Yes. Yes. YES. YES! YES! YES!

Other Games
1

When people ask me why I don’t like the Halo series … I explain, it’s gameplay mechanics (while very technically sound, and amazingly popular) simply aren’t my cup of tea.

I tell them I prefer a “faster, more frantic FPS experience with a lot of quick-pivoting and fast back-pedaling” Halo, to me is more tank-like in it’s movement, and a bit floaty when jumping.

And they usually respond “…um, well, which FPS games do you like? Which are your favorites?”, and I say “The Timesplitters series.”

And, it’s at that point that I usually get blank stares.

So I say “Did you ever play Goldeneye64?” and most times they say “Yeah.” and I ask “Did you like it?” and they say “Yeah, it was awesome.” or something similar. And when I tell them, “Well, you know that game Perfect Dark? Even though that was developed by Rare, and for the most part used the same engine as Goldeneye64 - it wasn’t really made by the same people who made Goldeneye64 … that team “Free Radical” went on to work on the Timesplitters series … and if you play it, you’d know what I’m talking about.” It’s around that point that the conversation usually ends, and the person that I’m talking to walks away and immediately erases anything I said about Timesplitters from their brain.

When Timesplitters:Future Perfect was released a few years back, I really expected it to be the third and final installment. Not because it wasn’t amazing. It was.

But mainly because the series just simply failed to capture the hearts and minds of the “average” gamer, despite everything it had going for it (and the 3rd game had one of the most robust, amazing online experiences with a few features that were completely un-paralleled in the entire last generation of online FPS games) … and if you log into the online mode of TS3 you’ll STILL find hundreds of people waiting eagerly to join rooms and play!

So. Now then.

What am I getting on about? Today I stumbled across this tidbit, and my heart nearly burst out of my chest.

http://www.frd.co.uk/timesplitters4/videos.php

I’m sure were a few years off. But I simply can’t freaking wait. This is bigger than just about anything for me, and right up there with MGS4, RE5 and many other AAA / top-shelf games.

If you missed out on the series the first THREE times…

PLEASE, don’t skip it a 4th!

2

Eh, I thought Timesplitters was ok.

Perfect Dark remains my absolute favorite FPS.

3

[quote=“lurker”]Eh, I thought Timesplitters was ok.

Perfect Dark remains my absolute favorite FPS.[/quote]

Well, I’ll say this about Perfect Dark

N64 PD >>x100>>> 360 PDZ

4

[quote=“FrankieViturello”]

[quote=“lurker”]Eh, I thought Timesplitters was ok.

Perfect Dark remains my absolute favorite FPS.[/quote]

Well, I’ll say this about Perfect Dark

N64 PD >>x100>>> 360 PDZ[/quote]

I don’t even associate Perfect Dark with Perfect Dark Zero. They don’t feel like they are really connected at all.

Joanna Dark doesn’t even seem like the same character.

5

The less said about PDZ the better.

I am looking forward to Timesplitters 4, I really enjoyed the 2nd one, and would spend hours playing with bots.

6

[quote=“lurker”]

Well, I’ll say this about Perfect Dark

N64 PD >>x100>>> 360 PDZ

I don’t even associate Perfect Dark with Perfect Dark Zero. They don’t feel like they are really connected at all.

Joanna Dark doesn’t even seem like the same character.[/quote]

To date PDZ is really the only 360 game I’ve spent money on that I felt was a complete and total dissapointment and waste of my money.

And, I did like PD on N64, it was very ambitious … but you could tell when the action heated up it was just struggling in the system hardware to maintain a playable framerate, even with the ram pack. Which, Goldeneye also suffered from in character-heavy rooms.

7

[quote=“FrankieViturello”]

Well, I’ll say this about Perfect Dark

N64 PD >>x100>>> 360 PDZ

I don’t even associate Perfect Dark with Perfect Dark Zero. They don’t feel like they are really connected at all.

Joanna Dark doesn’t even seem like the same character.

To date PDZ is really the only 360 game I’ve spent money on that I felt was a complete and total dissapointment and waste of my money.

And, I did like PD on N64, it was very ambitious … but you could tell when the action heated up it was just struggling in the system hardware to maintain a playable framerate, even with the ram pack. Which, Goldeneye also suffered from in character-heavy rooms.[/quote]

Yeah, the lag was really bad at some parts, but I still love it.

