The draft text was written at the end of December 2021. I decided to bring it to mind to the best of my ability and publish it, since the series MechAssault deserves to run at least on an emulator or on Xbox 360 backwards compatible
Loving fur is like loving cats. Just as cute, just as lazy – especially when they go into shutdown. Just as leisurely when basking in the rays of the sun, looking out for the target. And just as eccentric (midnight cat “tygydyk” is akin to a sudden salvo with dual LRM20 from around the corner) – you can’t even rein in a slipper .
My love for BattleTech grew out of an amazing discovery for myself, when in 1998 on the screen of a 14-inch pot-bellied monitor of the then personal 486DX2 at 66 MHz, through the whir of a two-speed CD drive Mistumi the legendary screensaver for MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat .
Advanced offline-CG from Activision, which had not yet grown into a monstrous publishing giant and was developing excellent games.
What I saw and played blew my mind at ten years old in much the same way as what I saw in 1996 did DOOM . These are fucking fighting robots! Three-dimensional, volumetric! With comprehensive and precise simulation control! You can freely rotate the camera around them, and the view from the cockpit is almost as real (how little was needed in the nineties for total amazement)! And it works more or less quickly! And there are many different robots! What kind of planets are there?!
The second culture shock was the opening video MechWarrior IV: Vengeance and her next gameplay seen – three years later, in 2001. Famous among fans of the franchise " MechWarrior 3 ", unfortunately, passed me by: I got my hands on it too late, so it didn’t have a significant impact.
Live actors + offline CG rendering and a bit of cheap serial drama. It wasn’t a bad thing to be so impressive back then, especially if you’re a fan of the franchise.
At the end of 2000 Microsoft, suddenly for the public, she began to do righteous deeds in the gaming field. For example, she acted as a publisher for FASA Studio, holding a license BattleTech, which allowed the release of the above-mentioned original game, an expansion MechWarrior IV: Black Knight and pretty hardcore MechWarrior IV: Mercenaries . In my social circle at that time, all the “four” were most tenderly loved and appreciated: the simulators came out a little more arcade-style than their predecessors, but they played much cooler, more fun and dynamically. They required a remarkable skill and generally created in every possible way the atmosphere of a B-movie, but with a powerful immersion in what was happening, pampering the inexperienced with a relatively advanced picture even on average hardware.
It’s no joke, in 2000, witnesses MechWarrior IV they dropped their jaws with a thud on the tables and drooled helplessly when they saw it launched on a not particularly cheap, but budget nVidia Riva TNT2. GeForce then was the lot of the very rich, especially after the 1998 crisis. I can’t count how many hours I spent in “two” and “four”.
A legendary presentation where Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson told unfunny jokes, made fun of Bill Gates, but at the same time remained a favorite of the public.
It’s 2001. “Melkomyagkie” took a confident course towards the development of the gaming line of its just released, presented with fanfare Xbox Original. The console, for a moment, had enormous power compared to its competitors and was significantly faster in most tasks, demonstrating this in practice. Thus, American hardware, without particularly straining, allowed itself much cooler effects, complex models and an increased frame rate compared to GameCube And PlayStation 2, inferior to them only in highly specialized non-standard tasks. In addition, it was the first console capable of executing shader code, which allowed free handling of polygon filling, which opened the way to new, previously unseen effects, practically inaccessible to competitive consoles. For example, beautiful water with ripples and reflections, or adding detailed relief to any surface with its correct lighting. And no wonder, since on board each instance they were installed Pentium III-733, 64 MB RAM and custom GeForce 3 with fillrate like GeForce 4 – and this is almost a year before the release of the video card itself for owners PC!
It was also the first console that necessarily came with a hard drive included, a whole damn 8 GB, allowing you to download games, updates and store honestly ripped music for playing in the background. Moreover, in support Xbox As a platform, many great games were released (not the tumbleweed that now reigns over Xbox One And Xbox Series), among which, barely peeking out from behind the wide back of the super-popular Master Chief, the first action got stuck in BattleTech under a logical name MechAssault. One of the first games I used Xbox Live for multiplayer. And one of those that clearly demonstrated the capabilities of the Xbox. Oh yes, the game also has 87 points on Metacritic, and 7.8 userscore points. Decent, isn’t it??
Platform: Xbox Original, passed on live hardware.
Release date: November 15, 2002
Genre: Action/Arcade/Mech.
Backward Compatibility: No.
Emulation: XEMU, Playable.
