Sitrep’s FPS Bizarro World: Some of the Weirdest FPS’ You Will Ever See

Today I became transfixed by how many games based around the X-Men have actually been released, and decided to read about absolutely all of them. Eventually, I came to X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse, made in 1998. Man, I remember this weirdness. It’s actually a shooter; an Uncanny makeover of the original Quake but with all X-Men coming atcha instead of fiends and shamblers. They’re all cyborg replicas, see.

It’s definitely not the strangest shooter I’ve seen. Not by a shot so long it suffers the wrath of the Coriolis Effect. Twice. Postal 2 is such a given I don’t even want to patronise you like I sometimes would if I’d been drinking, but PO’ed, on the other hand, is so delightfully obscure and flat-out insane you simply must know about it.

Put out in 1995 for the PlayStation and the short-lived 3DO, you were a cook with a jetpack and you bashed aliens with your frying pan. Almost instantly, you are attacked by walking asses. Spank them. It’s amazing.

Of course, if it’s weird, Japan totally has to have its say in things and that say is Gal*Gun. Inexplicably, you are the most sexually riveting student in high school entertainment today, and that means a constant barrage of hormonal anime dolls charging you at every unending hallway. In order to diffuse the likelihood that they may give you some of the greatest memories of your young life, you have to peg them with your Pheromone Shot, which seems counter-productive but okay. In response they moan and jiggle and expose their underpants upon fainting. You are a man.

I don’t know what the hell Nitro Family’s deal was either, but at least I didn’t feel like I was turning down frisky encounters by encouraging them further. You’re a guy called Victor Chopski and you have massive guns with which you use to smite such conventional enemies as Haitian militiamen riding giant pigs. It gets even more normal, though, because your wife rides you for the entire game. She’s some kinda Las Vegas dominatrix and has a whip that periodically lashes out to decapitate the filthy pig-men and their vile armies of what the hell.

Zeno Clash has always weirded me out, but in a good way. It’s just so exaggerated and surreal. Bashing other knobbly cavemen in the gooch with whatever I can find is usually a recipe for developing an unusual feeling in my prostate, and certainly the perineum comes into it sometimes, too. What.

There is no respite from this madness to be found in Dino D-Day, either, for it posits that during World War II, Hitler resurrected dinosaurs with which the Third Reich might ride to certain victory. You have not lived until you have been a T-rex with a machine gun in its mouth, just as assuredly as you have not lived until you’ve typed your enemies to death in The Typing of the Dead. Up yours, Dreamcast.