Welcome to the newest edition of This Week in Mysterious Nature: which as everyone knows, duh, is America's most popular blog about those Mysteries of Nature which haunt us all!

Today we set our sights on one of Nature's most elusive creatures: the Casual Friendly Multiplayer FPS!  Reports of several varieties of this nearly mythical beast have cropped up with increasing regularity over the last few years, and thus we begin our opportunistic search for that payload of payloads: a game that can simultaneously satisfy the hardcore 1337_$@UC3 and the carebear hugging casual!

The denizens of teh interwebs are not immune to partisanship and prejudice: the ghostly cries of "STFU NUB LRN2PLAY" and "dood i kno ur hacking" ring out amidst the graves of many a FPS that sought to be too many things to too many people.  Thus have multiplayer FPSs concentrated on the 'hardcore' crowd: COD has never been for those faint of heart carebears and it has always banked.  

Some supposed CFM FPSs have really turned out to be mutagenic Hardcore incubators: the much touted TF2, while designed as a CFM FPSs, has proven to either turn casuals away after one too many "@$$ handing" sessions at the hands of hardcores, or mutate them into hardcores themselves.  Videogameologists have argued over whether players of the latter type are acutal mutants, or were simply hardcores who were lacking some vital catalytic process to reveal their true nature.  Regardless, it would seem that over time, all multiplayer FPSs undergo a process of 1337ification. 

Yet evolution is an amazing process [the major leaps that is, the minor random changes are kinda boring actually] and no more stunning example can be found than the development of the most widely accepted example of a living, breathing CFM FPS, Left4Dead, from its uber1337 progenitor CounterStrike.  According to reliable sources, the seminal moment for L4D came during a CS Source dev play session.  Yes, it seems Casual Friendly tendencies have some fundamental similarities with Hardcore gaming behavior patterns! Stunning!  

In fact, many Videogameologists believe that Borderlands, a specimen sighted only from a distance in the Beta Wilds, will successfully continue along this genetic line of casual/hardcore hybridization in multiplayer FPSs.  And certified reports from the Beta Wilds also describe, with no little enthusiasm, the sighting of L4D's progeny, L4D2.  Who knows what the future will hold for CFM FPSs; perhaps you do?

Join us for the next installment of This Week in Mysterious Nature, when we will hunt the furtive phenomenon Healthy Fast Food. 

=)