The year is 2412. The place: the frontier of the universe. No, wait, it's actually 2612. Hell, I don't know. There's no visual cues or captions in the intro, so I have no idea where we are in space or what it is exactly we're doing. I can't be bothered listening to it. From the looks of things, there are dangerous corporations, desperate colonists and skulduggery afoot.
Luckily, Ranger Griffin is prepared for anything. The starting weapon is a light machinegun built to turn perps into paste. Game on!
Does this place look like Red Faction to anyone else?
For some reason, I really dislike recharging health, but a recharging shield is fine. A recharging shield means that if somebody sneaks up behind you (i.e. simply spawns there silently when you pick up a key), you don't instantly die and have to redo the entire level again like in Killing Time. Unlike both Nakatomi Plaza and Killing Time, there's no manual or quick saves in Mace Griffin, so bouncing about the place and finding cover quickly is a must.
Remember duckjumping? They were days.
Speaking of guns, that revolver I nabbed off the space ninjas seemed a bit cack compared to the LMG I started with. In Red Faction, the pistol you started with could fire as fast as you could press the trigger. In Mace Griffin, it fires incredibly slowly.
Unless you use the alternate fire!
The alternate fire for the pistol fires off the whole cylinder in one go. The alternate fire for the shotgun readies multiple shots to be fired at once. The alternate for the LMG is a grenade launcher. These guns are pretty neat guns.
Strange thing to do, if you think about it. As far as I know, there's absolutely no reason to do this. It would be like luring a SWAT team to your house and then blowing them up. All you're doing is annoying people and you'll end up with no house at the end of it.
You get to hear the Ranger commander yell in anger and desperation as Mace leaves him behind. Oh well.
Mace is the only survivor. That's either very good or very bad.
Mace's been sentenced to ten years in a penal colony. He's understandably a little pissed off about that.
The sentence happened completely off camera, as it happens. We don't get a montage or so much as an illustration. We didn't know Mace that well beforehand, so it's hard to say how much it's changed him. He seems very miserable and he's lost his helmet. I think he misses it.
Hey, lizard dude. Are we not fighting any more? No hard feelings.
He looks a little worse for wear than he did ten years ago, but he's still wearing his Ranger uniform.
Either way, it flies and it shoots things, which is more than enough.
He can't legally pay me in credits because I'm a convicted felon, but he can provide spacecraft, weapons and repairs. Presumably, this is supposed to be a safer arrangement.
The briefing:
Somewhere In Space there's a religious cult that worships technology. They like to wear masks which pump mind altering chemicals into their faces. Some tyke managed to get into their Big Mainframe and fiddle with the settings, so now all the innocent cultists have gone mad and started attacking other ships. I'm to get my butt over there and give the computer a good kicking to turn them all back to normal. Let's go!
The hull indicator is showing 83% because I... kinda crashed into the space station a bit. I wasn't used to the controls; you use the mouse to pitch and yaw the ship, but it doesn't control like Freelancer. In Freelancer, you move the mouse away from centre and that sets the angle and speed by which your ship turns. In Mace Griffin, the controls are more FPS-like: you give the mouse a shove and you can make your ship turn one-eighty pretty much instantly.
Time to plot a course for the Temple of Light. Aaaand JUMP.
*pop*
I'm not alone here... there's cultist bogeys all over the radar! Mace doesn't even try to reason with them. He's too intense for that. It's time for some space combat!
I think this bit was pretty fun, but it was all over so fast I can't really remember. A damn sight more enjoyable than the first fight in X: Beyond the Frontier at least.
Mace, you're a bastard.
This game is the cursed child of Red Faction, Timesplitters and Halo. How could anybody possibly hate that?
I'm hoping that Mace visits a pretty planet with nice plants and a colourful sky at some point, because if you've seen one dimly lit space station you've seem 'em all. But that would be an adventure for another time.
Know what?
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this, I think I'm finally going to play this game.
Thanks.
Fun trivia fact! Mace Griffin was voiced by Henry Rollins.
ReplyDelete