21 First Person Shooters you shouldn't have missed

Modern FPS (2007 and beyond)

What could be more fun than waking up as a lab rat armed with a weapon that gives you the ability to introduce interactive portals to your environment allowing you to propel yourself to your destination while encountering talking turrets and intriguing puzzles all for the prize of cake (heh)?

With its cult favorite status, Portal has earned a place in our hearts despite its disappointingly short length.

Portal today: After the gaming community named this as one of the most fun and interesting games of 2007, future releases had to be expected. In Q4 of 2008, Portal: Still Alive became available exclusively to Xbox Live members and introduced 14 new challenges along with Xbox achievements. Portal 2 has been confirmed to be in the works by Valve, though from a business standpoint it was almost an inevitable fate. Arguably the best looking game to date and undoubtedly one of the top first person shooters available, Crysis has been praised for both its immersive single player and action-packed multiplayer modes.

In fact, the amount of eye candy featured in this title is so computationally taxing that Crysis has made its way into most high-end hardware benchmark review sites around the Internet.

Crysis today: Still a modern FPS by anyone's standards, Crysis was announced as a trilogy from the get go. Crysis Warhead was released in 2008 but was coined as an expansion pack to the original game, rather than a true sequel. It'd be safe to assume Crytek will be using the same Cry Engine 2 on future titles since it's still got some untapped potential as far as graphics go.

The first person shooter is a revolutionary genre that has taken an important role on the explosive growth of key gaming technologies like 3d graphics and online play over the last decade.

For some the future of the FPS is in blending its interactive elements with other genres, but I'm sure hardcore shooter fans won't necessarily agree with that. Action-heavy titles seem to be favorites among online gamers, but meanwhile the future holds further changes for the genre.

Like it or not, consoles have become an equally attractive platform for releasing FPS titles, considerably expanding the gamers base from an otherwise PC dominated genre. Besides the most prominent franchises that are guaranteed to bring more great games in the immediate future, titles like Portal and Mirror's Edge have tried to defy the concept by adding new movement elements.

On the hardware front, GPU releases will hardly slowdown over the next few years. Also during this year's CES, Nvidia introduced their own stereoscopic 3D glasses, improving the already existing technology when combined with a fast graphics card and a capable monitor, gaining considerable praise for the new level of realism brought to the table.

What do you believe is in store for future first person shooters? Leave your comments here.