Valve Makes "Boomer Shooter" An Official Genre On Steam

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 342 points –
Valve Makes "Boomer Shooter" An Official Genre On Steam
gamespot.com
102

bearly anyone who's a boomer is playing these games or probs has ever played them short of seeing their kids boot it up. if anything these would be gen x shooters. People don't seem to even know wtf a boomer is. boomer for gen z seems to = anyone over 40 lmao.

The most Gen X move is to get overlooked, so this feels right to me.

We'll just be over here in the corner. If anyone needs us, don't.

I claim gen x. I'm outside the range, but I have more in common with that gen than either millennials (my actual gen) or boomers (what everyone calls me). I mostly listen to classic rock (late 70s and 80s), still whine about removed MtG rules from the 90s, and my first video game systems were the Atari and NES.

So if it's okay I'll just sit next to you. We don't need to talk or anything though, I won't be a bother.

In the spotlight. Losing our religion.

I had a good laugh when I noticed this tag on steam yesterday.

I think the reality is, "boomer" as a term is here to stay and a moving target: as gen x ages into 40+, they'll become boomers. One day when gen Z becomes old, they'll be called boomers. At least here, there's a fun double meaning to the term. For me, I came into the Doom franchise at Doom 2, at an age where what I played was still very much influenced by my parents and friends' parents. So yes, Gen X were the primary player base, but it's not unfair to say the boomers often paid for the game and maybe sat down to a round or two of it. And given that, it might have been one of the last games they were able to sit down and enjoy. I don't know if anyone else experienced something similar, but my dad in the last 20 years of his life or so really locked in on the 1997 MTG: Shandalar game, and despite several computer upgrades along the way was never interested in any of the newer MTG digital offerings, preferring the cards and UI and experience he was familiar with. And while similar with Doom that game was played by many Gen X and Millenials, I think those demographics mostly continued to follow the franchise through newer releases: but maybe not the boomers.

I think the reality is, "boomer" as a term is here to stay and a moving target: as gen x ages into 40+

This is a nitpick, but gen x moved into the 40+ age group long ago. As a gen Xer I'll be in my 50's later this year. 🤮

And yeah, doom is peak Gen X probably.

In fact, millennials have begun turning 40 already. Not everybody agrees on generation cutoffs, but I don’t think there’s anyone who considers someone born in 1984 to still be Gen X.

“boomer” as a term is here to stay and a moving target

Kind of like how "Millennial" for a while meant 'teenager' despite the oldest Millennial being 40.

Technically, they’re all millennial shooters, because the entire genre was only invented in the 90s and mostly played by teenagers.

In fact, boomers started a whole episode of “satanic panic” about them after it turned out that the Columbine shooters loved to play DOOM.

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Boomer became an insult for anyone vaguely older then zoomer. Millennials are also called boomers if they are out of touch as well. Then boomer just meant old. More importantly Boomer ends with er and so is more fun to say as Boomer Shooter over GenX shooter or old shooter of classic shooter.

But this comment has big Boomer energy according to zoomers

Yeah, boomer is shorthand for old person now. And these are games for old people. Because we're old now.

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I'm not sure if the name stems from the Baby Boomers or, like, "BOOM! Headshot!" Because Doom and even Wolfenstein were the games of my very millennial youth, and didn't exist for most of most Boomer's life time.

That said, my dad (who is a boomer) played the shit out of Doom and Heretic. But stopped when Quake came out and everything started centering around aiming with the mouse. He always used the mouse to move. 🤢

I think it's just because they're old. I've got told "ok boomer" for complaining about lines of source code longer than 80 characters.

I mean, that's the exact response it deserves.

Haha yeah I've seen the error of my ways.

But seriously I think it varies by use case. "Tight" languages like golang, python, ruby, or most backends (other than Java)? Going over 80 is a bit of a smell. But if we're talking about a React frontend? Then yeah, an 80 character limit is obnoxious.

Nah, Python is a little verbose at times, so 100 is a bit better, especially for longer comprehensions with an if clause. Our team uses keyword parameters pretty much everywhere, so a lot of regular function calls wrap even at our 120-line limit (I'm trying to push us toward positional-only args to keep it under control).

It really depends on the use case. Scripting? 80 should suffice. Writing a complete program with classes, methods in classes, calling methods of variables, chaining method calls... 80 is very punishing. Even 130 is punishing for some pyspark methods. To apply line limits , you end up dividing calls in separate lines, which in turn makes the whole file much, much larger. Doing to it for the times it happens in 130 lines is completely fine, but with 80 a 800 lines file would be converted to 2000 at minimum. That's not good.

120 is the limit for me. Anything longer is crazy pills.

Yeah if I have to turn on text wrapping to read the code, then something is seriously wrong.

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My boomer relatives skipped over DOOM and Wolfenstein and got into Duke Nukem.

It's important to recognize some Boomers were born in 1946, and some were born in 1964, so there is quite a range in regards to how they dealt with tech in the early 90s

Youngest boomer. Mainly playing League of Legends at the moment as support.

I’d like to apologise to my ADCs in advance - apart from the crappy ones.

Well, you can't do a headshot in Doom because there's no vertical look. So it's either a reference to older people (ok boomer) or the ridiculous explode-y weapons you get and the general feeling of blasting through hordes of baddies. I'm guessing it's the older people term, since modern shooters look nothing like Doom.

True I think there was a big gap somewhere in the years between when o.g. 2.5d retro shooters like Doom, Blood, and Hexen players got used to moving with mouse look, and the people who played shooters like Quake, UT and counterstrike back in 2000-2005 where we aimed with the mouse and strafe run with the left and right keyboard buttons.

