If you've been wondering where I've been the past months, the answer is playing Tribes: Ascend, a free-to-play shooter which is one of the very few modern shooters designed for PC only. It's kinda similar to Unreal Tournament and such, so if you're tired of modern slow-paced pseudo-realistic shooters this is your choice.
The game is rather skill-based. Unlike in ET, the majority of weapons are not hitscan which means the projectiles or bullets a weapon shoots have travel time and they also gain 50% of your speed. The thing that sets this game apart from all others is skiing: if you hold down spacebar, all friction between you and the ground is lost, which means you can reach ludicrous speeds by
a) skiing downhills, jetpacking uphills
b) good old rocketjumping
c) being smart and using both a&b.
It's F2P and thus you unlock new classes, weapons and perks by using either XP or gold, gold obviously being bought with real money. Gaining XP without using any money at all is kind of slow and if you enjoy the game I recommend you to buy the minimum sum of gold which costs 10 euros. With that you'll get permanent +50% XP and a nice amount of gold with which you can buy a booster which doubles your XP gain for some time (recommended) or just buy the classes and weapons with gold (not recommended).
Go give it a go, it costs nothing. I strongly recommend starting in Team Deathmatch with the class Soldier, and after rank 10 or so you can try out Capture the Flag which is the most fun in my opinion. Before you play CTF for the first time, I'd recommend looking at some class guides first. Please use the download link below, it gives me XP.
Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcNnU3D5rHc&feature=relmfu
Short guide (a bit outdated but gets you started)
http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/250/082/098.png
DOWNLOAD HERE (please use this referral link, it'll get me XP)
https://account.hirezstudios.com/tribesa....n=emailAdded (21/05/2012, 0:27 AM)
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Also, do note the game is rather heavy, my 5-year-old computer gets me around 20-30 fps with minimal graphical settings. Also don't be disheartened by the installing, there have been quite a few patches.
