I love Timesplitters 2. I mean really love it. In an almost scary way. If it were a girl I’d marry it, if it were a food I’d gorge on it until my stomach lining burst, and if it were a drug my veins, lungs and brain would now be naught but a sticky black goo, trickling out of my deliriously over-dosed body as it lay stinking in some alley on the wrong side of town.
Packed with brilliantly expressive character design, genuinely funny, marvellously deranged script writing, some fantastic and affectionate movie pastiche, and the slickest and most enjoyable gameplay in any console FPS, it’s as if Free Radical scanned my very soul before designing it and used the collected data to create the ultimate personalized gaming wet dream just for me. You’ll understand then, the moronic, dribbly grinning and unashamed moistening of trousers upon my part which greeted Grim’s news of a new sequel just over a month ago.
There’s a whole lot more of that on the way from me today, as Free Radical screenwriter Rob Yescombe has been talking to CVG, confirming that things are definitely moving ahead on Timesplitters 4:
Yes, TimeSplitters 4 is happening. At the moment it’s in the very early concept stages, and as yet it’s unsigned to any publisher.
TimeSplitters 4 will be a great big joke at the expense of the world of games – ourselves included. God, that’s a terrible sound bite. Can you just make one up and make me sound hilarious? No, wait, just say that I /*have*/ a hilarious sound bite, but it’s still in the very early concept stage.
The game’s not a very long way away but it’s not a very short way away either. It’s somewhere in the middle. Is that non-specific enough?
Rambling, vaguely nonsensical, and therefore exactly the kind of statement that bodes very well for the development of a Timesplitters game as far as I’m concerned. And the best bit? No specific publisher. While to some that may seem a strange thing to celebrate, to me it screams one glorious fact: EA isn’t involved yet. Timesplitters: Future Perfect was possibly the most crushing disappointment of my gaming life, a turgid, contrived, sterile and humorless piece of overly refined pap which subverted everything that was good about TS 2. Please guys, for me, sign carefully and don’t let that happen again.
