TOM FRANCIS
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The Completist: Tribes: Vengeance

What I thought at the time: Great, but merely great. It got eighty-something in our mag (Tim reviewed), and I remember thinking “God, I love eighty percent games” as I jetted and ski’d around the enormous levels. The Grappling Hook level annoyed the living fuck out of me, though, to the extent that I stopped there and didn’t play it again for three years.

What the world thought at the time (paraphrased): The world was unavailable for comment since no-one in it actually bought Tribes: Vengeance. It went vritually unmarketed, so only the Tribes hardcore actually bought copies, which was kind of a shame because, by putting enormous effort into a lengthy, complex, story-driven single player campaign, it was very obviously designed to court everyone but the Tribes hardcore. They hated it.

What the world thinks now (paraphrased): The world is unavailable for comment as its populace have either a) never heard of it, b) forgotten about it entirely, or c) intentionally erased it from their memories to preserve their fondness for the original games.

What I think now: I liked it a lot more this time through, admittedly because I wasn’t above using a level skip cheat to avoid fiddling around with the dismal grappling hook level, and to retain my sanity when I lost yet another hour’s progress due to the COMPLETE FUCKING LACK OF AN AUTOSAVE. The ludicrous thing is, the reason I keep losing masses of my progress is that I like the game so much. I’m lost in it, so I’m almost never pulling back and thinking “This is a game, I need to save”.

It doesn’t even have a quicksave key. Instead, you have to pull out to a menu, select save, then select “New Save Game”, whereupon – I kid not – it asks if you want to overwrite “New Save Game”. It’s not really an option, it’s a dummy savegame they put in there that gets recreated when you save over it.

The thing I wish everyone would copy: Skiing! We have games with jetpacks – though not enough by anyone’s count – but we badly need more that combine your short-lived skyward thrusts with the ability to curl that gravitational potential round into blindingly fast lateral motion by angling your descent along inclines. It’s a thrilling, elegant and endlessly satisfying mechanic. Even on the last level I was amazed by the dizzying speed I could pick up by playing off the shape of the land.

Best bit: It’s partly that, but more specifically what that leads to in the context of a single-player shooter. Because the levels are enormogasmic, you have some time and distance to plan your attack. But the main thing you’re planning is not which weapon to use, where to throw a grenade, but the rollercoaster undulations of your blistering route through the area.

“If I jetpack over that ridge, I can land on the incline and ski all the way down to the facility, and hit that lip at the bottom to launch over that water-tower, take out the turret, and still have enough jetpack juice to blast up to the mountains on the other side of the valley to ski back for another pass.”

I got to the stage where I could execute all this without hitch almost instinctively, leaving my higher brain functions free to handle the shooting as I shot by. The centrepiece weapon is the Spinfuser, which is like a lightweight rocket launcher except that your missiles inherit your own velocity. That means that you have to lead to compensate for both your own movement and that of your target, so nailing five guys as you slide by at eighty miles per hour does genuinely need some brainwork.

I don’t think I’d like a game that forced you to conduct that kind of mathematics in the middle of an N-like momentum manipulation across a 3D landscape, but I love that there’s a game which lets me, and rewards me.

How cocking hard is it? Not too bad, but the challenge has its minor frustation factor magnified a billion times by the no-autosave thing. There’s the odd inordinately tough boss fight, some of them unexpected, and the prospect of repeating the entire preceeding level in order to take another whack at one of these caused me to level-skip to the victory cut-scene once or twice. I am not ashamed of this. Irrational should be.

How long is it? Long. It feels super-epic, but in fact it’s merely long. It’s an utterly absurd structure – at various times you play a princess, her daughter at six, her daughter in her twenties, her daughter’s boyfriend, her daughter’s boyfriend’s killer and even your own killer. By the end of it, even though precious little of the dialogue and precious few of the characters have been even remotely good, you’re so exhausted by the sheer amount of plot you’ve lived through that you can’t help but feel rather satisfied.

Jumps the shark: Guess what? The grappling hook level. But not just because of the grappling hook. This is a level where you play a six year-old girl, piloting fighter jets and mowing down legions of trained soldiers. The problem with the grappling hook, by the way, is that their coders weren’t clever enough to work out how to make it wrap around obstacles that get in the way of the line, so when you grapple onto the ceiling or a high ledge, the challenge is to make sure your lifeline doesn’t brush some light fitting, skirting board or defect in the wall, or it will instantly vanish and you’ll plummet. It’s all the less tolerable because an Unreal Tournament player modded in a grappling hook with this feature implimented beautifully, and it took him all of a few afternoons. That’s the same engine.

What’s the end like? The penultimate level is really good, as mentioned, and entirely true to what made the bulk of the game great. The final one is a boss fight with someone who seemed to me to be a fairly minor character, and it’s pretty unremarkable. But it wins big points for a) not being at all frustrating, and b) being set above the clouds against a spectacularly beautiful sun. It’s one of the few games that ends in a place that feels like an appropriate place to end. It’s a game about flying, and you finish it higher than you’ve ever been before.

