I thought I had reviewed this previously, but I can't find it if I did. Anyway, this game popped back into my head due to all the talk about getting a TFC2 server up and running.
The Ship is also available on Steam and is an interesting little FPS aimed at casual gaming.
The Ship puts you on a cruise ship that has been taken over by a madman who forces everyone to play "Assassination".
Assassination is a pretty fun game that some of you might have played in high school or college prior to the country going nuts with security. It was also brought to the mainstream by the movie Gotcha. Players put their names into a hat and would draw another player's name out. This name was known only to the person running the game and the person who drew it. Everyone in the game was actively hunting everyone else. What made it fun was that you played all the time. To kill someone, you'd carry one of those suction cup dart guns or something like it. Last man standing usually won a pot made up of entry fees.
Anyway, the game play mechanics are really, really simple. There are no rocket jumps or that sort of craziness. You simply get assigned a target and you search the ship to kill that target while also trying to avoid whomever is hunting you.
I forget how I ended up with the game, but I played through the single player campaign during a film or two one weekend, and it was entertaining, but I feel the multiplayer component could be a LOT of fun to our assembled members. Even better, the very simplistic gameplay makes any player of any skill level as deadly as any other. The playing field doesn't get more balanced than this game.
To add in the bits of fun with The Ship, in the single player campaign there were other things to be concerned about like the need to eat, sleep, be entertained, and use the restroom. It says that if you ignore those needs something bad will happen to your character leaving you vulnerable, but that never happened to me in the single player game. Also, guards and cameras are about and will arrest you if you're caught doing something bad, which results in you being thrown in the brig for a set amount of time.
The best part of this game is that nobody needs practice or hours to get set up to play. Games can be jumped into, played for 15 minutes and then left.
Casual.
Anyway, I'm only mentioning this game because it seems like the number of Steam-enabled folks just jumped big time in the last week. Personally, I think it's the sort of easy multi fun that could fill some evenings and make our bits of gaming accessible to those who might not normally play due to fear of our l33t skillz or because they don't have a killer rig.
I might have a trial to handout if anyone wants to check it out.
The Ship
And it doesn't take much longer than that to beat the single player campaign, but the game wasn't designed for solo play. It was designed for multiplay.
In the solo player campaign nobody is hunting you.
In the solo player campaign nobody is hunting you.
"Happy slaves are the worst enemies of freedom." - Marie Von Ebner
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies..." - Orwell
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies..." - Orwell
What if you were their target?
If I remember correctly, there was stuff in place to prevent that from occurring, at least initially. Later, such things become unavoidable and you get assigned different targets by the officials.
Look it up on wiki or something. The game worked out damn well as it was played in high schools and colleges across the nation and inspired a movie.
Can't you just kill every living person on The Ship and win?
No. It's against the rules. You can't kill someone that isn't your target (I think you might be allowed to defend yourself...I'm not 100% sure. I could see it making sense where you wouldn't be allowed to do that either.). You also can't kill someone in front of the guards and cameras on the ship. That kind of adds a little Mexican standoff thing: You're standing there with a weapon, they're injured after your first strike, but they're in front of a guard. Who gets bored first? You to walk away and try again later or them and they attempt to run?
"Happy slaves are the worst enemies of freedom." - Marie Von Ebner
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies..." - Orwell
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies..." - Orwell