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Twisted Metal |OT| Don't Eat. Don't Sleep. Play

KalBalboa

Banned
I think they focused on multiplayer just perfectly and tried for a different spin on single player, but the wide variety of stories was definitely missed.

I hate to bring it up again, but the only objective issue with the game is the terribly lobby system and online implementation. The combat, level design, sound track, weapons, etc, all add up PERFECTLY, but 90% of people were completely turned off by the broken online system.
 

Unicorn

Member
Also, when the online wasn't working for people they were left with an inconsistent Single Player experience. Certain "stages" were pretty heinous.
KuGsj.gif
 

ElRenoRaven

Gold Member
Also, when the online wasn't working for people they were left with an inconsistent Single Player experience. Certain "stages" were pretty heinous.
KuGsj.gif

The only real level I hated singleplayer wise was that damn final boss. Even then I just hated the gauntlet part. The rest of the boss I thought was actually pretty cool. That said though I still prefer the old school bosses we always had.
 
I think they focused on multiplayer just perfectly and tried for a different spin on single player, but the wide variety of stories was definitely missed.

I hate to bring it up again, but the only objective issue with the game is the terribly lobby system and online implementation. The combat, level design, sound track, weapons, etc, all add up PERFECTLY, but 90% of people were completely turned off by the broken online system.

Yup. The 1% of the time online worked, it was magical chaos. Near flawless netcode/hit detection and solid framerate. Unfortunately, the other 99% of the time was filled with connection issues. Uber disappointing.
 
You know I still like the previous games over black storyline wise. I think black was a bit too dark and I didn't much care for how the stories all interwove into each other as much. I like the simple twisting of wishes with a minor cross over here and there the way it was always done before. Didn't much care for the design of Calypso in black either.

Gameplay wise black was the previous champ no doubt. I do agree though that Twisted metal PS3 is without a doubt the new champ gameplay wise. They nailed it. Where as black was a tad too fast this one was dead perfect. Either way I can say I've loved every Twisted Metal including the 989 developed ones. Theirs may have been a lot goofier and the gameplay different but they were still fun and good in their own right. Course that said I certainly don't consider them canon at all because the wishes did get really really goofy. I think that's part of their charm though. Where as all the David and Co developed ones were somewhat serious theirs were more lighthearted and funny.

I really would kill for a return to form. I would kill for a PS4 Twisted metal with individual drivers per car and the same gameplay as the PS3 version. If they were to do that and have a proper working online from the start I could then let the series die happily because then I'd have my perfect Twisted Metal.

Bit late but ill reply...

I still think, as many other hardcore long time multiplayer fanboys of the series, that this game doesnt even hold a candle gameplay wise to TM2 or even TMB. It doesn't even register on the meter.

And actually TMB is slower gameplay. TMX has 2-3 times faster missiles (generally every projectile in game) than anything TMB has to offer. Too fast, and too accurate; this new game has more undodgeable hyper speed crap than any TM ever before. Just a spamfest with little to no thought behind weapon mechanics or depth. This game was gutted, IMO largely due to the absence of so many former Incog members that never made it over to ESP. Disney poached them after TMB2 was canned. OH DISNEY!
 

Unicorn

Member
Homing missiles are the only ones that felt "unavoidable." Using the radar helped a TON to see incoming attacks, since missiles and stuff showed up on it, so as long as you can divide your attention and focus on the two "screens" I'd say the majority of the time you could shield or, if you knew the map and weren't in a bad location, could potentially find a sharp corner.

I do agree though that I think TM2 had a fantastic feel, if not the best. TMB felt too slow, perhaps due to the huge distances that were usually between you and an opponent because of how massive the stages were. This TM I think was trying to appeal to the twitch gamers that have come out of the woodwork this generation. I do think this was a great middle ground though. One-on-One fighting is lengthy enough and pretty meaningful in terms of strategy. It's been a while since I last played, but to me it felt like a nice blend of TM:B's scale and TM2's gameplay.
 
