Games You Should Like (as much as I do): Tribes

I was a pro gamer once.

There was a brief window of time after the advent of online gaming where computer and internet access were not really universal enough for everyone to be able to easily play games online from home.

It created an economic niche for people to cram tons of computers into tiny rooms and charge money for people to use them.

Oh, and sell sodas.

They were hot. They stank. It was insanely expensive (to a 17 year old kid anyway). It was home.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of playing a game with all your team mates and enemies there in the room with you. Yelling at your friends to protect the flag or hearing the cries of despair from a defeated opponents right there next to you.

Sure I can play online now, but try getting all your friends to play the same game at the same time on the same platform. Much less be able to talk (forget cries of despair altogether) to each other with babies sleeping in the next room.

The only reason highschool me could afford to game there was that it was owned by the uncle of a friend of mine. I knew, deep down, that it wasn't right to abuse that fact but my god did we abuse it.

Every weekend and many weeknights I'd be out there with my friends. We played Counterstrike, of course. Starcraft as well. But there was one game that fit the environment better than any other: Tribes.

Now in recent years there have been a few Tribes revival games, and I have played a few of them. Besides being microtransaction wastelands they pretty well recreate the games.

...whoa. That was spot on.

Anyway, no matter how competent the recreation, the thrill is gone.

Tribes is a multiplayer only title. There are three basic load outs: Heavy for shelling the other side of the map, light for getting to the other side of the map, and medium for people that hate themselves. You have a full array of weapons, the standout of which being the spinfuser, basically a rocket launcher with a fairly small explosion radius that looked a lot cooler.

Like that but bluer and with fewer cookies.

Oh, and jetpacks. Jetpacks in a team based FPS have some weird effects. They effectively make the players smaller and harder to hit, thus the rockets as a default weapon. They make it necessary to have expansive environments to accommodate the speeds achievable. It also means that since the play area is so large and the players are so small, the game can't be about simply killing each other. If you wanna hide in Tribes, it's not difficult.

So while there is a Deathmatch mode in Tribes, it is like a demo for the game proper, enclosed in bases. Out in the open the game has to offer reasons for people to come together and clash. They did this by focusing on objective based game modes like Capture the flag, capture and hold, and base destruction.

My favorite position was flag capper/base destroyer. I was not the best shot, but I was really good at figuring out the other teams' defenses and slipping by them to cause havoc. The thrill of swooping in from the sky to crash through their flag room and out the other side without touching the ground is hard to match.

Pictured: Me 99% of the time I tried something like that

So the pro gamer thing. Like I said, we knew the owner of the place and they wanted to establish a team for an upcoming tournament. We played the game all the time, so we went for it. We all figured we had no chance whatsoever. We had to pad out the group by two members who rarely even played.

But somehow we kept playing and kept winning. We made it through every round and got a trophy and we got to be on TV and Adam Sessler was like, "Whoa dude!" and I was like, yup, I'm amazing and the president gave me a high-five.

Pictured: Literally me and literally the president.

Except of course none of that. We lost every game and each time we lost the smell of sulphar grew thicker on the air until at last a great swirling pit of death open beneath us, a chasm of our failure drawing us ever closer, doom. Doom. DOom.

Pictured: DOOOOOOOOM.

Ok none of that either. We did ok. But those are better stories. Honestly, I've tried really hard to google the tournament and couldn't find anything so I really could have told you just about anything. Maybe I'm lying about all of it!

Anyway try Starsiege:Tribes 20 years ago in stores that no longer exist based on an outdated economic model, it's great!