Tryzon?s Nostalgic Gaming Trips #5
If Call of Duty 4 is the king of serious shooting, then Timesplitters is the master of daft, arcadey blasting. When the first game came out with the PS2?s launch, it was clear that it had been designed from the beginning with multiplayer in mind, and they had simply shoved an extremely minimal one-player adventure one because they could. It simply involved running from A to B before taking an item from B to C. Along the way one had to bazookoid (or avoid, for a bigger challenge) countless nasties, ranging from zombies, to aliens, to Egyptian cultists. It was very simple, but compelling in a traditional kind of way: it was a return to the brainless blasting of old, and while this was a brave step, it wasn?t what people really expected of a next-gen console. Still, the game came quite highly recommended, often as the best shooter on the system thus far.
Key to Timesplitters? fun was the perfect turning speed of the camera and instant classic-style weaponry, which included shotguns, rayguns, rocket launchers, and everything except flamethrowers, which thankfully made it into the next instalment instead. The explosions were over-the-top, the characters were highly stylised stereotypes and the maps were great fun, especially Chinese, with its plentiful glass windows, bangable gong and different floors to fire
from.
Arcade also had a league mode, which had you performing insane tasks for rewards in the form of characters to play as and bragging rights. Easily the best involved knocking the heads off zombies in a variety of ways, with either a time limit, little health, or both. Once you got into the swing of it, it could prove strangely therapeutic.
One very interesting feature of the title was the map maker, which allowed potential Bob the Builders to construct their very own multiplayer hell-house. The system had a few kinks in it, and was naturally limited to your own creativity, but could be used to put together perfectly playable locations.
Next was the aptly named Timesplitters 2, which basically took everything that was crazily-good about the first one and multiplied it by some fairly large number, possibly six. The only possible way in that it was inferior to its predecessor was the health and armour bars: where before they were always in the top-left corner and easy to understand at a glance, this time they only popped up when hurt or if you went into a menu, and took the form of two giant curves of light, which could be difficult to interpret accurately. But consider this a mole on the otherwise flawless face of Mighty Zeus himself.
If you think modern games are too serious, you need this, the mother of all sequels: the singleplayer was actually given variety, without losing its naff charm; arcade got an injection of options, and now featured about 150 characters; the mapmaker was refined, and could now be used to make fairly complex story levels. There isn?t much more to say, other than this is the quintessential arcade experience.
One little nitpick I have with both Timesplitters 1 & 2 is the front covers, or I should say the American covers. Always notorious for getting the bum boxes, Yanks had to get two bad bits of artwork in a row. Compare the American versions of both games with the ones the rest of the world got, and you?ll see what I mean: the first game was a mad heap of unrelenting insanity, and most folk got a bright coloured insanity-painting to accompany it. Americans instead got slumped with a generic-looking but mildly attractive in a kind of wrong way robo-lady with a big clockface-looking thing. The second game was even more deranged, but this time nobody got a good representation, although at least the European version featured three characters from different time periods. What does America get? A drunk-looking Cortez waving his huge weapon around with a big white haze (speaking of which, that horrible mess Haze was also a Free Radical game, which makes me worry for ?splitters 4?) in the background. It?s like someone has it out for the world?s only superpower. Appropriately, the third game was apparently given the same mildly engaging cover all over the world: Cortez back-launching while shooting into a time vortex.
Timesplitters: Future Perfect. What was wrong with Timesplitters 3? It?s not a big number or anything, so why annoy the acne out of me by pointlessly changing the title format? Hollywood loves pulling this little trick, and another of my favourite game series ever -Jak- has no consistency whatsoever. It may be a cosmetic change, but the third ?splitters game?s freaky title is representative of its unwelcome nature: the consistently irritating and completely transparent attempt at going ?mainstream?.
All the little details were changed, usually for the worse. It?s like the Star Wars Special Editions, only this is my childhood getting sodomised! For the first time, weapons actually had reload animations, rather than just moving off-screen and coming back full of bullets with a satisfying ?cha-chick!? All the arcade icons and things, while perfectly good before, got all moved around and changed, like in Guitar Hero. My favourite map from number 2, the Ice Station, mysteriously got axed, and I never managed to quite replicate it in the (admittedly far improved) map maker. Other maps vanished too, most unwelcome-like. And the entire nature of the single-player (having more than one plot thread) really didn?t strike a cord with me. They even took a variant of bag-tag out of the game! Why remove a super-fun game mode? This is bad insanity, people.
For all Future Perfect?s faults, I must admit that if it weren?t the sequel to probably the best shooter the sixth generation ever saw, (oooh, controversial!) I wouldn?t pick on it so much. But just compare them over a few hours and see what I mean. Like I said, the mapmaker is easily the best of the three, and I suppose the story mode is pretty epic, but it?s not right. All they had to do was make ?splitters 2 with more stuff, better health bars and online play and they would have made good history, as opposed to bad.
A consistently great thing throughout the entire series was the music, which was always varied and suited the scenario at hand perfectly. Astonishingly, Free Radical actually let you download the music for all their games (except Haze, but smeg that) for free at their official site. Unheard of! I like I think it?s their apology for Future Perfect and Haze, but that probably isn?t actually it.
This impulsive reminisce/rant was not planned like my other features, but it came from me heart, mon. As ever, I summarise with recommendations: if you have to pick one, get Timesplitters the 2nd. If you can get two, get the first one as well, but you should just get all three games, mainly because I like to order people about. It amuses me so. Second Sight, a completely unrelated game from Free Radical, is decent too, so whatever. I?ll be discussing that at a later date, most likely. For now, get the ?splitters games. Despite their shortcomings, they?re still better than a certain series that rhymes with Bailo. I?ve said too much.
