Day of Defeat

I've played lots of FPS games, relatively speaking, starting with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, and leading up to recent titles including Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield and Unreal Tournament 2004. I've logged many hours into classics including QuakeWorld, Quake III, Jedi Knight, Rainbow Six, Counter-Strike, and Battlefield 1942. And many of these games have provided frighteningly intense experiences, even to the point of being moving.

So, to me at least, it is no small deal that I count Day of Defeat amoung the best games I have ever played. There is no one single feature that makes Day of Defeat stand out. In fact, it is inferior in some way to each of the other games that I've just listed, but as an overall experience, Day of Defeat strikes me straight to the core--it is dark, vivid, brutal, fearsome, fast paced, and addictive. The graphics are B grade by modern standards, it lacks any A.I., and there are no vehicles that can be driven. And yet, not unlike Counter-Strike, I keep coming back to it over and over again. (I mention Counter-Strike explicitly because Day of Defeat is by the same team that made Counter-Strike. It's not a far cry to think of Day of Defeat as being basically a moderately enhanced version of Counter-Strike set in the World War II era.)

I just cannot even begin to describe the mind-blowing stuff that I experience in a typical round of Day of Defeat. But I might try... maybe I'll come back to it in a bit. For now, I just had to get that off of my chest.