Ragdoll Metaphysics: A Love Letter To The Good Old Fashioned Jet Pack
A nice little article about one of the things that made tribes great and stand above all the games out there.http://www.offworld.com/2009/08/ragdoll-metaphysics-a-love-let.html ;D
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Tribes, meanwhile, created a canon for jet packs in multiplayer gaming that continues to this very day in games like Section 8 and Instant Action's Fallen Empire: Legions. The Tribes physics were never quite right - I think everyone admits that - but it nevertheless created a joyously smooth and inertia-driven motion that led to unique swooping, leaping semi-aerial combat.
but what I was trying to say this article is about jetpacks in general not just the ones in tribes.
Jet packs are a great concept because they can address the problem in game if you have much larger areas of play. In that article the dev of Dark Void video makes that point. I just find it funny that a lot of these guys feel like they are having a Eureka moment discovering the wonders of a jetpack when we all know it rocked since 98.
Still most of these new games that are discovering jetpacks are using them in a basic way. For me the unique aspect of the tribes jet pack isnt so much the jetpack itself but the combo of the jetpack and skiing. That is Tribes to its roots and none of these games Dark Void, Section 8 etc can compare without it. GG could really prime themselves right for a re-entry of a new Tribes game. You can see the game industry is finally catching up to that type of gameplay and the trend will probably continue. Sadly I think small little pachinko arcade like ski games on facebook are more what they are looking at.