Happy 10th b-day to the best FPS of all time: Half-Life.

To celebrate, until Friday you can download the original Half-Life via Steam for a buck (well less than a buck: $0.98).

I already own a bazillion copies of the game myself and I played it all the way through again for nostalgia just last year. So I think I'll be raising a toast to Valve by playing Left 4 Dead tonight-- and the next night, and the next.

Now they should get that Half-Life movie made, starring Hugh Laurie of course.

After playing the Left 4 Dead demo for the past two weeks, the two levels provided were getting rather stale, plus they were far too easy for experienced FPS hands. Oh it was great fun, for sure, but repetitive. I was getting a little worried that the full game would be a fun, but too short romp.

Just from playing tonight however, I can see I shouldn't have been concerned. Valve left plenty of surprises in store and the Chapters get more intense as they go along. The versus mode really takes it over the top too.

I'll probably write more about it soon, but for now I'm going to get back to surviving the zombie hordes.

Stargate Worlds is launching its Beta on October 15th, which I think will be the first serious look into this game beyond a handful of screenshots.

As much as I like the TV series and the license itself is promising (coordinating teams is as natural to their storyline as a Star Trek MMO), this game falls into the category of shooter MMORPG and sadly I think it will suffer in the same ways Tabula Rasa has. This sub-genre overlaps too much with hugely popular FPS games, it's unlikely to hold up well against the likes of Halo, Unreal Tournament, CounterStrike, etc..

There's also been those pesky rumours of cash-flow problems at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

We'll see though, maybe they'll exceed my expectations, but honestly right now I'm enjoying WAR too much to take a deeper look into Stargate. I hope they do well with their beta and come out of the gate with a good alternative to the myriad Fantasy MMOs.

The full game is set to launch sometime in 2009.

Michelle has tried to convince me to give Tabula Rasa a try. She was in the beta and she had some nice things to say about it, but my reaction is still: "If I'm going to play a shooter, I'd probably prefer an FPS."

I doubt I'm the only person with this mentality. Ever since the Doom days (Wolfenstein even), we've been blessed with high quality shooters. The FPS genre still dominates and it's been seriously refined, plus they've been multiplayer since practically day one.

Stargate Worlds looks interesting, but it's also a shooter.

Even if you compare casters in most MMORPGs, it's the AoEs that make those classes popular.

I don't think an FPS makes a good MMORPG because having your character on the screen is such a strong tangible factor. I'd guess the designers at both Tabula Rasa and Stargate Worlds would agree with me there, they both have third-person shooter designs. The thing is, they're directly competing with what's arguably the biggest genre there is.

Thankfully we have plenty of great FPS games to choose from, but that's a problem for shooter MMOs, isn't it?