We all know that Boomer Shooters are stylized FPS games that’s taking inspiration from Doom. But what about stylized TPS games? And what games would you recommend

  • Quicky@piefed.socialEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    As a side question, I am a late GenX-er, essentially a Xennial, and I was a teenager when Doom was released in 1993, so surely young GenX was the target market, and the games themselves were probably written by older GenX-ers.

    Why then, are these FPS games referred to as Boomer Shooters?

    • Linken@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Marketing.

      I’m not a fan of the terminology myself, but I get it that when someone says Boomer Shooter, they don’t mean “Shooter that plays like DOOM/90s shooters which would have been played by someone born between 1946–1964.” (which they largely weren’t)

      They simply mean “Boomer = old” as in “old and/or inspired by old 90s shooters i.e. DOOM and the subsequent DOOM clones.”

      It helps that it sort of rhymes / rolls of the tongue.

      • pory@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        18 hours ago

        Also helps that gun go boom. Genre nicknames that stick tend to be snappy rather than descriptive. “Immersive sim”, “character action”, etc are terrible at describing what the game actually is. Regardless of whether or not the shooter is “for boomers”, a game calling itself a boomer shooter means, quickly, that it’s a fast movement shooter without “realism” mechanics like long reload times, usually with you using a vast arsenal of guns instead of only carrying a couple at a time and swapping them. Health kits or health-on-kill typically replace “take cover to regenerate HP/shields”.

        Without using a -like suffix, there’s not really a snappy word that fully communicates that stuff, and as you say boomer=old. And -likes drift really far nowadays. Anything with parrying or drop loot on death is a soulslike. Anything with a run based structure and any procgen is a roguelike (even if the runs actually exist in a framework of permanent progression).

        • BougieBirdie@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          True enough, although I feel the direction towards gunplay is still boomier.

          Like, when I think of a modern FPS I think of having a limited weapon loadout with realistic handling and ADS mechanics, being able to sprint for short periods from cover to cover before getting winded, and if you get hurt you just have to wait it out for a few seconds

          When I think Boomer Shooter I think of explosions and screen shake, guns are probably cartoonishly ridiculous, red barrels are everywhere, moving fast all the time while blasting heavy metal. Things like chainsaw limbs, dual-wield rocket launchers, or a Super Shotgun that’s also a grenade launcher are all things I wouldn’t bat an eye at except to say “That’s fuckin’ awesome”

          Realistically though, the origin of the term is probably generational. It appears around the same time people started saying “ok boomer” as an insult, and anybody who has used the phrase knows that it’s way funnier if you hit a gen-x or millenial with it - especially if they get offended. So then using Boomer Shooter to describe the shooters of Generation X still applies when you look at it that way: it’s not accurate to the etymology of the name, but it is accurate to its common parlance