Twisted Metal Musings from an Ex-Vigilante 8 Fan

I was originally going to write a simple impressions piece on the Twisted Metal demo, but after some thought I couldn't think of a more dull article to do. Almost all of us have played it, and eventually here I'll add my own two cents into the growing mountain of opinion articles on the subject, but for now I think it might be better to tell it from a different perspective. Namely, the perspective of someone who was once a die-hard Vigilante 8 player, and now will probably never go back to the series again.

I'm sure you're asking yourself why I never came to this conclusion sooner. Well honestly, I never played much of Twisted Metal over the years, and the few times I played it were simply too brief for it to get its claws into me. When Vigilante 8 hit the market in 1998 I played games mainly on my PC and on the Nintendo 64. Vigilante 8 played exceptionally well on Nintendo 64's controller, and its ease of use and low learning curve pulled me in fairly significantly. And so it was that many an all-night gaming sessions were played of that game, all the while naively unaware of what Twisted Metal had to offer.

At the time I thought it was paradise. A multiplayer car-combat game with differing weapons and destructible environments? Of course it would be terrific! But sometimes reality can be a shrewd jester, and through both circumstance and force of habit, I was left believing that this was as good as it could get. I liked Vigilante 8 and that's all there was too it. Twisted Metal? Sure, I played a bit...but apparently not nearly enough, and that's the key. Vigilante 8, with its accessible control setup and simplistic combat, doesn't have nearly the learning curve that Twisted Metal has, so a few moments is all you need. And I'll give developer Luxoflux credit for that, especially when you can argue that they might have been a bit limited by the Nintendo 64 controller.

All of that changed yesterday while playing the Twisted Metal demo on the PS3. I can't tell you precisely when it happened, but somewhere between the torrent of speeding cars, missiles, and exploding buildings everything just clicked. The complicated controls, which are admittedly extremely well designed for the amount of functions they operate, made sense all at once. The action, which normally moved blazingly fast by traditional standards, all seemed to contain a hidden flow that I began to understand. Then I hit the jump button just in time to fly over another car trying to ram me, and killed him by shooting a homing missile from behind. This was Twisted Metal, this was what everyone has been talking about. This was amazing.

What really shocks you when you truly understand the game is how deep Twisted Metal really is. All the cars have varying values for armor, weapons and speed, and there are a multitude of different weapons, most of which have two -or even three- firing modes. Cars can even do damage by ramming, which can also be compounded by doing it while at the same time doing a boost thrust. You don't just fire some weapons either. Some require you to fire them, and then land them in a targeted area by hitting the fire button again...and you're doing this while speeding 100mph through residential houses.

Speaking of which, the complexity is not just relegated to the vehicles. The levels in Twisted Metal are almost completely destructible, which also has a function rather than just a form. Powerful weapons, health packs, and short-cuts can call be found by learning the levels and figuring out where the destructible bits are. In a way, the levels in Twisted Metal are reminiscent of the ones found in older shooters like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. They harken back to a time when learning the secrets was not just an extra additive to the game, but necessary for the very survival of the player.

You simply don't get that same feeling from Vigilante 8, which has destructible environments but never utilizes them in such a way as to make the levels nearly as modular as they could be. There is, instead, a static quality which never seems to relax its grip on the design, and results in the levels seeming overly rigid. I hate to make it sound as if this is an attestation of a lack of creativity, but this overarching problem winds its way throughout all of Vigilante 8, and in a way it seems as though Luxoflux felt really awkward thinking outside the box. Even the quirky characterization of the cars seems to have been developed in such a sophomoric way, that in comparison to Twisted Metal they just come of as timid and banal.

And lastly, Twisted Metal would be nothing if it didn't play well online. And to realize that all the destruction, all the vehicles moving around at high speed, and all of them using an array of complicated weapons is happening over the internet, with nary a blip of lag getting in the way of the action, is testament that the netcode developed for Twisted Metal on the PS3 is nothing short of extraordinary.

I used to go back to Vigilant 8 every once in awhile, its XBLA offering being a secure tenant on my 360 for quite a long time. Now, I can't imagine really touching it again even if only for nostalgia's sake. Maybe just one more time though, you know...to say goodbye. One last torrid fling to seal it up and send it all away. Then its back behind the wheel of my Outlaw, there are some clowns that need killing.