The game is 16 years old... old enough to drive a car and it's still being played!
Tribes 1 was an absolute favourite in my household growing up. It was the first real viable, extendable MMO fighter I'd played. I don't know if I've had as much fun in a similar format (and I enjoy [like the odd ice cream treat] some modern ones like BF1). Maybe it's just sentimentalism. It was the first game I got my younger siblings into, and they became obsessed. More than me... haha...
SHAZBOT!
They can be downloaded here as iso files: https://www.tribesuniverse.com/
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Tribes/comments/6vmsqu/tribes_2_sma...
Smackdown in Tribestown happening Tomorrow at 8pm EST on SNAP LAK Server. 67.222.138.13:28000
Midair guys are coming over to Tribes2 to play a few games and warm up for the Closed Beta Release of Midair. Should be a good time. If you need a copy of the game preconfigured check out my Tribes 2 Config here. Join us in Discord for more info.
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...and download the map pack here => put in prog files / dynamix / tribes / maps / etc. => http://t2.branzone.com/
The crazy thing is that with T2 technology, they technically support(ed) 128 players in the same map! Epic, epic, epic, epic, on a scale that can't be imagined today for melee / team combat.
Or maybe that's just my nostalgia and lack of a Windows PC kicking in. 8v8 doesn't do it for me compared to Tribes. Eve looks awesome but it's not as punchy, crunchy, or visceral.
Any random game recommendations to recapture that feeling?
For altogether different reasons I really enjoy Star Wars Battlefront.
I'm not a huge gamer, though. There's probably something out there that I'm not aware of. I did buy a Windows PC/gpu just so I could do some gaming, though... (well, and for some basic VR dev project)
We had a community center near home, with about 10 gaming PCs. Tribes was a huge favorite, especially with all the different mods that were available.
We switched almost completely to AVP when that came out, though.
You just reminded me. I had a real slack-off sort of teacher(s) in my 9th and 10th grade communications labs, and Tribes would run on the old Dell boxes they had in there for whatever work. We had a whole system worked out with a watcher and everybody playing over LAN in the lab whenever the teacher stepped out of the room. I'd forgotten all about it.
I had an interesting experience with that. I'd borrowed the game from a friend, and it didn't play nicely with the integrated SiS graphics chip on my computer (performance was fine, but a lot of elements of the game didn't render). I contacted Fox Interactive's support team. They asked for my address, and I got a "replacement" copy of the game a few months later. To be clear, I didn't ask for a replacement, and stated that I was borrowing the game from a friend. Still, a nice surprise.
Also, the engine itself was open-sourced years ago, and a Linux port was made. It should be perfectly possible to clean up some bitrot and get it working on modern systems, including natively on the (x86) Mac. Makes me curious if it would run on the PPC Mac that I've got in my closet.
Having in game mail, IRC, and an actual clan system I think was awesome and ahead of its time as well.
Tribes original certainly remained in play while tribes 2 dwv was happening.
Beta testers constantly complained that falling didn't feel right, jetting and skiing (the game's main movement) was slow and soupy. Players were leaking videos and photos showing the differences in motion.
At one point, Dynamix hired a top player to playtest, as he "remembered the best" how it felt. All to reclaim the physics calculations of some game from the Leisure Suit Larry company.