox so bad but i was 13 years old, so I didn't have any money to buy an Xbox. And my little sister had braces and at the orthodontist, they had a raffle and she won the Xbox. And I was so stinking excited. I was like, yeah, I have an Xbox. And she's like, what do you mean?

That's my ass. I was like, oh, I'm playing this thing. And I snatched that bad boy up and i played so much halo on that thing i was more excited than probably any anything for a long time when she won that thing i can't that's crazy i know right anything like that yeah oh man so many good shooters out there i love that you already mentioned borderlands too josh so even though none of us picked it that one has to be mentioned and gears of war kind of taking a big out here that none of us brought it up but i was gonna say same way halo sold xboxes gears of war sold a lot of xbox 360s and uh i would say for me that's definitely right up there with everything else we've listed.

Even a couple other outside the box picks. Super hot. Yep. For VR. Yeah. Like the whole idea of like when you don't move, time stops and how you have to like play that as a shooter is, you know, pretty inventive. And Splitgate, I feel, is criminally underrated for like online multiplayer shooting. Yeah.

Time splitters. Time splitters time splitters great perfect dark obviously but yeah all all great yeah this is this has been fun guys yeah we we always mention goldeneye and perfect dark so i think all three of us were like someone else will probably mention it and we talk about all the time so i'll leave it off my list and here no one brought it up. There's going to be games people are like, I can't believe you didn't bring this up. I mean, number one, limited time. We're trying to keep the list to five. I mentioned in the beginning, it's really, really hard to pare a list down to just five.

So obviously, some caveats have to be made there as well. It's a memorable genre. I still love it to this day you know I'm with you Paul I don't like Valorant and the sweaty ones anymore it could just be maybe back in the day I would have but now it's not what I'm looking for you know in my gaming time kind of thing but you know to me the fusion of shooter and RPG I mean I mentioned Remnant 2, Outriders, Half-Life 2. That is the pinnacle of gaming to me in a lot of ways, when you can marry those two genres in a really good way. It's a gaming nirvana for me.

Best of both worlds. Yeah. All right. Well, this was a lot of fun. I'm glad we were able to talk about shooters. We haven't really covered a lot of shooters lately, so I'm glad we had the opportunity. To all of our listeners, please remember to rate our show five stars. Go take a look at Patreon support options at MultiplayerSquad.com. That'll unlock your bonus episodes and all kinds of other stuff.

Also, come join our free Discord community. Let us know what shooters you love, maybe something that we left out. There's an invite link in the episode description and make sure to follow us on socials at video gamers pod thank you so much to everyone for listening and until next time happy gaming see ya all right see everybody