Despite hue and cry from die-hard fans over the series' move to a less complicated tactical approach, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas still managed to offer up a more high-minded multiplayer shooter experience as a counter-point to Gears of War. Vegas' blend of tense first-person shooting action, advanced squad commands and tactics, and progressive multiplayer character growth (through the Persistent Elite Creation system) made it a potent mix that blasted the shooting genre forward into the current generation. Vegas also brought co-op multiplayer to the fore, highlighting what would become an online multiplayer staple for future games.
Gabe: For me the best thing about Rainbow Six: Vegas was the co-op multiplayer and I vividly remember churning through the entire game with Bryn, Patrick and some random dude we met on Xbox Live one night. Granted, my memory gets a bit hazy near the end of our epic session because we played until something like 4:00 a.m., but gaming experiences like that are so rare that I'll always cherish Vegas.
Sterling: That's one of my favorite memories of R6: Vegas, too. The single-player was fun, but the online stuff made for one of the absolute best multiplayer experiences you could get during the earlier days of Xbox Live. Also, for all of the annoyances of creating your face in-game, it became a meta-game in and of itself, as I wasted several minutes of an online round trying to figure out just how shitty Gabe and Scooter's virtual faces were compared to their real faces.Gabe: Yeah, for some reason, the initial attempts to import real faces into R6V always seemed to result in a sort of Friar Tuck-ization of your face. In fact, in the case of Scooter (who was already sporting a shaved head) it replaced his forehead with an eye-searing glare! It was still pretty sweet to have my face in a game, regardless of how little it actually resembled me.Sterling: Yeah. Ugly but endearing cam-face aside, I think that Vegas' timing was great. At the end of 2006 cover-based shooting was all the rage, as everyone jumped back and forth between online Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas. At a time when Xbox Live was establishing a foothold for itself, games like Rainbow Six: Vegas epitomized why the service offered so much flashbang for the buck.
