Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?
These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers. When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old? I’m sure some of them played FPS games, but there is no way they were the majority.
Whenever I see the term Boomer Shooter, my mind goes to games like Shootout! for Magnavox Odyssey. Can’t we call them something else, like Retro FPSes or something?
Anyway, rant over. Thank you for your time.
If it helps, this is the first time I hear it 🤷♂️
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Old=boomer sorry. That’s just the way it turned out, nothing we can do about it. Raging against new slang is just gonna make us more out of touch, and intensify the feeling of being old, so I just accept it and try to keep up. Boomer is old now, not just the Baby Boomers.
Raging against new slang is just gonna make us more out of touch, and intensify the feeling of being old, so I just accept it and try to keep up.
NEVER! I choose to embrace my inner geriatric and complain about kids these days and their hippy-hop music.
NEVER! I choose to embrace my inner geriatric and complain about kids these days and their hippy-hop music.
Can recommend, but only when you’re subverting expectations. Young student is unloading a bunch of empty beverage crates from the elevator on the ground floor, making you wait, already looking quite self-conscious about it? Bellow, loud but not shouty, “Unbelievable, the students of today”. See them flinch and cower, “oh fuck this again”. Continue, with flawless timing, “why isn’t that beer?”.
I’m 26 and I’ve already been called a boomer by younger people. I don’t really see the problem as to me it’s just funny and reminds me to try my best not to eventually become a boomer that hates everything that isn’t how it used to be.
Don’t be such a tardigrade.
We were calling them Doom-likes before FPS became a thing, maybe it’s time to bring it back as a sub category.
Not a bad idea, but like which DOOM?
I ask that sarcastically, but 90’s DOOM, 00’s DOOM, and 10-20s DOOM all play very differently lol
Any of them would be more accurate than Boomer shooter.
Appending “-like” to any genre is so unoriginal and uninteresting.
It isn’t intended to be interesting
That’s abundantly clear.
The burn you think you are deploying, to a casual categorical label and those who use it, is not very effective.
It’s an observation, not a “burn”.
If you observed it to be abundantly clear you wouldn’t have made your original comment.
Speak for yourself. I comment on obvious things all the time.
Doom clones!
I call them id-style shooters myself, but there is a bit of word play I like in the term ‘boomer shooter’. On top of referencing the age of the audience when they first arrived (albeit incorrectly), it is also a reference to the fact that the optimal strategy for these games is simply to blow things the fuck up. There is very little tactical play beyond what weapons to use for a given situation, and these games really love their explosive barrels and rocket launchers.
Guys, IT ISN’T A REFERENCE TO THE BOOMER GENERATION. It’s boomer as in shotgun-go-BOOM.
This is worse tho. You can’t just erase the bfg like this
Boomer cope
When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old?
You mean, like most of us Millennial gamers are now (30+)? The youngest Millennials, born in 1996, will be 30 in 2 years.
These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers.
I’m a middle-Millennial (1988), and Doom was well before my time as a gamer. I was 5 years old in 1993. Halo (2001) was more my generation, just barely. The oldest Millennials in 1993 were 12 years old, which was not the target age group for Doom.
GenX? Sure, they played Doom, but Boomers were by far the larger age group playing “Mature” games at that time. Video games have never been just for children.
Millennials are going to be in absolute shambles if they ever find out “Okay boomer” wasn’t directly targeted at boomers.
It wasn’t? This is what Wikipedia says:
“OK boomer” or “okay boomer” is a catchphrase and internet meme that has been used by members of the Millennial generation and Generation Z (born between the early 1980s and the early 2010s) to dismiss or mock attitudes typically associated with baby boomers – people born in the two decades following World War II.
Who was it targeted at then?
It was targeted at everyone older than the younger people saying it.
It’s used as a catch all, with the intention of getting everyone riled up. Because regardless of if you’re an actual boomer or not, now you’re getting bundled together with them.
Young people saying things old people told them.
People who were usually younger than millennials.
Ok Boomer.
It’s so curious, I swear I heard “boomer shooter” used to refer to another type of FPS… But then again I guess the definition has changed. What term do people use nowadays for slow FPSes that are more tactical, rather than twitch-reflex reliant, like ARMA?
Those are tactical shooters. If it’s a simulator like ARMA then the term “milsim” (military simulator) is also used. Good example of a non-ARMA tactical shooter would be Ready or Not, Squad, Insurgency, or S.W.A.T
Makes sense. And I have heard those terms before. I guess i just need to update my internal definition. All this time I thought boomer shooter meant “slow FPS for old folks who can’t keep up in Valorant anymore”. Which is a group I probably belong to myself, to be honest.
Oh no boomer shooter means very fast FPS, it just has old-school mechanics like health packs, a large loadout, arena-style gameplay, stuff like that. Things that were considered outdated when games like Battlefield and COD rolled around in the mid 2000s. Like you’re not supposed to take cover in DOOM, but you are in Battlefield.
I think they’re called that because they postdate the “looter shooter” that combined Diablo-esque “action RPGs” with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. “Looter” without the “shooter” is a much better name for Diablo’s genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.
I’m still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don’t know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn’t also get assigned the label of “boomer shooter”, because then it’ll be harder for both audiences to find what they’re looking for.
I always assumed that the Boom in Boomer Shooter was more “Gun go Boom”, which seemed to fit the genre quite well.
I never even considered that the name referred to baby boomers I thought it just meant they went “boom”
I just think of it like boom as in explosions. Boom-boom shooty-shoot; or boomer shooter if you prefer brevity.
There’s a video on this, but that’s just the name that stuck. Its not derogatory at this point, just a way to differentiate a good shooter from a game like CoD