The duology took place, alas, not on this well-worn handsome man. The one who heroically withstood both MechAssault currently under repair due to age and damage to motherboard.
But who definitely took part in the matter is this gamepad. This is the second revision, S, more compact and convenient than the bulky Duke that came with the first revisions of the console.
And here is the same Duke. I don’t have this in stock for obvious reasons (only two genuine S-ki and one Third-party from Bigben).
While developing a new game, the duo https://noverificationcasinos.co.uk from Day One Studio And FASA Studio first of all I started cutting off fat and massive BattleTech-discard everything unnecessary that would slow down the pace of gameplay. Yes, into a slender body MechAssault two significant pillars of the simulator and tabletop wargame were not included. The first victim of liposuction is MechLab, allowing you to fine-tune all fur components. The second victim was a deep simulation model that takes into account the weather, terrain, type of armor, weight and cooling of each individual robot module and thousands of other small parameters interacting with each other.
Here and below are screenshots from the Internet, since it is impossible to take them from the console itself.
On the screen: intraspheroid Cougar on the march.
In the distance, on an inaccessible hillock, stands a 100-ton Atlas and insolently showers us with a heavy cannon. But we are not born with a bastard – we will also find something to answer.
All game mechanics are subordinated to drive, fun and getting vivid emotions from switching heavy weapons from robot to robot. Because of this, for example, the developers abandoned another covenant BattleTech — mandatory repairs on a dropship ship or in a hangar. Now you can get it repaired right during the battle: just pick up a repair kit from the floor that falls out either from an enemy mech or when special buildings are destroyed. The ability to cleverly escape from imminent death in this way does a good job of pumping up the player with adrenaline – even if the skirmish suddenly drags on. The balance of battles itself is not bad, the game mechanics are easy to understand and in essence resemble the classic Sheldonovsky rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock set. For every action there is a reaction, except for the situation when a heavy projectile flies into a light mech and knocks the poor fellow completely off his feet. There’s nothing you can do about it – you’ll have to somehow get out.
Controls, in general, are distributed across the original gamepad Xbox quite convenient. You won’t have to get used to it much, since the layout is similar to the standard one in modern games: on the left shift and X-Y-B – weapon selection, on the sticks there is a sight with movement, on the right trigger there is a shot, on the right stick button there is a defensive gadget – everything is literally at your fingertips. Buttons and axes of the gamepad for such an action, unlike the gamepad of the same DreamCast , grabs you by the eyes. Relatively few mechs and weapons were brought in, but this is enough to keep the player from yawning out of boredom until the very end.
In addition, the aforementioned boredom is aimed at dispelling the soundtrack proudly growling with guitars, striving closer to the genre of good hard rock, since what is happening on the screen, in my opinion, cannot be crossed with any other direction of music. Power Xbox allowed for some time to show fur fights as truly beautiful (for its time, of course) and, according to heavy fate, evil: armored vehicles look great even after a dozen brutal collisions and explosions. The scenery is quite good, moderately destructible, but utilitarian: the main focus in MechAssault made on combat engines and the effects that they generate with their guns and ferro-fiber bodies.
The game’s location design is good, by the way. For example, a “wooded” area mottled with green bald spots with five shabby fir trees looks moderately lively and creates the illusion of a large space, which is why it is sometimes possible to get lost in a seemingly corridor area. Some levels, such as the boat chase, are really large in size and require skillful piloting. Other levels do not indulge in detail, but require ingenuity in order to competently maneuver and quickly shoot enemies and manage to run around the entire hefty defensive structure – before a friendly landing ship escapes.
Gameplay from the XEMU emulator seven months ago. Emulator version – 0.7.111. Seems to work well.
The tasks are also in order: they are quite typical for paramilitary action arcades and do not particularly stand out, consistently entertaining with the relative variety of tasks and subtasks. Plot in MechAssault is not even close to the main dish, representing an absolutely linear, somewhat pretentious story about the confrontation between mercenaries and cultists of the Word of Blake (a sort of pseudo-analogue of Vakh’s “Word Bearers”). It is presented in primitive cut-scenes between missions with occasional jokes interspersed during radio conversations, and, unlike the sequel, is not of particular interest.
For the modern player to feel MechAssault it will be difficult without a live console. XEMU, despite a sharp leap in development over recent years, it is still quite crude, although it is capable of launching the first game. Backward compatibility was also not delivered: Xbox One, Xbox Series And Xbox 360 it is not officially supported. You can, of course, try to start MechAssault on a hacked Freeboot or JTAG X360, but even if it starts, it will be with monstrous artifacts and will break somewhere on the first level, hanging tightly.