If Call of Duty 4 is the king of serious shooting, then Timesplitters is the master of daft, arcadey blasting. When the first game came out with the PS2?s launch, it was clear that it had been designed from the beginning with multiplayer in mind, and they had simply shoved an extremely minimal one-player adventure one because they could. It simply involved running from A to B before taking an item from B to C. Along the way one had to bazookoid (or avoid, for a bigger challenge) countless nasties, ranging from zombies, to aliens, to Egyptian cultists. It was very simple, but compelling in a traditional kind of way: it was a return to the brainless blasting of old, and while this was a brave step, it wasn?t what people really expected of a next-gen console. Still, the game came quite highly recommended, often as the best shooter on the system thus far.
Key to Timesplitters? fun was the perfect turning speed of the camera and instant classic-style weaponry, which included shotguns, rayguns, rocket launchers, and everything except flamethrowers, which thankfully made it into the next instalment instead. The explosions were over-the-top, the characters were highly stylised stereotypes and the maps were great fun, especially Chinese, with its plentiful glass windows, bangable gong and different floors to fire
from.
Arcade also had a league mode, which had you performing insane tasks for rewards in the form of characters to play as and bragging rights. Easily the best involved knocking the heads off zombies in a variety of ways, with either a time limit, little health, or both. Once you got into the swing of it, it could prove strangely therapeutic.
One very interesting feature of the title was the map maker, which allowed potential Bob the Builders to construct their very own multiplayer hell-house. The system had a few kinks in it, and was naturally limited to your own creativity, but could be used to put together perfectly playable locations.
Next was the aptly named Timesplitters 2, which basically took everything that was crazily-good about the first one and multiplied it by some fairly large number, possibly six. The only possible way in that it was inferior to its predecessor was the health and armour bars: where before they were always in the top-left corner and easy to understand at a glance, this time they only popped up when hurt or if you went into a menu, and took the form of two giant curves of light, which could be difficult to interpret accurately. But consider this a mole on the otherwise flawless face of Mighty Zeus himself.
If you think modern games are too serious, you need this, the mother of all sequels: the singleplayer was actually given variety, without losing its naff charm; arcade got an injection of options, and now featured about 150 characters; the mapmaker was refined, and could now be used to make fairly complex story levels. There isn?t much more to say, other than this is the quintessential arcade experience.
One little nitpick I have with both Timesplitters 1 & 2 is the front covers, or I should say the American covers. Always notorious for getting the bum boxes, Yanks had to get two bad bits of artwork in a row. Compare the American versions of both games with the ones the rest of the world got, and you?ll see what I mean: the first game was a mad heap of unrelenting insanity, and most folk got a bright coloured insanity-painting to accompany it. Americans instead got slumped with a generic-looking but mildly attractive in a kind of wrong way robo-lady with a big clockface-looking thing. The second game was even more deranged, but this time nobody got a good representation, although at least the European version featured three characters from different time periods. What does America get? A drunk-looking Cortez waving his huge weapon around with a big white haze (speaking of which, that horrible mess Haze was also a Free Radical game, which makes me worry for ?splitters 4?) in the background. It?s like someone has it out for the world?s only superpower. Appropriately, the third game was apparently given the same mildly engaging cover all over the world: Cortez back-launching while shooting into a time vortex.
Timesplitters: Future Perfect. What was wrong with Timesplitters 3? It?s not a big number or anything, so why annoy the acne out of me by pointlessly changing the title format? Hollywood loves pulling this little trick, and another of my favourite game series ever -Jak- has no consistency whatsoever. It may be a cosmetic change, but the third ?splitters game?s freaky title is representative of its unwelcome nature: the consistently irritating and completely transparent attempt at going ?mainstream?.
All the little details were changed, usually for the worse. It?s like the Star Wars Special Editions, only this is my childhood getting sodomised! For the first time, weapons actually had reload animations, rather than just moving off-screen and coming back full of bullets with a satisfying ?cha-chick!? All the arcade icons and things, while perfectly good before, got all moved around and changed, like in Guitar Hero. My favourite map from number 2, the Ice Station, mysteriously got axed, and I never managed to quite replicate it in the (admittedly far improved) map maker. Other maps vanished too, most unwelcome-like. And the entire nature of the single-player (having more than one plot thread) really didn?t strike a cord with me. They even took a variant of bag-tag out of the game! Why remove a super-fun game mode? This is bad insanity, people.
For all Future Perfect?s faults, I must admit that if it weren?t the sequel to probably the best shooter the sixth generation ever saw, (oooh, controversial!) I wouldn?t pick on it so much. But just compare them over a few hours and see what I mean. Like I said, the mapmaker is easily the best of the three, and I suppose the story mode is pretty epic, but it?s not right. All they had to do was make ?splitters 2 with more stuff, better health bars and online play and they would have made good history, as opposed to bad.
A consistently great thing throughout the entire series was the music, which was always varied and suited the scenario at hand perfectly. Astonishingly, Free Radical actually let you download the music for all their games (except Haze, but smeg that) for free at their official site. Unheard of! I like I think it?s their apology for Future Perfect and Haze, but that probably isn?t actually it.
This impulsive reminisce/rant was not planned like my other features, but it came from me heart, mon. As ever, I summarise with recommendations: if you have to pick one, get Timesplitters the 2nd. If you can get two, get the first one as well, but you should just get all three games, mainly because I like to order people about. It amuses me so. Second Sight, a completely unrelated game from Free Radical, is decent too, so whatever. I?ll be discussing that at a later date, most likely. For now, get the ?splitters games. Despite their shortcomings, they?re still better than a certain series that rhymes with Bailo. I?ve said too much.
