When criticizing a game, forum posters love to throw around certain words.  For shooters, one of those words is "run 'n gun."  In this big thread about Call of Duty, that phrase popped up in about every other post.  There was quit a bit of debate about whether or not Call of Duty is a "run 'n gun" (RNG) shooter. 
 
Here's a better question: Why's that matter? 
 
I said:

What's "run 'n gun" mean? If I look at it literally, that seems to mean I can run and shoot at the same time, or at least fast movement will have minimal effect on my accuracy (like in Unreal Tournament, for example). People get in arguments over terms without ever defining them.

  
So let's say our game in question is RNG.  Most shooters are.  So many posters in that thread seemed to think that if they said "COD's RNG!" enough, that automatically means it's a bad game.  I've literally seen posts that were a single sentence: "CODs a run and gun shooter, lol."  Okay, what does that prove?  I'm not even getting into the argument of whether the game is RNG or not.  When you break down what RNG means, it shines absolutely no light on whether a given game is good or not.  It's just irrelevant jargon, like FPS versus TPS. 
 
Tomorrow: "Realism" in shooters, another word people love to throw around as if it's actually relevant.    

My review of Halo 3: ODST is up.

GameSpot: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/halo3untitledodstgame/player_review.html?id=683855

IGN: http://rr.xbox360.ign.com/rrview/games/halo_3_odst/852871/110849/

Giant Bomb: http://www.giantbomb.com/halo-3-odst/61-24035/user_reviews/?review=10900

1UP: http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?gId=3169382&sec=REVIEWS&r=9171746    

After cunningly avoiding the snare I had emplaced to capture Jehovah's Witnesses, a colleague entered my house this evening with a fresh copy of Halo 3: ODST. 
 
My first ODST experience: I played Firefight on Crater with a friend for about 45 minutes.  We got to 197,000 points when my Internet died.  For those of you who don't have the game, there are achievements for playing Firefight on the various maps to 200,000 points.  So that was just terrific. 
 
I'll write a real first impressions article tomorrow.    

So I was playing this stupid shooter recently, and like a stupid shooter it at one point continually spawned enemies until I performed a certain action. My girlfriend kept count, and I knocked off 25 guys in the couple minutes it took me to complete my objective. That got me thinking: How many people/creatures/entities have I killed over the course of my shooter career?

As a metric, I reference the Gears 2 achievement Seriously 2.0. For those of you who don't know, the description for that achievement is "Kill 100,000 enemies (any mode)." Plenty of people have this achievement. It's rare, but it's not incredibly rare. Keeping that in mind, let's consider two facts:

1. Gears 2 has been out for about a year.
2. Gears is not a fast-moving shooter. Both online and offline, kills come at a slow pace. Double/multi-kills are rare in Gears.

Let's contrast that to my shooter experience:

1. I've been playing shooters for over 15 years.
2. I've played every type of shooter there is. I've played tactical games like Rainbow Six, where you spend lots of time planning, and where kills are infrequent. On the other hand, I've played scifi run-and-gun shooters, where one BFG blast knocks out 20 opponents.

Considering the above facts, a very conservative estimate suggests that I've simulated killing a million living things in shooters. Damn.    

I could wrap things up here, but inevitably, I have to compare Mass Effect to Oblivion. It's not my fault this time, though, it's my girlfriend's fault. While watching me play, she asked, "Why is it I can watch you play this game, but watching you play Oblivion makes me want to kill myself?" 
 
Wow. Burn. 
 
It took me a second to form a response, which was basically, "Because the story in Oblivion sucks!" Yeah, Oblivion is light as hell on story. Now, the overall plot of Oblivion (emperor dying, demonic invasion, finding a lost heir) is solid enough, and would probably be interesting if it were novelized. However, in terms of actually playing the game, the presentation of the story is very weak. 
 
My number one reason for this: Oblivion has next to no characters. In place of characters, Oblivion has plot devices. Some people dispense quests, other people are the object of quests. None of them have anything very interesting to say, you never really get to know them, and you certainly don't think of them as real people. There are occasional exceptions to this (i.e., Martin Septim), but when compared to Mass Effect, Oblivion's characters run from bland to non-existent. Without good characters, even a well-conceived story is no more interesting or emotionally engaging than reading a history book. 
 
Back to Mass Effect, after leaving the Citadel for the first time, I landed on an uncharted planet and began exploring the surface for survey-able resources, bits of space junk, and one side quest. My girlfriend remarked that watching me drive the Mako around, hunt for stuff, and fight some scavengers wasn't very interesting. I agreed, but then it occurred to me: If you completely removed Mass Effect's main quest and took away all the characters (your companions, Saren, Cpt. Anderson, others), and all you had in the game were the uncharted planets and the sides quests…you'd have Oblivion! Yeah, it's a perfect analogy:

Mako: Shadowmere. (Both are annoying on hills.)

Resources to survey: Ingredients to collect.

Combat that isn't as good as real shooters: Combat that isn't as good as real action adventures.

Lance Henrikson giving you missions in monotone voiceovers: Unrecognizable actors giving you missions in monotone voiceovers.

Space junk to find: Fantasy junk to find.

Hunt and fetch missions in similar looking planetary outposts: Hunt and fetch quests in good-but-similar looking dungeons.

Space pirates: Bandits (e.g., Random people who attack you for no reason: Random people who attack you for no reason).

Quests which have you kill a certain number of monsters and then are resolved by a simple window of text: Quests which have you… Yeah, you get the idea. 
 
There you go. Oblivion is Mass Effect minus the characters and main quest, just much longer. Think about it: The Cerberus side missions are about as interesting as any faction questline in Oblivion. The sidequests on the Citadel are as emotionally involving as the main quest in Oblivion. Compared to Mass Effect, the only thing Oblivion has going for it is that you can play for 500 hours and still not see all the game's content. This I've said before: Oblivion is a breadth over depth experience.