Mechassault 2: Lone Wolf
Platform: Xbox Original, passed on live hardware.
Release date: December 28, 2004.
Genre: Action/Arcade/Mech.
Backward Compatibility: Yes, Xbox 360.
Emulation:XEMU, reaches Intro. Ingame won’t start.
They didn’t waste time with the sequel. Two years later, on the shelves of the entire civilized world with the help of Microsoft with the support of spectacular trailers, the shiny, freshly sealed boxes collapsed MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf . Beautiful, rumbling heavy licensed music during boss battles, with quite a breakthrough for a 2004 console game in the staging of story scenes on the engine – and this is three years before Mass Effect ! But the main thing is why people fell in love with the game – for the fast, angry and addictive gameplay brought to mind both in single-player and multiplayer, unfolding in complex, quite complex and excitingly constructed levels. Each location is now densely built up or planted with all sorts of destructible props: vegetation, buildings, swamps, whatever – and it looks incredibly cool for the sixth generation of consoles. And how does the dense neon urban development of Terra look and shine here – wow! And this is 16 years before Cyberpunk 2077 ! Okay, okay, I’m seriously going too far here =)
Experimental mech with very heavy specific PPC guns, supposedly powered by dark matter. Requires a scrupulous, careful attitude.
Wading through the mud-chomping swampy jungle here is no less exciting than climbing skyscrapers in power armor, hiding from the assault mech scurrying under your feet Nova Cat, armed with a quartet of deadly pulse lasers ready to leave you in nothing but a handful of ashes. After finishing it, I was surprised to find that the second game received 6 points less than the original – 81 on Metacritic, but 8.2 points from players. Error? Maybe.
In general, get out of the fur in the first MechAssault and in any part MechWarrior was not permitted under any circumstances. It was possible to emerge from it either in disgrace, by being catapulted into the atmosphere, or in the form of a bloody fillet, but with subsequent packaging in a zinc coffin. IN MechAssault 2 equipment was allowed not only to leave during the battle, but also to change it at their discretion for any available one – be it a fur, a tank or some other masterpiece of futuristic military engineering of the 31st century. It is also not forbidden to rush around the battlefield literally on your own two feet, hacking various terminals using QTEs and blowing up buildings with powerful explosives. Moreover, a good 1/7 of all missions are partially built on this.
One of my favorites – Timber Wolf\Mad Cat. “Clan” mechs received double names after the return, in fact, of the Clans to the Inner Sphere (this is best told in the chronology of the universe). The pilots of the Inner Sphere, in defense, gave unknown enemy combat vehicles their own, sorry for the tautology, “internal” names.
Well put together basic gameplay formula of the first MechAssault practically unchanged: in the vast majority of missions we are entrusted with furs. He, as usual, has three types of weapons – beam, ballistic and jet. Each of which, in turn, is divided into loading, aiming and burst firing. In battle, to maintain balance and increase the intensity, the player is given the opportunity to pick up temporary, limited ammunition upgrades from the ground for the guns mounted on the mechs and – oh, heresy! – repair on the fly. This, I repeat, goes against the rules of the table BattleTech and simulation series MechWarrior, however, works great inside an action game. Mech Restoration Kits continue to drop from special buildings and defeated enemies, turning the series MechAssault in the only duology in the franchise, where you have the opportunity to hoot and snatch a repair kit from under the nose of a stunned enemy, and, pointing your middle finger at the screen, then destroy half of his entire armor, plus a third of his weapons, with an accurate shot.
BattleMechs can also optionally be equipped with one of the types of active reflective armor, selected according to the enemy’s potential ammunition: ballistic, reactive and beam. At high difficulty levels you have to take this into account a lot and correctly guess the moment to attack. It won’t work to shoot at everything and without taking into account the type of enemy armor – this is a direct road to overheating and a deadly retaliatory salvo to the forehead. IN MechAssault 2 the tactics of “find the moment, choose cover, maneuver and shoot so that the enemy does not really have time or cannot respond to you” are encouraged. It’s also not worth running around in zigzags like a bee, stupefied from the heat, recklessly either – they’ll quickly spit rockets and kick you with lasers. The correct manner of fighting is the old-fashioned way, as in MechWarrior, like a crow, circling around the enemy. Either running behind buildings, then behind bushes and bumps, hiding behind another enemy, timing the shooting at the moment when the target is reloading. Remember, pilot: the physical model here, although simple, does not sleep, and overheating is a real threat to throw off the mechanical hooves, since the mech in this case will simply go into hibernation, obediently accepting all the incoming laser-missile-ballistic slaps in the face.
