Shooter game
A common resource found in many shooter games is ammunition, armor or health, or upgrades which augment the player character's weapons.
Run and gun games may use side-scrolling, vertical scrolling or isometric viewpoints and may feature multidirectional movement.
These games emphasize greater maneuvering or even jumping, such as Green Beret, Thexder, Contra and Metal Slug.
When these debuted, they were typically played from a first-person perspective, with enemy fire that occurred anywhere on the screen damaging or killing the player.
As they evolved away from the use of light guns, the player came to be represented by an on-screen avatar, usually someone on the bottom of the screen, who could move and avoid enemy attacks while returning fire.
These sorts of shooters almost always utilize horizontal scrolling to the right to indicate level progression, with enemies appearing in waves from predestined locations in the background or from the sides.
As light gun games and rail shooters became more prevalent and started to make use of scrolling backgrounds, such as Operation Wolf, or fully 3D backgrounds, such as the Time Crisis or House of the Dead series, these sorts of games fell out of popular production, but many like Blood Bros. still have their fanbase today.
It was not long before the technology began appearing in mechanical shooting arcade games, dating back to the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite in 1936.
[5] Notable examples of the genre include Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, GoldenEye 007, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Unreal, Call of Duty, Killzone, TimeSplitters, Team Fortress 2 and Halo, while games such as Half-Life, Deus Ex, and System Shock would combine shooter gameplay with narrative-focused or role-playing game elements to instead branch off into the immersive sim genre.
Third person shooter mechanics are often incorporated into open-world adventure and sandbox games, including the Elder Scrolls series and the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
Outside of a match, players have the ability to customize the appearance of these characters, but these changes are usually cosmetic only and do not alter the game's balance or the behavior of the "hero".
Hero shooters have been considered to have strong potential as esports games as a large degree of skill and coordination arises from the importance of teamwork.
Notable examples of the genre include Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series and Bohemia Software's Operation Flashpoint.
[17] The better gear allows players to take on more difficult missions with potentially more powerful rewards, forming the game's compulsion loop.
In 1975, Taito's Tomohiro Nishikado adapted the concept of Sega's EM game Gun Fight into a video game, Western Gun (1975), with the cowboys represented as character sprites and both players able to maneuver across a landscape while shooting each other, making it a milestone for depicting human shooting targets.
Western Gun became an arcade hit, which, along with Tank, popularized a subgenre of one-on-one dueling video games.
[31] The genre gained major attraction in popular culture with the release of Taito's Space Invaders arcade video game in 1978.
It established the basis of the shoot 'em up subgenre, and became a cultural phenomenon that led into a golden age of arcade video games that lasted until around 1983.
[28] In contrast to earlier shooting games, Space Invaders has targets that fire back at the player, who in turn has multiple lives.
[5] In the early 1980s, Japanese arcade developers began moving away from space shooters towards character action games.
According to Eugene Jarvis, American arcade developers were greatly influenced by Japanese space shooters but took the genre in a different direction from the "more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" gameplay of Japanese games, towards a more "programmer-centric design culture, emphasizing algorithmic generation of backgrounds and enemy dispatch" and "an emphasis on random-event generation, particle-effect explosions and physics" as seen in arcade games such as his own Defender (1981) and Robotron: 2084 (1982) as well as Atari's Asteroids (1979).
[41][42][43] Due to its violent nature, some[vague] consider the shooter game genre to be a representation of real world violence.
[44][45] Similarly, in Germany, school shootings such as those at Erfurt, Emsdetten and Winnenden, resulted in conservative politicians accusing violent shooter games, most notably Counter Strike, of inciting young gamers to run amok.
[47][48] Shooter games were further criticized when Anders Behring Breivik, perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, claimed that he developed target acquisition skills by playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Experimental Research, focusing on the short term effects, found that playing violent games can increase the player's aggression.
[45] In a 2011 Supreme Court case involving a California law, Justice Antonio Scalia stated that there was some correlation between violent video games and increased aggression, but very little real-world effects.