Thx for the reply. FYI TM2 is also my favourite gameplay wise. (Played online version for 8 years)

For TMX: Homings, Outlaw's special (primary chain gun, not grenades), other car's with chain gun specials, freezes, sniper, remote bombs... all undodgeable. There are other near undodgeables too like Vermin rockets, or Meat Wagons gurney. Ridiculous amounts of homing and speed on them.

Dodging as well to clarify, doesnt mean using cover, which has been around since TM1. Dodging is where a missile (locked on) is fired, and opposing car then using only their car and its maneuvering capabilities, makes the missiles miss. Driving skills. Naturally of course, bigger the car... worse it is at dodging. (Unless youre Warthog or Minion in TM2...)

TM2 and TMB share a lot of the same core rules so to speak, although yes they are leagues different in play-style. TM2 ramming is king, TMB not so much. But core gameplay elements are universal in TM-verse... small cars better at dodging, big cars have armour and shittier dodging. Another big one was using a single weapon for multiple purposes. Homings (TM2), Gas Can/Sat (TMB) can used to make an enemy car "pop up" off the ground if they landed (so they couldnt dodge while in mid air). This sort of strategy would help a not-so-strong homing weapon like a freeze missile land; once you have that person frozen, you can then set up that frozen target for further slaughter. Now that the weapons are 2-3x faster/accurate than ever before. You don't need to set up anything. Freezes really don't require any assistance to land.

A big one for TM2 was using napalm on an enemy car to burn an enemy with a fire DOT that slowly ate away at their health unless they put out the flames. But! Putting out napalm flames costs turbo, a lot, so if you extinguish the flames, you then sacrifice a tool for your car that is ultra helpful to dodging, and something that boosts damage output for ramming. This helped balance the large vs small cars. As a big car, hitting smaller ones with napalm will burn their turbo, thus hindering a smaller car's dodging capabilities... and as a small car, napalm will not only burn through a large car's turbo reserves which they need to help them land MEGA RAM DAMAGE, but burn their health advantage down.

God I could go on and on.....

This game is actually closest to TM: Head On. Its got ramming like TMHO, but again, ramming that is not quite up to TM2 levels. And its got loads of spammy weapons that don't really require much in the way of aiming or timing. They went with the silly "skill" weapons from TMHO instead of TMB. Lord knows why they would ditch the Reticule, SAT, and Zoomy in favour of the swarmer, blood missiles :/ (remote bombs are cool in this game, but they are undodgeable, and can go thru walls :/)

So yes I agree, this TM is definitely to appeal to the twitch gamers, but I think they lost what car combat was (killstreaks? really?). It was a fighting game on wheels. Not a shooter that required no aim.

I really really wish more people played TM2PC or TMBO back in the day hardcore to see how gutted this game actually is.

In terms of how badly these gameplay changes killed their hardcore community... Imagine if Capcom made Street Fighter 5, and no one from the prior games hardcore community played it, except maybe one person. Halo-Gaf thinks Halo 4 had lots of changes that drastically changed the gameplay for the worse... but this game really takes the cake. Hell I didn't even go into network connection issues! Diablo 3 and this game really shit all over my 2012.
 

Unicorn

Member
I always forget about TM2 PC and would love to play that against other people (only ever did co-op).

Is TM2 still up server-wise? Is there a community still playing? Does the game even run on current PCs?
 
Tm2PC we used a server called Kali. Unfortunately its not the greatest, never has been. Hell i think last time it was really updated was like 2003 :/

The community does not play any longer for a range of reasons: most all are technical. Community lived from like 1999-2010.

Ever since Windows Vista... Microsoft removed the feature thru which we used to play with one another (forgot name). But basically what this means is that any operating system newer than XP, wont be able to play TM2PC online together! Ouch

To combat that issue, those of us with newer pcs turned to vmware, where you can partition part of your harddrive to run a winxp instance, and then run the kali server program and tm2pc at the same time.