Battles in MechAssault 2, no matter what you happen to steer (and besides mechs, these are tanks, power armor, airplanes, and other types of armored vehicles, almost like in WarT..) – fast, angry, very agile. Significantly more dynamic and aggressive than in the first MechAssault. Every time it’s like a rollicking cancan on armored mechanical hulks bristling with guns. In the thick of battle, sometimes you have to look back in a daze after an enemy shell flying past, and only then to discover that, due to your own stupidity, you have already been surrounded and it’s time to engage in active combat half-strafe, choosing the correct trajectory of movement. The sky is cut by colorful lasers, somewhere there an ER PPC sparkles like a New Year, hitting an ally, nearby (with an obscene roar) someone’s missiles are flying by, smoking in a thick smoky trail, and on your right leg the AC/5 cannon that has emerged from around the corner is already scribbling with a tracer Uziel.
As soon as you deal with the main forces of the enemy, the game designers release some kind of boss onto the battlefield – a heavy mech like Atlas or someone easier, but with experimental weapons. And this comrade no longer hesitates to test your skill, forcing you to use your environment in every way. Fortunately, the game carefully saves your progress at key points, so if
If you die, you’ll start over again.
And everything will repeat itself as before:
Night, steel tread Cougar ,
Boss, laser, PPC… Again.
I am sure that such an exciting game mechanic was not born out of nowhere: it was probably possible to correctly screw its elements together only after a great many iterations during development with the investment of thousands of man-hours. Looking back at how the game turned out, I have the feeling that the testing department, without expecting it, received literally manna from heaven, which you can play voraciously and legitimately receive a salary for it. The developers really tried to improve the sequel on all fronts: they significantly improved the rendering, models, the environment and its destructibility, reworked the approach to creating missions, improved and enriched the narrative with cut scenes, and most importantly, they accelerated the gameplay to a state of reactive adrenaline swings.
Plot MechAssault 2 continues to develop exactly where the story of the first game ended, recruiting into the role of our alter ego a certain experienced mech warrior who joined the same squad of mercenaries that fights with the same repulsed cultists from “The Word of Blake”. It should be noted that the designers of tasks and levels, despite the primitiveness of the story, did not hesitate to introduce a considerable amount of diversity into our mechwarrior life. Either they will send you to accompany mechanics in a tank, or they will put you at the helm of a combat aircraft, or they will contract you to blow up an entire city on your own two feet, or you will be forced to climb high-rise buildings in power armor, or you will be forced to steal someone else’s equipment right from under the enemy’s nose. And then, who knows, furs! So, in one of the tasks, after landing on an alien planet, it suddenly turns out that there is somehow an acute shortage of our own combat robots. And here there is such freedom at the enemy base literally a couple of kilometers around the corner from the landing point! And just try to get caught by a sentry, being on your own two feet, and they will immediately smash you into bloody goulash with the words “Who ordered the fast food pilot?”?».
Players familiar with BattleTech will be incredibly pleased with the fact that the scriptwriters MechAssault 2 did not disdain to actively use the lore of the universe to create the appropriate atmosphere. Familiar names, titles and terms will pop up every now and then in the characters’ speech. We are even sent on missions immediately after the briefing directly on a truly recognizable dropship with extremely good animation of all the characters living on the bridge. Among them you will definitely find a major-mentor, a guy-sitting-by-the-radio (that’s literally his name!), a mercenary defector and the personification of our in-game presence. That is, our avatar, which can also be minimally customized in the settings. The scenes look great for 2004, I repeat, great. The models are excellent, the animations are not bad, the environment is well designed – and all this, I repeat, is powered by the game engine. Sometimes you wonder how the programmers managed to pack the visual part into the 64 MB of RAM available for the console, the volume of which, at one time, among developers, only the lazy did not swear. Booting from a DVD drive is surprisingly fast, by the way. From the hard drive, if the console is hacked – even faster.
In fact, the entire single-player campaign boils down to the fact that our squad of brave mercenaries helps the Kurita house to poison and harass cultists like cockroaches throughout the Inner Sphere. The Word of Blake has plenty of obscene language, personnel and equipment in store as a response, but what stands out among them is the experimental walking equipment developed specifically for this game, which is not part of the canon of the universe BattleTech. I would point out two units that stand out: the six-legged mechaspider, which rhythmically strides across the battlefield under Papa Roach – Getting Away with Murder, and an unusual last boss, the multi-phase fight with which takes place under a wonderfully selected and mixed situation Korn – Right Now. The listeners who selected the music for the game will not be denied taste: it is both melodic and fiery, fitting both the tone of the main soundtrack and the audience of the 2000s, among which there were many fans of underground music – from alternative to nu metal.
