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Free Tribes 1 and 2 Downloads, DVD Forthcoming
PoopShipDestroyer writes "In celebration for their upcoming game, Tribes: Vengence, Vivendi Universal Games is distributing the videogames Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2 for free via FilePlanet.com on May 4th, and also on a special-edition DVD-ROM bundled with the newsstand edition of the June issue of Computer Gaming World magazine. The price is certainly right."
These aren't all chump games. In fact, many of them are very popular, commercially successful games.
Impossible? Not at all.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Hey jvm, thanks for posting the itching question of "Will this include the Loki Linux release?" up on http://www.linuxgames.com/
At least now I have a place I can watch for the answer!
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Having played both, and loving each, I'll share:
It's really all about pace for me and actual thinking. Most of the time, UT2K4 and the like are played a truly frenetic pace. From time to time, a handful of players will be standing still sniping or moving only a little while babysitting an objective or flag. While you are moving in UT2K4, you are moving fast and it's intense. UT2K4 is never peaceful, nor are there generally large strategic decisions.
Tribes (I played 2) can be peaceful. There are those wide open areas that you can navigate very quickly with light armor and skill but otherwise are slow to traverse on foot. You can also contribute to your team while remaining almost ignorant of combat going on around you and certaintly not firing a gun. To do this, you run around deploying sensors, or turrets or what have you or carry a repair gun to glue stuff back together. (Yes, link gun in 2K4 does this, but it feels like kludge)
It also makes a big differance that there are vehicles in capture the flag. And they work in that environment. One of the more beautiful team efforts you'll see in Tribes is one player grabbing the flag and begining to run home. Another player on his team will be flying a Shrike (a small hover plane) and will fly past the flag carrier and park the plan in his path. Guy #2 jumps out, the flag carrier jumps in and starts flying home.
There are just so many interesting tactical / strategic things to do in Tribes that aren't there in UT2K4. That's the selling point. I'll share two favorites.
You have becons. Usually you use them to let your team know where you've put something useful. They can also be put in target mode. All your teamates guns will see a dot which lets them know where to fire to hit your becon. Sounds a little useless until you put one on the underside of an enemy's defensive turret or vehicle station. Suddenly your teamates are lobbing mortars from halfway across the map with pinpoint accuracy to destroy things. Funny as hell.
The other is on a map that is normally dominated by snipers. There is a huge open area between the two relatively close flags that can be picked off. On the edges of these are a series of canyons. You can be daring and load up heavy (slow) armor and walk the canyons mortar in hand. If you manage to sneak up properly from behind. The map is hilariously set up so that well shot mortars are trapped and held in a small room that contains the enemy reequiping stations. Killing a stack of people and trashing those stations that way is hilarious.
Finally, in Tribes, when the action heats up and its a clutch moment, your adreniline does kick up. The cool thing about UT2K4 is that you're almost always at that level of intesity. Mostly because of that small field of view.
Frankly, while the vehicles in UT are very cool and the new mode is fun, I just don't think it's right. UT feels too high paced to have tank battles. I really feel that while the new modes are great, UT is at its finest when there aren't vehicles, when it's played on smallish maps between two fairly small teams. UT's indoor maps tend to be very very good, while the outdoor ones feel bland and average. Tribes had the opposite problem. Their interiors were pretty lame compared to the vast expenses between bases.
So why look at Tribes? Because you want a gaming experience that is more interesting, if slower paced. Why ignore Tribes? The learning curve is a bitch and it takes forever to finally get your first spinfusor kill.
You obviously havn't looked very hard.
There is a thiving community build around engine work for Doom, Quake, and Quake 2, at least. And i'm sure there are others out there that I just havn't looked for yet.