What is the Best First-Person Shooter Ever?

Unless you've been completely (and perhaps blissfully) ignorant of the video game world, you know that first-person shooters have risen to become one of the most dominant types of video games out on the market today. Just recently, we saw Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 add-ons inspired millions of downloads in just a short amount of time. So it's not exactly controversial to say that first-person shooters have become one of the most popular types of games out there.

The popularity of these shooters has lead to some amazing innovations and developments over the years, which has us thinking: which is the best first-person shooter of all time? It's tough to say which is the best video game ever, but if you narrow the field to just one specific category, the picture can be a little clearer. Let's take a closer look at some of the candidates.

GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64:

This is perhaps the classic first-person shooter of all time, introducing a multi-player option that allowed you to take on the avatars of your favorite James Bond characters and start doing war with each other. Hey, it beats playing Scrabble. Complete with an interesting "campaign" mode and many of the familiar Bond weapons from perhaps the favorite of all Pierce Brosnan James Bond flicks, GoldenEye 007 was like a revolution in the way people played video games. GoldenEye brought the world of first-person shooting to a much more mainstream audience, and introduced the concept of directly battling against your friends: in other words, it made the genre popular, and it's one of the reasons we're even writing an article about first-person shooters today. Not to mention: the gameplay is so excellent that even modern versions of the James Bond franchise have been able to duplicate the success of GoldenEye.

Halo for Xbox:

Halo was the introduction of a new generation of first-person shooting, a step forward in graphics and game concept that is just downright fun to play. There isn't a lot of emphasis on making the gameplay realistic - as you'll see in Call of Duty - but the graphics looked good, the guns are fun to use, and the multi-player option makes it downright iconic. In other words, Halo is just an excellently-designed game that perfectly suits our modern world of Xbox Live and first person shooting online.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:

The newest of these releases, Modern Warfare 2 is just that - modern - and it's one of the most sophisticated first-person shooters ever created. The graphics are realistic, the sounds are defined and clear, and the weapons are all unique with their own advantages and disadvantages. It is, in short, one of the most entertaining and thrilling first-person games ever created, and goes a step beyond the realm of Halo in order to create a more realistic world. If any game has ever convinced your brain that you're really in combat more than this game, we'd like to see it.

So which do we select?

GoldenEye 007.

We love Halo and Call of Duty, but for our money, there was never a first-person shooter as revolutionizing or as entertaining as GoldenEye 007. It was on a different playing field from all of the other games at the time, and the multi-player fun meant you could have a different gaming experience every single time you started up the old Nintendo 64. Call us nostalgic if you like, but it's hard to deny the impact GoldenEye 007 had on people and on the way first-person shooters would be constructed for many years to come. Halo and Call of Duty are great, but they are also sailing in the wake of GoldenEye.