From part of Rare to Free Radical to Crytek UK to Deep Silver Dambusters… it's honestly
surprising this Nottingham-based studio still exists to this day.
Oh, Nottingham is in the United Kingdom, where we say SNES, by the way.
I'm starting to realise there are a fair few non-Brit viewers of these videos, so I
may start having to patronise more.
Which means talk-ing do-wn to yo-u.
Anyway, while Dambusters and its previous incarnations has a combined legacy stretching
back two decades - and that's not even including Rare - it's a series from the earliest days
that everybody still talks about.
Most people still talk about.
Okay, some people still talk about it.
I still talk about it.
Look, this is my video, and if I want to talk abou-it's TimeSplitters.
It… yeah.
The original game was closer to a tech demo than anything else and is roundly ignored
in the broader discussions of the series.
That's fine.
That's fair.
In four-player it was superb and I'm glad I invested in a multi-tap back in the day
for my PS2 - because back in said day you had to pay extra so more than two of you could
play a game on the PlayStation, rather than today's world of four hundred controllers
connecting to a single machine and everything else being free forever.
I mean, apart from characters and levels and entire sections of games, but there you go.
But it wasn't until TimeSplitters 2 that people started to really go wild with their
praise.
It had an actual single-player game rather than some vague challenges strung together,
it had a much more defined sense of character and it really refined that multiplayer action
into something that could unironically be described as 'bloody great'.
It's not the best in the series, though.
No, that's TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, the third game released under the EA banner
in 2005.
You'd be forgiven for unleashing your best 'buh-doyyy?'
face at that statement.
After all, Future Perfect was the evil corporate sell out game slithering out from under the
evil eye of Sauron, or EA, or whatever they're called.
And it's gone down in history that the Free Radical team felt neither free nor radical
during development of the third Splitting frenzy.
In an interview with Gaming Nexus back in 2005, linked below, an unnamed Free Radical
bod said of EA's involvement with the game: "EA asked us some important questions in
the early part of development, which made us consider our approach to some of the things
we wanted to do...
It was really useful to have someone come in from the outside with a fresh approach
which encouraged us to focus on specific issues."
Not so bad, right?
Well, it's more interesting to read that back with the benefit of powersight nine hundred
- or hindsight as it's sometimes called by nerds - and see how obviously the statement
is saying nothing - while at the same time saying so much about how Free Radical was
feeling under the heel of EA.
Compare and contrast the 2005 statement to one from former Free Radical boss David Doak
in 2012, speaking to Eurogamer - link below - about working with EA Partners: "It was
a bit like being groomed, you know.
Here's all these friendly avuncular people that will give you all the love and attention
you need to get your game out, and then after a while they go away and all the bad guys
come around and it's like you're in borstal.
Getting held down, beaten around the head with a cue ball in a sock."
Safe to say, those working in Nottingham at the time of Future Perfect were not having
the best of times.
After being courted by EA, the team was swiftly ignored in favour of the publisher's other
big FPS - Goldeneye: Rogue Agent.
Yes, TimeSplitters - a game made by many of those who had cut their teeth creating a console
shooter legend in the shape of Goldeneye on N64 - was intentionally sidelined in favour
of a hasty spin-off made by a completely different team.
You can't write this stuff.
I mean, I just did, but… yeah.
There was a general feeling from the studio that they were having decisions forced on
them - like when a team of execs used images of Vin Diesel and Wesley Snipes to not-so-subtly
prod the devs in the direction they wanted them to go.
I mean, you play Future Perfect and there's a definite feel of mid-2000s EA about it;
an air of homogeny, in a way.
But TimeSplitters 2, while definitely riddled with comedy, featured a thoroughly po-faced
Sergeant Cortez - and a Cortez quite clearly already modelled on Vincent Diesel.
It also felt, shall we say, a little on the derivative side of things at times, with much
of the action doing that thing where it's parodying popular things like tough space
marines fighting off alien hordes by… well, having tough space marines fighting off alien
hordes.
When you're just doing the thing you're talking about, it's not exactly parody - you're
just doing the thing.
I can't say anyone is telling porkies about the experience of making a game under EA,
but there are certain things that just ring a bit hollow - admittedly from an outsider's
perspective.
And TimeSplitters 2 already had a crapload of what ended up in TimeSplitters: Future
Perfect, so how much interference was there really?
There was probably loads.
