So "boomer" just means anything that's older than the person viewing it now? Boy they've sure killed off any power that word ever had lol
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Its especially annoying in this case since it was the boomers who actively were trying to get DOOM/Quake/whatever banned. It is the GenX/older millennials who got off on shooters with any sense of urgency or movement.
It is on the level of deciding Taylor Swift's sub-genre of music is "Kanye-core" because Kanye was a dick to her in the past.
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Certified zoomer here to explain. This boomer games tag is not about old games. It's about games that match what a boomer thinks of as an FPS (as viewed probably by a zoomer). The top 3 most popular games are made in 2020, 2023, and 2023.
Basically if the game play for the game was the style of a pre 2000 shooter it would qualify for the tag. But it could have come out yesterday.
Boomers didn’t and still don’t think of video games at all unless they’re trying to moralise it and outlaw it.
Jack Thompson Is the perfect example of a boomer and their relationship with video games.
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So "in the style of" ?
I do think it's interesting that the almost fundamental definition of being a boomer would be the significant dividing line of having access to video games growing up or not, but alas, culture is what culture is.
Can you give a longer form description?
Would this be like a "fixed perspective" fps ( like of doom or quake or Wolfenstein)?
I’m thinking more arena shooters like quake and unreal.
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It's about games that match what a boomer thinks of as an FPS.
Can you give me an example?
I can't think of anything in the last three years that have massively changed what an FPS looks like.
I think it is more just general trends.
Assume all dates are wrong because time has no meaning and what little grasp I had was destroyed by 2020-2022.
DOOM (1994? and especially Quake) era FPSes were very much about running into a room and murdering everything. Health was a resource and it was about combining reflxes with resource management skills. Also, the average game speed was actually really fast. I think someone did rough math and DOOM Guy was sprinting at like 90 MPH? Arena Shooters like Unreal Tournament came out of this where it was about different players seeing who can react fastest while managing those resources and the item spawns. And the level design was generally "a whole level of enemies" as it were.
Then, in the early 00s we started seeing a heavy rise in third person shooters. In large part because it was a way to show off character models and minimize the fine grain details on consoles. This, combined with REALLY shitty AI in FPSes like Iron Fist or whatever the alternate reality WW1 g ame was, very much birthed the "cover shooter" gameplay. Advance to a choke point, snipe enemies and funnel them, then hide. Lather, rinse, repeat. Which, like Half-Life before it, very much turned level design into " a series of rooms".
Which... led to Call of Duty (and, to a lesser extent, Medal of Honor before it) where the gameplay was exactly what. Stop, take out every enemy you can, and advance. Which also was because of greatly shortened time to kill and an emphasis on leaning and going prone. And multiplayer followed suit with generally much slower gameplay and a focus on "pre-firing" and "camping". And level design became "a series of set pieces"
And... that more or less gets us to where we are today. Something like Infinite Warfare or even Titanfall are "fast" relative to Soap waiting in a shitter for the enemy to run past, but they are still REALLY slow relative to the "boomer shooters".
In recent years (I guess since 2016?), we have seen a rise in something "else". I like to think of them as "puzzle shooters" (and Bulletstorm was one but Bulletstorm was shit so let's ignore it) and they are a lot closer to Hotline Miami. You are still treating every room as its own encounter, but those encounters are very frantic and more about adapting your plan depending on RNG and explosions.
Whereas the modern "boomer shooter" are almost exclusively quake-likes masquerading as doom-likes. But they are w hat we remember Quake to be, as opposed to Quake itself. Movement isn't necessarily as fast as it used to be but it is still a LOT faster than a Call of Duty and is more about whole level encounters.
And as an aside, take a look at the Rise of the Triad remake like ten-ish years ago. That is the game which broke me and realized how slow CoD et al had become. That game is fast even compared to DOOM 2016 (and most DOOM Eternal encounters, but not all). Shame ROTT was always a mid game though.
A game like Tarkov stands in drastic comparison to a game like Quake. Compare the weapon selection (many guns for one role vs distinct but limited) or gameplay loop (enter zone->loot->fight to extract vs spawn->kill->die)
Quake, Battlefield 4, Rainbow 6 Siege, PUBG, and Tarkov are all FPS games but they're drastically different in design.
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The "boomer" in "boomer shooter" refers to the style, not the release date lol. Most games with that tag are actually pretty new. They're just shooters that are mechanically similar to old shooters like Quake and Doom, so you're typically gonna have a mix of these traits:
- A wide range of weapons with unique uses (think rockets, railguns, shotguns, machine guns...)
