Timesplitters
I seem to have fond memories of Timesplitters, but now I realize it wasn’t from this.
I hated the FPS as a child. It scared me. I experienced so many on the N64, playing against my older brother. Dying felt certain and random. I would run away or hide as much as possible. I would try to find a corner and shoot at a doorway, hoping I could catch my brother before he caught me. This liminal period for console shooters was a bad time for me back then and it’s a bad time for me now. Free Radical Design, a rebel faction split from Rare, hardly tries to break through into something new and interesting.
I played this game for two hours, alone. The “story” missions are all about finding some MacGuffin and returning to an escape point. It’s much more thoughtless than DooM, Halo, or Goldeneye. Like Goldeneye, there’s a rudimentary spray-and-pray feeling to the action. Deliberate aiming feels like a total waste of time when the cursor snaps to different targets and enemies die within two or three shots. I liked the variety of level themes but the character design is atrocious. Seriously, the way they modeled female characters is disgusting. However, I do have to admit that the names are gloriously stupid. To give a sampling, there’s Fingers McKenzie, Peekaboo Jones, Sebastian Photon, and Ravelle Velvet.
I remember I had a friend in the neighborhood who was about five years younger than me. When I was around 14 and he was 9, I brought Timesplitters over to his house and we had a good time. He got really excited about it and told his mom how fun he had shooting tommy guns. She got angry at me and told me that that wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted her kid to see. The kid is an adult now and he lives in Myrtle Beach, coaching people on how to trade on Forex while supporting Trump. Was it my fault he turned out this way? Would things be different had I shown him Ico and Sky Odyssey instead? Probably not. Honestly, I blame his mom.