What’s the ending like? Surprising, actually. You never get to kill the real villain of the piece, she gets away scott free. It would almost be noir if the characters involved weren’t such hammy irritants.

The Completist: Far Cry

Feh, I had another This Month in Terrible written but I’m bored of Terrible now. Terrible is over-rated. As stupid as it sounds, I’ve actually been reluctant to post here because I didn’t want to interrupt the series with something else, but didn’t feel like checking over and finding images for the final post. So, new series!

Valve’s stats show that still less than half their players have made it through the four-hour first episode of their follow-up to Half-Life 2. Crytek reckoned around 20% of gamers would see the end of Far Cry, and on anecdotal evidence I’d put the actual figure at less than half that.

If I really like something, though, I play it to death, then start again and play it back to life, and then really just mess around with its limp and compliant body of work until I get bored. So I shall, from time to time, note my thoughts on how old stuff holds up as I replay it, what the ending’s like, and how cocking hard it was. First up, Far Cry:

What I thought at the time: Brilliant! I knew the Trigen and indoor bits would suck, but I was expecting the game to degenerate into them for the whole second half, when in fact they turned out to be sprinkled bearably throughout. I remember playing River, one of the last few missions, about twenty times over, screwing it up each time but enjoying myself far too much to try and do it sensibly. I crashed boats into buildings, jeeps into the sea, boats into other boats, jeeps into boats, boats into people’s faces, and at one point a jeep into a helicopter. Sorry Bruce, I did it first.

What the world thought at the time (paraphrased): Brilliant! Unprecedented AI! Amazing graphicsability! Freeform gameplay! Ruined by Trigens!

What the world thinks now (paraphrased): Less brilliant! Everyone still loves the freeformness, but love for the AI has faded somewhat and the horrible Trigens and horribler last two levels have stuck in everyone’s minds.

What I think now: More brilliant! I don’t know why, but the Trigens hardly bothered me this time through. I actually found them pretty scary – they pounce suddenly and unpredictably, and kill in one swipe, and take a lot of shooting, so you end up having a lot of moments where you only just kill them in time, causing them to fling their own limp, bullet-ridden bloody corpse into your face.

The two things that really stand up well today are the boats and the binoculars. Skimming that glossy rippled sea is pure joy, and crashing into a beach at a hundred and fifty miles per hour, flipping eighty foot into the air off a rock, is the only way to start a mission. At one point on Boat – a mission that has boats in it – I hit an enemy speedboat at full pelt, both of us firing, just as I took out their gunner. My boat hit the driver in the side of the head, threw me into the air, spun three times and landed the right way up in the water, just before I landed back in it and sped off. Bitches, I refer you to my wake.

The binoculars are The Thing I Wish Everyone Would Copy. In fact, new field:

The thing I wish everyone would copy: The binoculars. You scan an area with them and every enemy not behind anything very solid is highlighted, and their position is tracked on your radar from then on. It’s a level of intel most tactical shooters don’t dare give the player, for fear that he might be able to plan his attack, or enjoy himself. Situational awareness enables situational manipulation, and that’s where the fun always is.

Best bit: Oh, I wasn’t supposed to be talking about the best bits yet? Because that was the best bit.

How cocking hard is it? Not desperately, actually. Shameful admission: I actually played Far Cry on Easy mode the first time. I felt pretty smug about it, because everyone else was groaning about how hard it was even a third of the way through, and it gets a lot harder than that.

So I grit my teeth slightly when I committed to Medium this time through, but it was fine. I got through it without cheats and only mild frustration. I don’t think the end, which I’ll talk about in a minute, is as hard as people make out, it’s just frustrating. I died more times on the Boat level than on the last two missions put together, it’s just it wasn’t really my fault when I died on those, and I lost more progress.

How long is it? Fairly. You could cut out all the indoor sections – around 30% of the game – and it’d still be a good game-length. You should probably do that. They’re not terrible, they’re just no better than most shooters.

Jumps the shark: Not right until the end, actually – the mission where you start with an M4 and ten bullets, and there are a million Trigens. That was dumb. I didn’t cheat, but I did install the quicksave mod. I foxed that first Trigen by waiting for him to pass a boulder on his way to me, and passing it myself on the other side. PSYCH!

At that point I jumped off the waterfall, on a motorbike.

What’s the end like? After that you’ve got a drive through instakill magma rivers with five hundred Big Trigens – WEAK – an assault on a large complex full of well-armoured commandos without much health or ammo – WEAK – the fight with Dr Krieger, who is tough and irritating and surrounded by lots of guys and there’s nowhere to hide – WEAKNESS ITSELF – then the infamous dust bowl of four hundred Big Trigens – NOT AS WEAK AS PEOPLE MAKE OUT BUT STILL PRETTY GODDAMN WEAK GUYS.

What’s the ending like? Abysmal.
Doyle: You don’t understand, Jack, they sent me, you can’t change the future!
Jack: Probably not! But I can make sure you’re not a part of it! LOL! (shoots Doyle)
Jack, that is totally changing the future you dick. Also stop talking like a barbecue salesman.