8

And, for those that think I’m just blowing smoke up this games ass :

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/919642.asp?q=Timesplitters%203(86%)

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/517864.asp?q=Timesplitters%202 (92%)

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/258285.asp?q=Timesplitters (83%)

Yes, if you don’t dig it, you don’t dig it. I can’t do anything about that any more than you can convince me that Halo is the “right” FPS for my taste.

But, opinions aside - all three games in the series scores well “above” average on gamerankings.

9

FPS’s aren’t my thing, but I’ve always preferred Serious Sam(until they milked it to death).

10

The curious thing about this little issue is that, Goldeneye 64 (and Perfect Dark by inference) arguably set the tone (for some) for how to do a console FPS in part because it was more deliberately paced than all the other Doom/Quake clones before it. Whereas the Timesplitters games are some of the most spastic console FPS’s around. So while PD Zero is certainly a travesty, I’ve never been able to understand the people who try to cling to the TS series as carrying the torch. And I’m not saying you are Frankie, this is just something bubbling up from the reminders in this thread…

Even if the game hadn’t been so obviously rushed for launch, Perfect Dark Zero was even more obviously squished into a Halo-player-friendly mold. Which made me especially sad because the other thing that (for me) made the N64 games so special was the floating aim point, which I think should have become the standard for console/gamepad control. PDZ seemed to put the nail in that coffin… :anjou_sad:

11

[quote=“Heretic Agnostic”]The curious thing about this little issue is that, Goldeneye 64 (and Perfect Dark by inference) arguably set the tone (for some) for how to do a console FPS in part because it was more deliberately paced than all the other Doom/Quake clones before it. Whereas the Timesplitters games are some of the most spastic console FPS’s around. So while PD Zero is certainly a travesty, I’ve never been able to understand the people who try to cling to the TS series as carrying the torch. And I’m not saying you are Frankie, this is just something bubbling up from the reminders in this thread…

Even if the game hadn’t been so obviously rushed for launch, Perfect Dark Zero was even more obviously squished into a Halo-player-friendly mold. Which made me especially sad because the other thing that (for me) made the N64 games so special was the floating aim point, which I think should have become the standard for console/gamepad control. PDZ seemed to put the nail in that coffin… :anjou_sad:[/quote]

And I in turn don’t see what’s so “spastic” or unenjoyable about TimeSplitters or it’s control scheme.

Granted I’ve never played the series on Gamecube or Xbox, so I don’t know how it feels on those controllers - BUT I feel that on PS2 it does a wonderful job of translating that Goldeneye64 “floating cross-hairs” that you elude to. And, if that’s not your FPS control scheme cup of tea, TimeSplitters offers one of the most customizable FPS control setups that I’ve ever seen.

You can pretty much re-map everything if you want to.

12

Well, TS2 is the only game in the series I played a lot of, and while it was superficially very similar to Goldenye in particular, I thought it’s ‘feeling’ was about as alien to the N64 games as PDZ is. Though not for the same reasons, and of course many will disagree and are perfectly free to.

And thinking about it, my choice of the word “spastic” came mainly from the multiplayer experience. It had nearly the same run-or-die sensibility of something like Quake 3 to me. Which seems in line with your own sentiment about it…

Perhaps it’s that “frantic” to me suggests an emotional state that only a very rare game might instill in any positive sense, otherwise it’s a passable synonym with “spastic” in this context. So I fail to see how you gleaned an explicit criticism of the control scheme and even the game’s overall enjoyability from my one litte word there. But I seem to get people reading all sorts of random stuff between my lines on a regular basis… shrug

Indeed, just going by my experience with the group of friends at the time who I played both the original Halo and Timesplitters 2 mutiplayer with, the actual control of TS2 was preferable. I dominated a lot of Timesplitters matches but rarely won any in Halo, which is obviously a huge part of why my positive sentiment about Halo is mostly based on the campaign… heh.

However, and do correct me if I’m wrong here it’s been so long, don’t you only have the floating aim in that game when you’re in the focused aiming mode? Regardless I had my hopes up that PDZ might show the alternative to many new gamers, and once I knew it wasn’t going to a certain level of dissapontment was already in place before I’d ever even played it.

Just don’t anyone try to tell me that Free Radical has the ‘genuine’ Goldenye/Perfect Dark mojo now, cause they haven’t shown it to me either. Which it should go without saying is just my opinion.