Look, a sequel to my article about sequels.

Tribes – I know, I know, this game has had sequels.  Three, if I remember correctly, and it’s a spin-off of another popular series, Starsiege, but the world wasn’t ready for Tribes just yet, despite the games being successful.  The perfect set of circumstances that would have allowed for it to take over the world had yet to come about.

Tribes was tailor-made for online console.  No more hot-keying vocal commands on your PC to get a troop pick-up or a medic when you can just yell into the microphone that is no longer a luxury but a standard.  The games can either be fast-paced twitch fests or take hours as teams build defenses and send raiding parties on feints and actual flag captures.  While nowhere near as polished or, frankly, perfect, as Team Fortress 2, the game is essentially Team Fortress 2-lite.

In space.

With jetpacks.

The player picks an armor class, heavy, medium, and light, each with their own strength and weaknesses.  Heavies are, wait for it, heavy, and naturally they can soak up damage and unleash mortars on the enemy.  Lights are quick with lots of hang time from their jet packs and the ability to carry sniper rifles, but they go down easy.  There’re vehicles, flying bases, laser targeting for the mortars, turrets to deploy, force fields to set up, and the game is never played the same way twice.

Now, there are sequels, the last as recent as 2004, but that was released on PC, and frankly, the FPS genre just isn’t theirs anymore.  People will make the argument that the PC control scheme is superior for shooters because you can just put your mouse crosshairs over a target, you know, the exact opposite of real life?  Even if the argument has merit, in terms of sales and online usage, consoles are ahead for shooters.  

There was a Tribes game released for the PS2, but do you remember how much fun it was to use the old Playstation Network?  Of course not, because it sucked out loud.

  However with Sony making an effort this time, and Xbox Live showing everyone else how to do it right, now would be a great time to release a polished and balanced online game.  

With jetpacks.

Crackdown – Before Crackdown and later, GTAIV, I wasn’t too enamored with the whole idea of sandbox games.  Sure, I could explore a whole city, but it’d be in a car that either drove like a concussed hippo or behaved like it existed in world where the streets were paved in Crisco.  On top of that, one of the big selling points was that your actions had consequences (you could piss off the cops), which was a neat idea except the shooting and fighting system were both complete shit.

Yes, recreating an actual city with traffic, weather, pedestrians, and the ability to go anywhere you could see, is impressive.  However there was too much give and take for my taste on the core gameplay.  As I said, the game is about being a criminal: boosting cars, shooting it out with the cops, essentially doing all the things you’ve been told your entire life not to do, but with the controls, at least early on, you can only do that type of stuff poorly.  I feel that when the genre was young, it got a pass for doing something so new and daring, and perhaps rightfully so, because the genre as a whole has come far, and is doing almost everything well.

Having said that, I hated GTAIII. 

There it is; I’m coming clean.

I had basically written off the whole sandbox idea until I downloaded the Crackdown demo on a lark.  Realtime Worlds figured out exactly what was necessary to get me into their world, superpowers.  I don’t have to worry about driving because I can just pick up a car and throw it down the street. 

My favorite thing to do in the game was to get into a police car, start the sirens, get out, pick up the car, and chase criminals down the street, and beat them to death with the engine block as the sirens wail.  As I throw the wrecked car at a passing bus, leap forty feet into air, and bound away from the crime scene I know, deep down; I touched lives in Pacific City.  I made a difference.

Look, I have no deep introspective analysis; I just want to blow shit up.  Give me a new city, new vehicles, new guns, and make it so I can actually level buildings.  That’s all I want.  Search and destroy was the only mission in the game.  No escort or defense missions to bore me to death.  Hell, the option to actually enter the game and play says, “clean up the city.”  In my head I like to imagine someone adds “by any means necessary.”

Give me all the new stuff I mentioned plus, after every successful mission I talk to the police chief who tells me that I’m a wreckless loose cannon, and then give me a dialogue tree consisting of the following choices:

-     “You’re right.  I’m sorry.”

-       “…”

-       “Eh, stick it in the report.”

-       *Throw Chief out window*

Then at the end, as I climb out of the rubble of a blown up building, holding the severed head of the last crime lord, I brush past the Chief, and everyone thinks he’s about to go off on me, but, instead, he stares into the distance and says, “he’s dangerous, rude, trigger happy, and his paperwork’s a mess.  He’s a goddamn loose cannon, but son of a bitch does he get the job done.”

Roll credits, play National Anthem on electric guitar over it.

“The End”

“Or is it?”

“It is.”