Whats in YOURRR wallet? (part 2)

Since Sunday until last night, I have been house sitting for friends. The adults of the house wanted to take a few days away for themselves before their 17 year old son gets out of school. They asked me to “house sit” just in case something went wrong, and to chaperone he and his girlfriend around the house. He is a computer gamer. They have cable-modem and a two week old computer with the latest in processor, sound, and video cards.

I have spent the last 4 days working as a mildly-lethargic communications specialist by day, and a combatant in the game “Tribes 2” by night. Literally. I sleep for an hour or two in the afternoon while HE uses the computer, and for an hour just before I go to work, maybe.

Tribes 2 is a first-person shooter (FPS). This means, you take on the role of a person in the game, and you are able to move about on foot and you have a variety of weapons with which to shoot at your enemy – other players. It is played over the internet, so you are going head to head against users from around the country and parts of the world. Servers “hosting” the game provide the graphic environment for the encounter, and keep track of all the players, so everyone can interact successfully in real-time.

Many FPS are based around shooting enemies provided by the computer (not other players) in order to gain experience, which increases your power, so you can shoot more powerful enemies, to gain even more experience…. Other shooters put you in a maze of sorts, and the goal is either to simply survive, or to find the exit. I find some of the later type of games fun. I especially enjoy exploring mazes. Trying to survive while exploring just makes the exploration more exciting. But, in the end, once youve explored the map, you are done, and you move on.

Tribes is different. It has a POINT! It is capture the flag, with toys. You are placed in a variety of outdoor terrain – desert, hillsides, snow, lakes. Conditions can be rainy or foggy or snowy. And lightening. There are buildings – some are large bases on hillsides, some are subterrainian mazes, some are small towers. There are a variety of vehicles, from hover-bikes and tanks to flying gunships and transports. There are a variety of personal munitions – gatling guns, energy disks, fusion mortars, grenades. There are gadgets – sensors, deployable gun turrets, cameras, mines, repair packs, cloaking packs. And, you can wear 3 different kinds of body armor, which affect the speed at which you can run.

Those are the toys. Here is the point. You are placed on teams. The objective is to capture the other team’s flag and return it to your base. The gamefield is often miles wide and long. On top of just getting a flag and getting it home, you have power generators, a vehicle station, and many inventory stations where you re-equip yourself – all of which need protecting. Then there are the enemy attacking your location on ground, with laser guided mortar, or by aerial or ground gunship.

While it is based around far-future military hardware, the game is suprisingly clean. When you are fatally wounded, you simply stumble to the ground. If you are hit with tremendous force, your character may be reduced to pieces. But in either case, there is no blood, no guts. Instead, you simply materialize again at a random location, and keep going. So “death” isn’t the goal in the game. You seek to destroy an individual enemy in order to improve your teams strategic goal. Take out the generator guard, etc. In the end, either your team wins more flag captures, or you don’t. The TEAM concept (TRIBE) is strongly reinforced.

A game can have up to 64 players. Imagine having 32 players on your team, all running around, working to defend your base or strike at the enemy! The game has a group and game chat feature, plus 60 some chat-macros. It also has a Command Interface, where players can see the radar map, see all the permanent and deployed hardware, and actually create “commands” or objectives, and dispatch individual or group players to execute them.

The beauty of this game, is that everyone can find a niche. Like myself. My personal mission is “Service and support”. I enjoy a front-line scrap every now and again, but I am one who can patiently wait by a generator tucked in the bowels of some remote building. I enjoy doing that. Or running around with a repair pack fixing everything, and everybody’s armor. Or standing on a rooftop a mile away and directing fire-control with a laser. Pud jobs, that when admitted, are what keep the game going.

This is a game for those people who might have enjoyed bombardament, but kept getting picked on and eliminated early. There is a place for you in this game.