Papa Roach – Getting Away with Murder.
Korn – Right Now.
By the way, about the in-game music in the series. I will continue to regularly praise it: no sour and academics that had already become ingrained in my teeth, only rhythmic, playful, bass-raucous rock with admixtures of nu-metal and alternative. The tracks are written with a bunch of special interruptions for the dramatically changing situation “in the field”, contain several layers and are perfectly orchestrated: the arrangement can change repeatedly during the mission – a now forgotten art of our ancestors.
As you play through the game, it’s as if your neurons are absorbing an explosive, hurricane-force futuristic action cocktail. Here you will find dashing battles riding on a variety of different combat robots, performing multi-phase tasks on a whole string of planets to great music. And a simple, rapidly rushing forward simple plot, supported by jokes, betrayals and antics of crazy cultists. And an exciting multiplayer (currently only on pirate servers), allowing you to compete your piloting skills with mech warriors around the world. Only during the credits does one manage to exhale and say: “It’s a shame they don’t do this anymore.”. I want a threequel!».
And it’s true: the series, in my opinion, really needed a third game – back in the era Xbox 360, from some talented in-house studio that knows how to handle console hardware. And the reason turned out to be banal: in an interview IGN one of the developers FASA Studio said that MechAssault 2 did not sell well enough, so it did not become the franchise that was needed Microsoft. Roughly speaking, the corporation set a minimum sales bar that the series had to overcome in order to deserve further development. The developers themselves say that they still do not agree with the decision of the publisher + platform holder rolled into one. And I, in turn, don’t understand at all the reasons why the game sold so poorly.
Flea, despite the relatively ridiculous tonnage and weapons, it can also cause considerable damage if it gets close to a heavy mech and begins to maneuver competently.
As an alternative to Xbox was available Steel Battalion , but it was developed for absolutely hardcore fans who are ready to endure humiliation from game mechanics, having previously shelled out 400 bucks for just one specialized controller.
Finishing this text, I tried to remember at least a few Western games of recent years that aroused such vivid emotions in me during the playthrough. Precisely in the sense of being carried away by the process to the point where you forget to eat and sleep, getting up for work with red eyes and a piece of the game interface in the corner of your field of vision. And… I remembered practically nothing. The more I turn to unexplored games of 3-7 generations of consoles, the more convinced I am that they were then developed not for the sake of soulless numbers in reports to financially obese investors, but to systematically capture the attention of the consumer and the market as a whole, with the help of a high-quality product that we would like to play ourselves. A ton of interviews immediately flew through my head, among which I especially remember the conversation with employees Blizzard the times of 1995–2004, when they literally spent the night at work. And not because they were forced to crunch, but simply because they really wanted to play a still crude build of their own game with colleagues online. This is how people were passionate about their work – and this unconditionally affected the results that were already arriving on our store shelves. Of course, the development of entertainment then cost much less than ten million dollars, but games were also hatched with a love of craft. Let me be for a moment an angry critic, tired of modern “AAA”, who just makes you want to shout “AAA”!». Nowadays, the market often spits out a seventy-buck semi-finished product for 300 hours of “gameplay” from masturbatory monotonous openworld tripe, seasoned with yet another useless social statement. All this is served with the tag “eat it”, along with a bunch of publications for $90-120 with the sign “Well, buy it, take it.”. Top managers don’t have enough for a seventh yacht and a sandwich with black caviar.”. Therefore, if you like intense but short games that keep a stranglehold on the screen and don’t shy away from outdated graphics, try looking into history, as I did: dive into the Youtube collection “all games of the X console in one video”. Look at what was coming out then, look through the generations of consoles you are interested in, and it is possible that a huge treasure trove of unprecedented, missed gaming goodness will open up to your eyes. Just like I managed to do in recent years. Thus, for example, material about SEGA Saturn was born.
If you ever happen to stumble across a treasured original console Xbox or her heir, Xbox 360, with a copy of these games in any form – don’t shy away from giving it a try, especially if you have a soft spot for high-quality action arcades and universes BattleTech, in particular. It’s worth it.
P. S. for help with proofreading, special thanks to our good friend Cheezzy fioletovaya boroda and old friend fugudrum.
