One of the unfortunately small number of FPSes on GameTap that I'd actually heard of, Operation Flashpoint: GOTY Edition has, apparently, been nominated game of the year at some point; I'm guessing 2000 or 2001, based on the release date of the game itself. Why it has been named game of the year by anyone, I really can't guess. This has to be the most boring first-person shooters I think I have ever played. I am not exaggerating when I say that the first level involves waiting 10 minutes for the bus, riding for 10 minutes on the bus, and (get this!), walking from the bus stop to your office. It's an hour into the game and I haven't shot anybody yet! I haven't even held a gun! The most action I've seen is from the (unskippable) cutscenes, which still isn't saying much.
I'm not sure what the developers were thinking with this game, but I'd have to say that my major gripe has to be the unskippable cutscenes. What if I want to skip right to the gameplay because I really don't care whatsoever about the story? What if I've played the game once already and don't want to watch the cutscenes again? That last one is a bit of a stretch, I'll admit, because I don't know who in their right minds would sit through this bus-riding simulator in its entirety and then actually want to do it all again. At least when you're waiting for the bus, you can move around and interact a little with stuff. I say "a little" because the most you can do, and again I am not exaggerating, is to salute people (who show no reaction at all to your existance anyway so I don't know what the point of saluting them even is), sit down, and look at your watch to see what time it is.
Now, if that sounds boring - and it is - then you may find it hard to believe that the cutscenes are worse. Luckily I got to skip a few in the beginning but as soon as you're waiting for that bus, it becomes unskippable. And you WILL want to skip it, because they are the type of cutscenes that make CNN look like an action-thrillride. While sitting on the bus, I get the incredible joy of listening to a news reporter on the radio talk about mundane political things that I have no interest in at all. The next cutscene comes when you're in your office, in the form of a news report about some country invading some other country. They show a few clips of tanks driving around wide open fields. Then at one point they stop talking and just show the tanks, driving along in a mostly straight line over some green hills. Then they show the tanks from a different angle. All without any talking or action whatsoever. For about 5 minutes. When the cutscene finally had the decency to end its miserable life, I'm plunked back into this office building with the objective "escape the city" because apparently the tanks have started attacking. You can't actually see any tanks or anything happening because you're in the middle of a city and they're out at the edge shooting at the ground somewhere near city limits, so there's really no sense of urgency or fun at all. I would have kept playing just to try to give the game a chance, if it weren't for the fact that (A) I was bored to tears as it was, and (B) the controls.
This is an original PC game back when PC FPSes were at their prime. This is 2000 or 2001. Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena are out and about. We KNOW how FPSes are supposed to be controlled: WASD, space for jump, mouse aim, and maybe a few other keys for different functions (some people would add ctrl for crouching but I've always preferred the c button. Maybe it's the years of playing Star Wars: Jedi Outcast, which used c as the crouch button, but I'm too used to it now to use anything else. But I digress...) I am again not exaggerating when I say this game controls like an N64 game. The crosshair moves around inside a bounding box, within which your view itself remains motionless. Can anybody please tell me why they thought this was a GOOD idea for a PC FPS?! I'm really at a loss. Oh, and the spacebar apparently is for switching weapons or something. I don't think you can even jump. The 'use' key, which I would think should be near WASD, maybe E or F if E is taken as a lean function, is instead the enter key. Wow, great design, idiots. Might as well make the firing button the page-up key.
As I mentioned earlier, I didn't get that much into the game before I quit out of boredom and frustration. However, this may be a bit of a misnomer, because the game itself was running for about an hour. I, however, only got to "play" about 10 minutes of it, and almost all of that was waiting for the bus. Maybe this game gets amazing when you actually get to do something fun. Maybe the multiplayer is awesome (no chance to try that). Maybe the modding scene was really good, which I am led to believe based on all the videos of mods I found when searching youtube for "operation flashpoint" in order to actually find some gameplay footage that wasn't more boring than watching a rock grow. Regardless, if a game can be playing for an hour and not even begin the action yet, and that game ISN'T an RPG or adventure game where a story is actually sort of important (and even in those cases, I want to skip the cutscenes if I feel like it!), then I really can't give it much more of a chance. I play an FPS for the action. It's not a movie. I have no problem with a lull in the action for some storyline. Just look at Half-Life 2, which is the model by which all FPSes should follow for how to deliver story. But when the entire first hour of a game is essentially a big cutscene with pointless gameplay thrown in, I just don't care to keep playing.
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