- Chapters that you can complete in any order but the levels in them are completed linearly
- Colored keys to open colored doors
- A level-end screen when you reach the end of a level that tells you your completion time and what % of items/enemies are left
- And my favorite part, a lot of them have advanced movement techniques, which are usually identical to Quake (if not Quake 2/3) like bunnyhopping and rocket-jumping
I recommend Dusk or Ultrakill if you wanna try a really good (and cheap) boomer shooter that came out in the last few years.
It's shooters in the style that Boomers and Gen X (but no one ever addresses Gen X) played. Like Doom, Wolfenstein, etc. Sure millennials played them too, but they weren't the target age demographic.
Cultic is a good modern boomer shooter if you want to try one.
Ain't no Boomers playing Doom, Quake, or Wolfenstein back in the 90s. These games were directly aimed at the Gen-X and early Millennial generations. And by god, did we ever play the shit out of them.
Boomers did not fucking play Doom in any numbers, they were in their 50s.
They were playing minesweeper and tetris and solitaire if they played any computer games.
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Boomer shooters never get played by boomers, what a shame
Seriously tho a boomer shooter would be like maze war not DOOM, by the time this genre of games was created (by GenXers) and played by Millenials, they were becoming geriatric but whatever
Yeah, I'm around 40 and I played these games as they were coming out back in the 1990s. I call them either "FPS" or "Retro FPS"...
People born in the 1940s/50s never played them much. Although my dad did play Wolfenstein3D and Doom some, but that was not common for people in his age group.
Well, it was boomers that made them, so presumably SOME of them played them.
The term boomer has degraded over the last several years. I think of mid 90s fps games. And that's fine. I grew up during that era.
As a Gen-Xer who used to twitch with the best of the younguns, I can vouch that we're playing a lot fewer games that require reflexes that can't be made up for with strategy and treachery (e.g. exploits).
Mostly I play dad games like Satisfactory or Subnautica but do pretty well for my crew in Deep Rock Galactic
If a boomer shooter is a classic run-and-gun shooter (contrast: tactical shooters or first-person survival) I'd still do fine unless its bullet hell or something. Serious Sam had the tendency to teleport in dozens of shooters on a plain with no cover, or send me into a dark place teeming with climbing ninja monkeys.
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Finally someone did the math!
As the exact target audience for classic shooters (ion fury is gooooooood))
Idk, I find this term lighthearted and endearing, maybe it makes finding that exact kinda game finally easier
Yeah I love the term. It’s funny, unique, and you know exactly what they’re talking about.
I always preferred the term "Arena Shooter" but it may have more specific meaning than any game that vaguely has elements popular in fps games of the 90s that I think "Boomer Shooter" is usually trying to communicate.
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Doom is Gen X if anything. Boomers are pongers.
Age 35+
Boomer
Age 1-34
Millennial
Literally A Baby
Zoomer
Cool. I don't really care about the name if it means that finding games that I like gets a little bit easier.
"Back in my day, we could only render 3 polygons at a time, and by god, we were grateful!"
Am I the only one that actually doesn't mind the term boomer shooter? I find it hilarious and accurate for the most part.
It's just a harmless joke, most boomers never actually played DOOM and it's not even used in a pejorative manner.
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Are they seriously calling arena shooters that? I'm mad. This should be generation X shooter!
I dislike the term, but I think Arena shooter implies multiplayer whereas a Boomer Shooter is a modern, retro inspired single player shooter
I don’t think an arena shooter necessarily has to be multiplayer (but they’re mostly only fun when they are)… but it heavily implies that the maps are… arenas. Smaller areas that you backtrack through constantly with no “end”. Matches probably end by a condition like a timer or kill count or something. That said, I think we use “arena shooter” to distinguish games like Quake 3 from CoD (with some differences like weapons being on the map and players spawning with the same barebones kit)… but arguably CoD isn’t that far removed from something like Quake 3 (which I know is heresy and they play very differently, but the fundamentals aren’t so different).
I agree with the other guy, I've always thought of "arena shooter" as describing the multiplayer aspect. IMO, "boomer shooter" is a good way of distinguishing the game from being more similar to Quake's multiplayer vs singleplayer
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millenial shooter
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There are some really great explanations of "boomer shooter" itt, and you should read them before just reacting to the headline.
I had no idea it was a thing but there are some extremely insightful comments in here that imo totally justify the definition.
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hey, now i can finally have an easier time looking for Retro-style FPS.
assuming the games are tagged correctly.
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Makes perfect sense. Boomer as in old school, and it conveys these games are action "boom" packed.
i thought boomer shooter ment anything that had explosions every 30 seconds to keep the tweens attention.
It's games like Quake, which does have it's fair share of explosions but it's mostly about emulating what games like Quake had to offer. Like high skill-cieling movement and/or combat.
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