This however, added some new problems. The game can only be played in a smaller window, and furthermore, the game doesnt quite run 100% up to par. There is a bit more slowdown especially when jumping or turning sharply using tight turn. I and others felt very neutered, considering we had mastered the gameplay and driving doing insane combos... now using vmware we were kinda hindered by some technical slowdown.

Also - using vmware increases chances that games fail to launch. TM2PC already had notoriously bad network connectivity. Just getting 6-8 people in the same game room was sometimes very hard. More people you have harder it was to get into a room. Sometimes you would rejoin a game a dozen times, ctrl alt deleting in between because it would freeze. Vmware exacerbated that issue, by increasing time in which games took to load. Sometimes after everyone picked their cars, it would take 2 minutes to load a level. And if you go to that point, you increase odds of a giant failure and redo whole thing :(

TLDR: New computers and OS killed TM2PC. That and over years we lost lots of players, TMBO community outnumbered TM2PC community probably 200:1 to give you an idea of how few we had lol. Last 2 years of the game's life. We had about 5-6 of us. For some the skill gap was a bit too high, the best were leagues ahead of even mid-range players. I could easily take on three people by myself (tootin my own horn here but yea).

So after 8 years, being neutered by vmware, and only doing 2v2s with same three other people (best 4 players of all time tho, but 3v3 was where it was at). It was time to put the game to rest.

That said the game ran wonderfully, and the net code in game was solid as fuck. Hell we even sometimes used to play Minion matches if we had odd numbers of players. 2v3s... where team of two gets minion and grasshopper! (We played Shared pool of lives teams always, FFA boring). Also we had a skins maker, so we had custom skins on every car. Grasshopper with Pit viper skin? Check. Sweet tooth with dark tooth skin? CHECK!

Right now, lots of us play TMBO using Xlink Kai. Pretty easy to use and trouble free for most part.
 

Riposte

Member
That's hilarious.

Even if it is unlikely... I'm still hoping for a Twisted Metal on PS4 at some point. My interest is renewed. IDK, give it a new twist. Car combat meets DotA, I don't give a shit. Sony just needs to give a fuck beyond the first e3 appearance this time.
 
Since we are doing gifs ;)

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Just a little Twisted Metal inside-joke gif.

There was a discussion once about how the new game featured very little if no dodging mechanics... To which someone claimed that dodging in old TM games was akin to exploits in Super Smash Bros. /facepalm

So we made some funny videos of these dodging "exploits".

As you can see, here on the left is a homing missile coming at Sweet tooth, and hes able to dodge it by driving... forwards! at 5mph! with no turbo! Very unintended exploit alright.

ST is very good at dodging tho, not all cars can do it quite that easily. And sorry for zoomed out view of the car itself.
 
For Unicorn since you seemed interested and anyone else really!

I managed to find some old (4 years ago!) TM2PC videos on vimeo.. quality is OK but nothing 1080p unfortunately. These videos only have four people featured, the best four that played ;) I myself am included in the films often playing Slam (Roadie), the person who is doing videos was my equal in skill.

This one has audio and is the longest....

Amazing TM2PC Compilation/Fuck Smash Video Link (1v1v1 Holland, 2v2 Swamps, 2v2 la roofs)

