Oh man, I played the hell out of the first two installments of the Tribes series.  The first was such a breath of fresh air in the gaming community with massive customizability, huge open maps, a few vehicles and intriguing and varied gameplay base on the other team’s strategy.  But eventually the gameplay became imbalanced as players figured out “tricks” in the system to get Heavy Armor (very powerful, but supposed to be slow) to “ski” all the way across the map and into the opposing base to wreck it with only a few mortar shells.

For a while I switched to Counterstrike, which despite the typical CS player being a shithead was a great game.

Then Tribes 2 arrived.  It had been pushed out the door too soon and had a ton of bugs.  But when it worked, it was glorious.  Heavy armor had been slowed down, but huge transport vehicles had been added to get them from place to place.  You could still assault the enemy base (now much further away on even bigger maps!) with heavies, it just took teamwork to do so.  A large array of new deployables were added, including new sensor packs and different types of turrets.  A robuts community system was built-in, allowing the creation of your own “Tribe” with members, private messaging, buddy lists, email and more.

I played the HELL out of Tribes 2.  It’s all I did for about a year and a half.  But eventually the developer stopped releasing patches for it, and players moved on — some of whom had never been able to get the game to work right.  Honestly I don’t even remember what I started playing after Tribes 2.  Nothing as glorious, that’s for sure.  There was a sequel called “Tribes Vengeance” but the maps were tiny, the speed was too fast and the gameplay just wasn’t there.  The game sucked, hard, and for it I absolutely blame the people on gaming forums bitching about Tribes 2 being “too slow” because they were used to pulling off unbalanced, un-fun moves in the original Tribes and couldn’t do it any more.

Anyway…

On a few message boards people have been pointing out that it’s now the 5th Anniversary of the release of Tribes 2, so I’ve been firing it up lately.

Looks like I’ve still got it.