ribes is a franchise of PC games devoted to the idea that the most challenging opponents are other people. This is not a revolutionary idea for console gamers the way it was for PC gamers. Since the days of Atari, the most popular games on consoles have been the ones where players challenge each other. What Tribes: Aerial Assault asks console players to do, however, is go online to find opponents, and that is new to consoles. Most console games allow four players at most, and usually ask them to share one screen. The advantage of playing online is that 16 people can play, all with their own TVs. TAA allows multiplayer battles that have never been seen before in a console game.
In the game, it is the 40th century, and there is a war on. The action is set
on the Wilderzone, the frontier of human space. On various worlds, the last
tribes of man fight with a genetically modified race called the Bioderm.
The gameplay is straightforward. Players will need the network adapter for their PS2 and an ISP so they can log onto a server and find an open game. Once in the game, players pick one of three classes of armor (light, medium and heavy) that their characters will wear at the start of the game. Players also outfit their characters with eight different primary weapons and four different grenades. In addition, there are four different vehicles which the characters can pilot for transport or battle.
There are five games in TAA: Capture and Hold, Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, Hunters and Team Deathmatch. The maps are smaller than in the PC version, and fog limits the players' vision, two changes made to keep the PS2's frame rate from being reduced to stutters. The battles are fought on plains, on mountains and in valleys, often all on the same map.
Non-stop battle beyond the stars
On the PC side, there has been a move in online deathmatching games like Tribes to escape the classic gameplay cycle of run around, shoot everything that moves, die and then respawn to do it all again. Games have introduced character classes, weapons and vehicles, all of which require cooperation among players to be put to their most effective uses. TAA is a step back from this state-of-the-art design. For instance, in the latest PC version of Tribes, the Bomber needs three players to work at full capacity: a pilot, a bombardier and a tail gunner. In TAA, the bomber holds only one character, and it both pilots the craft and targets the bombs.
This is not say that all the cooperative elements have been stripped from TAA. The mortars, for instance, which can be carried only by players in heavy armor, are devastating weapons, but they need a scouting player, probably in light armor since they move the fastest, to target for them. There are remote turrets and remote stations that provided defensive firepower and offensive reloads, respectively. Teams that take the time to place and maintain remotes will tend to do better, but because of the smaller maps and fewer players, their deployment is not essential as it is in the PC version.
What has survived the translation to the PS2 is the sheer fun of controlling a Tribes character. When they aren't zooming about in their vehicles, Tribes characters hop and skate around the map using jet packs. The packs have limited thrust that then requires time to recharge. The lighter the armor, the more time a character can spend hopping about. Fun as the supercharged movement is, it makes aiming the weapons a learning process. Fortunately, the one thing that TAA has which the PC versions don't is a single-player version that acts as a tutorial for the game's controls and features.
The hardest thing to convey about deathmatch games like Tribes is how much fun they are. Description can make them sound repetitive and dull, but in fact the large number of real people involved means that no two sessions are ever the same.
— Eric
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