A few other hidden gems back in the day that I never got around to playing until years later after their prime time was probably Descent, System Shock and also AvP.

Those were the days alright

It comes from a few years ago. Some team making a boomer shooter weren't sure what genre they wanted to advertise it as, since just plain "first person shooter" is saturated. One of them saw the original DOOM described on twitter as "some kinda boomer-ass shooter" and thought it was hilarious, so they went with it.

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Lol I thought the genre was called boomer shooter because you have an arsenal of guns that go boom while circle strafing and holding the mouse button.

What was wrong with calling them doom clones? That’s what they were called until gen z made OK boomer a meme

Because most are quake clones, not doom clones

Quake was a doom clone

No Quake was a real level up from Doom, at least graphics wise.

Though I actually preferred the sprite graphics for smaller monsters, what I reckon would have been cool is if we could have a retro reboot of Doom 2 but with Quake style 3d monsters for mini bosses, and a whole Hexen remix/mashup but with UT style grenades and low gravity jumps and stuff

If you call the whole genre doom clones then that means Doom is a doom clone. Kind of like the problem with 'Souls-like' games. Also calling them clones somewhat diminishes the accomplishments and inmovations of the devs within the genre.

It happened with metroidvanias

And rogue-like, but maybe we've all accepted that it's a bit broader than "just like Rogue" at this point.

I understand it to mean "heavily randomized"

It should be:

  • permadeath
  • randomized runs (maps and equipment)
  • usually grid-based movement

The last seems to be an unpopular definition though.

Also some people would add not having upgrades or unlocks of any kind that persist between runs for a game to be considered a true roguelike, the idea being it's you the player who learns and gets better to eventually be able to beat the game, and not because you failed 50 runs to eventually unlock enough hp and damage upgrades.

Which is why the "correct" term for most of the games is roguelite and not -like.

Yup, that's what I mean by permadeath, you start each run from scratch, though you may unlock access to content (i.e. open a new area, unlock a class, etc) that the next play through can access.

I disagree, it's informative.

Maybe Doom-like is better, since "clone" implies they didn't add anything. It has worked really well for rogue-like, and souls-like has also evolved a bit to not just be "like dark souls," but any game with a focus on hard boss fights.

On a semi-related note: Is there a commonly agreed upon term for games like 'Vampire Survivors' yet and does it have its own tag on Steam?

So far, I've only found 'Action Roguelike', but that one has a lot of games that are, well, action based Roguelikes, like 'Binding of Isaac' and 'Risk of Rain'.

I call them arcade style games.

I like Arcade Style. I could see putting coins in and using a single joystick to play it on an arcade box.

Horde something I think? Horde shooter is fps wave style games, so top down horde... Thing.

Looks like bullet hell rogue-like, though I haven't played it to know for sure. Search for those two genres together.

a commonly agreed upon term

God, I wish. No, there's like a dozen. Off the top of my head, I've heard

Survivorlike
Arena Survival
Bullet Survival
Reverse Bullet Hell
Bullet Heaven
Bullet Shooter
Survival Shooter
Autoshooter
Horde Shooter
Horders
Anti-tower defence

If any one of them gained prominance, we could have a steam tag, but nobody will agree, so here we are

Yeah, it's kinda telling when I explicitly ask if there's a commonly used term yet and I get like a dozen of different answers.

For Steam, not yet. Thy might eventually go the "Open World Survival Crafting" route and combine the popular tags to one, but for now they are Bullet Hell + Action Roguelike.

Bullet heaven is what I’ve heard as an antithesis of bullet hell. You’re the source of the bullets.

I love these sort of games, Painkiller is my fav

I hope you've seen the Zero Punctuation episode on Painkiller. It was the second positive review he ever gave, and caused the sales of the game to skyrocket temporarily.

https://youtu.be/qk7DlYcQ0uM?si=TeUzlBlIj53dwM93

I am pretty sure boomers are not FPS gamers.

Yeah, I think some people don't think of boomers as 70 year olds.

The same people who still think of millennials as people in their early/mid 20s instead of late 30s early 40s.

TBH thou, like "millennials" has replaced "young'ins" for boomers, the same can be for millennials, "boomers" replacing "old man".

Yup, my parents are right smack in the middle of the boomer gen ('50s) and we recently celebrated my dad's 70th birthday by going on a cruise. They're still somewhat active, but we still needed to take their age account (we did a couple small hikes as excursions).

My dad was a boomer and he absolutely loved Doom and Duke Nukem.

My boomer dad is definitely an FPS gamer, and he has been since Doom.

The joke is that younger generations refer to anything older than them as boomer. Hence boomer shooter.

They would be better called GenX shooters. Cheesy aaaand accurate!

That's really disappointing. Boomers did not make or play doom clones.

Yeah but “Xennial Shooter” doesn’t have the same ring to it

Why try calling it that? They've been just fine with thier category the last 30 years, why change it now?

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Weird. Considering us folk born in the early 80s got lumped with millennial. I was playing all the doom and doom clones in the library in middleschool.

Yup, I'm a later 80s millennial, but I'm the youngest of four and my oldest sibling is at the top end of gen x, so I played lots of 80s and 90s games because that's what we had available (first consoles were an Atari and NES).

I played Doom as a kid and I played gzdoom as late as college with friends, it's great fun! In fact, if someone mentions "Doom" in a conversation, I think of OG Doom, not 2016 Doom.

Has anybody else noticed that boomer isn't the correct generation for this nomenclature? It's like people aren't using words literally or something.

I call anyone younger than me a "coomer" and any unnecessarily complicated rougue fps is a "coomer shooter". Does your game have a timer to purposely slow you down? Coomer game. I feel like the word "coomer" really captures the lifestyle and essence of today's unintelligent and entitled kids.