I’ll do my damndest to get this cleaned and colored today.

Tribes undoubtedly holds the personal record for “Most played series” although I have no way to back that up. STALKER and TF2 are up there, but I discovered Tribes by accident in 1998 on a shareware disc as a demo. I’d never played anything mouse/keyboard before, so I had to get my brother to play with me, where I’d operate the keyboard controls and he’d look around/shoot with the mouse. One day I got tired of waiting for him and took it upon myself to (gasp) control both at once. I used to play the shifter mod all the time, even had a clan back in the day! Tribes was home to my first competitive match, too. We got trounced, but it was all in good fun. Tribes 2 was great for me, too, because I got it after the initial shitstorm of bugs was past. The amount of misery I could dispense with that shocklance was legendary. Tribes:Vengeance…yeah. Bought it, gave it an honest try, hated it.

Well now here’s Tribes: Ascend. EVERY piece of info says I should loathe it, the earning of exp/tokens to unlock things that should have already been unlocked to begin with, the lack of customizable loadouts , the fact that generators aren’t NEARLY as important as they should be, the earning/use of “credits” within the game to upgrade turrets/call in air strikes, HITSCAN WEAPONS. Many people ask what hitscan weapons are – it’s a gun whose bullet has no travel time, in order to hit an enemy, you put your reticule over them and pull the trigger. No leading the target, just point and shoot. I still don’t think it has any place in Tribes, but I assume that’s just to try and win over some of the other FPS crowd? DESPITE all of this, I am having an absolute blast with this game. I’m usually near the top of the charts because I make it my duty to be CREDIT TO TEAM. Repairing things, defending the flag, spending all my credits on upgrading turrets/generators, and defending our flag carrier. The tokens/credits thing: I’ve only played a handful of times, but already I’ve got 75% of the tokens that I’d need to purchase a new class, so it really isn’t THAT big of a deal, plus one of the defaults has the spinfusor, and that’s all I need.