Yet, to me, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect is the best of the series.
It feels like the game where Free Radical was having the most fun making it - I can't
speak for how it actually was in the trenches of development, but I can say how it feels,
and it feels right.
It's pacey, well structured, has a story that is absolutely fine by game - i.e. low
- standards, and it's genuinely funny at times.
TimeSplitters 2 by comparison still felt like game still on the boil, with some fun, funny
elements and a decidedly non-parodic Cortez - reminder: just straight up doing the space
marine thing doesn't make it a parody.
The second game was a bloody great time, don't get me wrong, but to me it's the third that
finally nails the experience and makes it something to treasure, to remember, to put
up there in your best-of lists.
Future Perfect's poor showing in the revenue department - thanks in no small part to EA's
focus on the Goldeneye game not being made by the Goldeneye team - contributed to Free
Radical's eventual time to split.
I just… like…
Cortez isn't funny in the second game, and he is in the third.
So there.
Part of what makes young Not Vincent comical in the third game is Free Radical's embracing
of him as an idiot.
That's it.
He's a goof.
A twerp.
A silly billy.
There's a running gag about him just doing things without thinking that still amuses
me every time, and his ever-failing catchphrase - "it's time to split" - is genuinely
superb.
All of this plays out in a coherent, fun and challenging story mode that takes you through
hundreds of years of history… and future… future history.
Basically you go from wartime pistols to future-wartime laser rifles.
That's cool.
It's also in the previous games, but there's a stronger thread tying this all together.
Along the way you meet many weird and wacky characters, many of who showed up in Timesplitters
2, and… well, you listen to a lot of them make pervy comments, which is something I
never noticed when I played this aged 22.
I definitely noticed them now.
It's weird and icky.
But hey, you get to see familiar faces across this swashbuckling timeventure!
Outside of the solid story mode you also get the two Timesplitters staples - multiplayer
and challenges.
If the story mode's what hooks you, these two modes are the painful barbs that just
won't let you go.
Even if you don't have any friends, because there's bots in it.
We used to play multiplayer - on the snowy map, whatever that's called - for hours
on end back in my uni days, riddling the map with as many tough-as-nails bots as we could
and hammering capture the bag up to a first-to-thirty match with no time limit.
Tons of fun.
Rocket launchers all round.
Sci fi snipers for the cowards in the group.
TimeSplitters multiplayer doesn't get enough credit in popular circles, as far as I'm
concerned - it's on a par with Goldeneye - and I do mean the N64 version.
It also has robotic monkeys and chunks of flesh as playable characters, so there's
that.
Oh and don't forget your map maker!
I mean, I never put any time into this, but I'm sure some smartarse out there made an
entire game just using the in-game editing tools.
It's something that, while I never used it properly, I love dearly.
Even if things are limited, hello Doom's SnapMap, if you put it in the main game and
shine some light on it, it's always going to be great if only because so many people
will muck about with it.
Future perfect really was the total package for the series, featuring everything we wanted
from a TimeSplitters game and handled with the grace and ability you would expect from
a team making their third game in a series.
Unless it's Ubisoft with Assassin's Creed Three, which was one of the dullest things
that's ever happened.
And so we've been left since 2005, in a TimeSplitty-shaped limbo forced on us by large
publisher interference and a developer's insistence it make something like Haze.
That's a long time to wait with nothing, and it doesn't sound like much is changing
on any official level.
Will TimeSplitters ever return?
Crytek said maybe.
Former studio head Hasit Zala said maybe.
TimeSplitters Rewind says yes... but a true sequel?
Probably not, at least not from the people who made it.
The actual talent behind TimeSplitters has mostly - if not all - left the studio.
Deep Silver Dambusters is not Crytek UK, is not Free Radical, is not the Goldeneye team.
People move on, times change.
The best we're going to get - the best we can hope for - will be TimeSplitters Rewind,
which puts a lot of pressure on the fan-made project.
Unless… no, I don't have anything for this.
I just have to add some level of intrigue and possibility things could change, otherwise
it's way too much of a downer.
Even if my gut feeling is this is a dead, dead and dead series.
SIGH.
If you like being made to feel sad by my words and deeds, then like, share and subscribe!
I promise it won't always be so soul-crushing.
Unless you want it to be.
Do you want it to be?
Let me know in the comments.
For now, it is indeed time… to go awa-split.
I mean split.
It's time to split.
For fu-
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