I have a serious problem. A very serious problem. It hasn't started to affect my personal or professional life yet, but it's just a matter of time.
I stay up, bleary-eyed, refusing to stop until, realising I cannot function on just 2 hours of sleep a night, I resign myself to the fact that I must turn it off.
Tribes 2.
At work on my lunch break, I used to be hooked to Unreal Tournament. Our collective bosses finally banned the game from the building. We would hook up on the LAN and blast and curse and yell over the cubicle walls until, with the induction of new ownership (who might not be so lenient with that sort of thing) our bosses decided it was unsafe for their professional lives to allow this to continue.
My jones had to be fed, so I would try to get into the online fragfest on the internet. I don't know, but without knowing who I was blasting to pieces, it lost a lot of excitement.
Then I bought Tribes 2. Similar in concept in some ways with the Arena/Deathmatch features, when used as a Capture the Flag platform, the game takes off completely and leaves UT in the dirt.
Employing seemingly endless landscapes, extending the map size by a factor of ten, and adding vehicles like tanks an bombers where you can actually be the bombadier or the tailgunner, Tribes 2 is on a complete different level.
With three armor types, almost unlimited weapons combinations and the ability to deploy turrets and radar and cameras, T2 is a gamers dream. Whether you want to be a rogue assassin, employing a cloaking pack and a power leech capable of fatally shocking an oponent without his even knowing you were behind him until it's too late, or packing on the Juggernaut armor and strapping a hill-shattering Fusion Mortar gun to your arm with the ability to not only destroy armaments and instalations quickly, but to blast an opponent into tiny fragments of armor, limbs exploding outward from the blast zone, every firepower fetish is explorable.
You can sit on the sidelines and man missile or mortar turrets, you can act as General and direct troops to the action, you can act as defense, destroying enemy troops as they try to capture you base or flag.
I personally like to try different things, not happy with the same-old. My favorite is the Juggernaut Assault configuration, for the sheer joy of unstoppable firepower, but sometimes I like to go light and fast and fly in under my own power and snag the flag.
The ability to make rocket assisted jumps across the map (limited with the Juggernaut armor) adds a third dimension to the game and keeps it fast.
Online, this game really takes off. In order to be a bombadier, you need to hook up with another player who will fly the craft. If you want to be a tank gunner, you need a driver. I've noticed that the successful assaults always seem to have a coordinated effort, where the individuals have either planned their attack beforehand and each trooper has a specific mission within the assault. This, of course, makes perfect sense, therefore it behhoves one to communicate with other players. This can be done through the chat interface that allows you to choose from a set of pre-programmed phrases, like "I'll attack the enemy generators", or "I've got the flag, cover me", or through straightforward type in, entering your own messages via the keyboard.
You could also have voice chat with a headphones setup to keep the hands free to destroy opponents.
T2 has a seemingly infinte number of maps to battle in, with new ones being developed by players all the time, as well as new weapons and armor classes that have been built into some servers. Shielding, beacons, updated weapons, new skins for you armor, new vehicles, a seemingly endless array of additions to the game combine to keep it fresh and fast and furious.
There simply is not enough time to go into everything the game has to offer. There are only so many hours in a day and I am not going to waste any talking to you when I could be dropping a Fusion Mortar in your lap and obliterating your slow, useless newbie butt!
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