Some little bits of info about TM2PC to note for the videos:
- We used lots of custom skins.. so yeah we like to use Aryan Axel skin ;)
- We banned shields & healths.
- You will see loads of team rams, sometimes one person either side to ping pong. Or Mr Slam specials someone into a ram.
- Often times you will see us jumping OVER a car, and might wonder why? Its because we are dropping a mine on top of the enemy car and adding a tiny bit of extra damage PLUS getting massive knockback/pop-up on enemy car. Mines great for getting people off edges in roof levels.
- Homings are weak, but cause knockback upon impact.. so they are almost always used to setup a freeze. Lots of other weapons have bounce or knockback effects: Napalms, Grimm skull, or ST cone missile.
- You might scratch heads at all cars reverse driving. This is how skillfully driving and dodging/return firing was done in TM2PC. Tight turn to evade fire whilst returning.
- Remote bombs + air-born target = triple damage. So sometimes you might see a person get rammed into a remote (3X air damage since few feet off floor), or a remote goes off when person is in air.
- Jumping bean is useful for getting in between buildings or generally dodging and jumping over mines to land an aerial to ground ram :)
- Corpses last 5 seconds, and yes can be used as meat shields.
- Might often see Axel shockwaving corpses... this is taunting :) Since a dead player gets to watch their corpse for a few seconds post death... enemy can taunt the corpse by dropping mines on it, zapping with outlaw's laser, rake with machine guns... all sorts of stuff lol.

Other videos have no audio but are complete matches. Can always watch while playing music on some other youtube vid lol.

1vs1, Hammerhead vs Axel (w/o Shockwaves)

2vs2, HH + Mr Slam vs Thump + ST 2vs2 super close but we win by 3 seconds. (40 shared lives per team)

There are other online videos on youtube of our online endevours but unfortunately the dude who did them was... horrendous at the game and its a really bad show of what the game was like lol. Zergs everything and doesn't know wtf to do. ugh. Rather shame he didnt upload more of other cars, and no 3v3s are on there :(

Rather long winded post, but eh i figured someone might enjoy it or watch for a bit. Graphics suck but gameplay sure don't. Helped make videos but hadn't seen em in years.
 

Tom_Cody

Member
I finally picked this up and I'm absolutely loving it.

I can't claim to be as hardcore as many in this thread but, to me at least, it sits right up there with TM2 and TMB. I am having so much fun with this.
 

Unicorn

Member
Great to hear d00d! I was just talking about this game to my friend last night. Wish we got the DLC they were working on =(
 

AEREC

Member
Hope this isn't the last time we see Twisted Metal...game was so awesome but I'm guessing it did not live up to (sales) expectations.
 

Unicorn

Member
Which, I would say, is a lot on Sony's lap. Ratcheting it up to a physical product, adding Single Player, Demo and Launch MP fiasco, Studio closing shortly after release. All added to either increased budget or dissent among online communities.

Gameplay is fan-fucking-tastic though.
 

ElRenoRaven

Gold Member
Which, I would say, is a lot on Sony's lap. Ratcheting it up to a physical product, adding Single Player, Demo and Launch MP fiasco, Studio closing shortly after release. All added to either increased budget or dissent among online communities.

Gameplay is fan-fucking-tastic though.

Um the studio didn't close. David just left to do his own thing. They just changed focus to mobile gaming sadly.

http://www.eatsleepplay.biz/
 

ElRenoRaven

Gold Member
I know it's a bit early but Happy 2nd Anniversary you wonderful game you. In spite of the online problems and lack of support you got I'm still as glad as ever I bought you.

I'm so playing through the campaign again this weekend in honor of the 2nd Anniversary.
 

KalBalboa

Banned
I know it's a bit early but Happy 2nd Anniversary you wonderful game you. In spite of the online problems and lack of support you got I'm still as glad as ever I bought you.

I'm so playing through the campaign again this weekend in honor of the 2nd Anniversary.

You know what? I'll be doing the same.
 

Unicorn

Member
I wonder how the custom skin servers are. I'm going to be so goddamn sad if/when they shut down. I spent a lot of time on some of my skins, especially my Mr. Slam Road Boat
KuGsj.gif

Recent Jaffe thread on gaming made me read through this whole fucking thread again. More nostalgia than any Twisted Metal experience.

But, getting to this... It appears the skin server is down as any link to skins redirects to the PSN store page for the game. My TV and PS3 are packed as I'm moving to a new state next week, so I can't be certain.

Basically, fuck them for keeping skins on a server and not letting us keep them on HDD. And, also fuck them for taking the server of skins down at all, as I'm sure it wasn't much space for .png's anyway.
 
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