Just a short write up... nothing fancy, don't get excited.. I have writer's block today.

Well as sad as it is, an era in my gaming life is drawing to a close. Tribes 2 is coming out in just a few short, eagerly awaited days. And Tribes 1 is dying.

Over two years ago, I saw an advert in a magazine for a game that looked so damned good I just had to have it.... It promised massive outdoor and indoor environments..... An engrossing multiplayer experience like no other...... Flying armor, flags, vehicles and big frickin' guns.

All this time later I have to say that the promise was certainly kept. And then some.

I've been playing Tribes longer than I've ever played any game before in my life. I've met more people than before, and made some great friends over the time. Tribes is the first game that really got me playing online alot, and playing at a competition level as well. (Grrrr.... Stupid KOV|Kermy. :) I became an admin on Teamplay.net as well, for their Tribes CTF ladder.

In my personal opinion, Tribes is the best first person shooter ever made. (Heh. Sorry Quake guys.. But it's true.) Tribes is not only a first person shooter, it's also a first person strategy team based game. It's not like Quake where the best reflexes and fastest connection win, or the highest frame rate... You can play Tribes on a crappy system with software acceleration and still be a good player. You don't have to be a good shot, or have reflexes of sprung steel to be a good player. How? Because of the roles you can play, and the fact that it's a TEAM based game. As the original box reads "No man is an island." In Tribes, a team of not so good players who have excellent teamwork can kick the crap out of a team made up of excellent players who have little or no teamwork.

You can deploy defensive turrets for your team. You can deploy beacons or jammers. You can sit on a hill and warn your teammates of incoming and outgoing enemies. You can control turrets remotely. (Hmm. Rockets good.) You can just sit on the flag in a heavy and blast anyone who comes near it. You can base rape. You can snipe. Or you can just play like a Quake player and running around shooting everything that moves. (You still need to learn to fly though. :)

It's the depth of Tribes that makes it excellent. I'm still, 2 years later, seeing people do things that surprise me from time to time. That's a good sign. :) I do think it's about time to find another game though. I still get all pumped up when I'm fleeing like a coward on raindance before the evil doers who would put and end to my camping and sniping ways, and my heart starts beating faster on those rare occasions I actually manage to get my ass over to their flag and get it... But I just don't feel the urge to play the game nearly as much as I used to.... It's still very good, but it's started to lose that old magic. And from the number of people playing matches on a regular basis, and playing on the base pub servers other people feel the same way.

I'm really looking forward to Tribes 2, and I hope they don't screw it up... But it's the same dev team that did such an excellent job on the original Tribes, and the guy who's in charge over there apparently headed up the team for Heavy Gear 2 as well. (In my opinion one of the most unappreciated games of all time... Grrrr again.) So I don't really think they could screw it up.

One of the most ironic things about Tribes is that the Earthsiege/Starsiege games have always, in my opinion, been technically superior to their competition, the Mechwarrior series from FASA. Better graphics and sound. Better storyline... But they've never been as much fun, and they don't have the backstory and depth that years of board games and novels brings to the Battletech universe. So they have never really been all that well known...... Tribes, as near as I can tell was supposed to be kind of a background type of game, while Starsiege has supposed to smoke Mechwarrior 3 and Heavy Gear 2. (Rumors state that the reason for the crappy condition of Mechwarrior 3's shipping multiplayer was due to Microsoft's rushing it into production to beat Heavy Gear 2 to market.) It didn't. I really don't know that many guys who played Starsiege. It honestly just (again) wasn't as much fun as MW and HG2.

It was Tribes that took off. So well that it's lasted 2 years. Hell, the sequel doesn't even have the ill fated Starsiege name on it. Just kinda proves that a smaller game can win out, if it's good enough and gets the attention of enough people. And Tribes, with it's online only play was certainly a pioneer in the first person shooter genre. Now it seems that everyone is releasing, or plotting the same sort of thing..... Hell, some of them (Planetside) are going to be pay-as-you-go games. We'll see how they do. It'll be interesting.

It's been a really good run, and I must say that the $60 I spent on Tribes was worth it a hundred times over.

I'm hoping that we'll see, in a few months, more people starting to play Tribes 1 again... Assuming we're not all hopelessly addicted to Tribes 2 by that time. If the dev team expands on what they did in Tribes 1, I don't see how we can't be.

See you on the battlefield in a few days. :)