Strike Vector

That's a lot of egos you're puffing up there! lol
As ever, careful what you wish; you just might get it

Edit; Granted.

Loki wrote:That's a lot of egos you're puffing up there! lol
As ever, careful what you wish; you just might get it

Edit; Granted.

Haha ok, good to see you on that forum

I left a lot of egos out of course.  Deviant Saint, Abstractness, Viking Jack, Zigzag Joe, Greyman, Shade, Corny, Belshirash, Marv Swarve, Bhrome, Grant, Nyxy, Xenotrickster, Rabbanah, Jazzycat, Recorde, MJ, imda ... the list goes on.  Of course I'd love to see everyone from the good ol' days come back, with all the major MB squadrons and aces in the air once again - if it takes a new game to achieve that then so be it.

The game has now hit closed beta.

Having just got out of a lengthy session against players who made me feel more inept & clueless than usual, I can summarize the gameplay as incredibly high-skilled and high twitch hide & seek, and maybe a bit too fast for what's left of my ancient reflexes. But those maps sure do look perty.

Yes, so ... its not a flying game, its not a dogfighting game. Its a high twitch 3D FPS. Personally I doubt I'll be able to keep playing it for long, but I'll wait & see how the developers respond to feedback & what they decide to do to the gameplay.

Looks like MB is dead... let's hope that this game can be as good.

Its artwork & game engine are worlds ahead of MB's.  However as I said its not a dogfighter, its an FPS.  This is due firstly to an overly simple flight model with a way too laggy 3rd person camera (though its cockpit camera is great) and only two speeds - fast and very fast with no restrictions on how long you can go very fast.  

Secondly it has a hover mode, and travelling at boost speed you can switch to hover & come to a dead stop in a second.  You can turn in hover mode as fast as you can turn the mouse, plus you can dance around erratically like a hummingbird, and it takes a second to complete the transition back to jet mode with afterburner at full speed.  This means ships can be zooming along at 5 times the max speed of a MB Sidewinder, screech to a full stop, do a 180 turn, then be back to supersonic speeds in the opposite direction over the space of a few seconds.

The speed & maneuverability are therefore lightyears beyond what you can do in MB, which sounds great until you realize how difficult this makes keeping enemies in your field of view let alone trying to aim at them.  

Then there's lag.  If you have > 100ms ping, forget it, as this game's client/server model (which is UT's) is unforgiving.  You're like Mr Miyagi trying to catch a hovering/dodging fly with chopsticks, except you have to aim based on where that fly was half a second ago plus it has a pair of chopsticks of its own.

Add to that the fact that Radar/HUD information about ships only shows up at close range, but you can start sniping at enemies at much longer distances & you have a system where you can be repeatedly killed coming out of spawn by enemies you never get to see.

It looks like a wonderful game, but its not for everyone, sadly in its current form its not for me.

Having said all that, I actually played a little MB last night - a couple of fun battles with a "captain underpants" and <Reaper> Slug GB plus a few one bar folk.  Was very enjoyable - this game still has something unique & special.

longshot wrote:You're like Mr Miyagi trying to catch a hovering/dodging fly with chopsticks, except you have to aim based on where that fly was half a second ago plus it has a pair of chopsticks of its own.

I read that, and started to crack up. I can just picture that: "Wax on, Wax off. Now lemme duel this fly, you bastard!"