Remember back when playing a first-person shooter was a completely non-serious engagement? Once you inserted that disk (or in some cases, floppy disk) into your machine, you knew you were only minutes away from shooting away some humanoid-pigs, looking for that one secret you knew you had missed in DOOM, or attempting to blast away your friends in a competitive round of Quake. Nowadays, a majority of shooters take place in present-day conflict, with real-life skirmishes being recreated digitally and — while they do have their place in the industry, and I have enjoyed my fair share of them — they are, just by their setting, harder to call completely innocent fun. Rather than running and gunning, real-life tactics are put into play in the modern shooter. What happened to the days when people could run around a small, confined map, shoot some baddies that don’t carry much of any real-world baggage, and just have some fun? I’m very, very happy to say, those days aren’t completely lost, with the advent of Rise of the Triad. Continue Reading