A friend with benefits – TimeSplitters 2

[It’s guest post time again! I’m pleased to welcome back Matt Gardner, editor of the excellent site GameTripper, who previously wrote very entertainingly about WWF Smackdown! 2: Know Your Role]

TimeSplitters 2 is the first game that entered my life with zero hype but transformed into one of the very best games I’d ever played in mere minutes. With hindsight, it’s no surprise.

After successfully engineering the incredible GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, a bunch of people from Rare – including the super-talented David Doak and Graeme Norgate – went on to form Free Radical Design, creating TimeSplitters: an FPS series that’s horrifically overlooked in the annals of FPS history, even though it maintains a strong cult following to this day.

Despite rave reviews, the TimeSplitters series only landed on my radar in 2003, one year after the second instalment was released. However, the world was so different back then, and it was easy to be ignorant of remarkable releases. 

In the early 2000s, you only needed to miss an issue of Edge or CVG to completely overlook a classic. Game-related TV adverts were few and far between; recommendations from friends almost always promoted safe-bet classics; crucially, the modern internet was still in its absolute infancy. 

YouTube and social media were five years away. Official game websites were rubbish. Message boards were a minefield of opinion and lies (nothing’s changed there). Vitally, internet connections – which were impressive if they delivered even 30kb/s download speeds, and that’s if you’d entered the brave new world of broadband – often stopped you from simply seeing good-quality JPEGs, preventing you from knowing what games even looked like.

Luckily, everyone had a dependable fallback. For me, my saving grace was unexpected, given the circumstances: my best friend, Richard, was a long-time Nintendo gamer who utterly contradicted my PlayStation lifestyle, but he introduced me to TimeSplitters 2, a game that remains in my all-time top ten. 

Back in my PS1 days, he had an N64, which we swapped during summers to enjoy each other’s overwhelmingly different collections of titles. Aside from those very few cross-platform games – South Park and Shadow Man come to mind – the N64 was a closed shop filled with endless exclusives. It was exciting, knowing I could try out the likes of Blast Corps, Zelda or Mario Kart in those long, endless weeks of the summer holidays.

As the new generation dawned, we kept our form: I got a PS2 and Rich had a GameCube. Games started to appear on both platforms with increasing frequency, meaning I didn’t have to wait a few months, or a long afternoon at his house, to enjoy them. One day, he picked up TimeSplitters 2: a game that took us back five years, in the best possible ways.

We both sat in his attic bedroom and he told me about this magical game that played like GoldenEye. What’s more, it was also on PlayStation 2. Nonsense, I thought. But he was right. If anything, he undersold it.

Up to that point, sixth-generation FPS games were gathering pace, but were still inconsistent. Highlights had included Medal of Honor: Frontline, Red Faction II and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. TimeSplitters 2 not only trumped all of these, but also set an impossibly high bar that even the first few Call of Duty games couldn’t match.

It was all down to the sheer amount of content the game offered. TimeSplitters 2 had everything. Even now, nearly 20 years on, I can’t understand how Free Radical managed to fit so much onto a single disc. 

Its brilliant campaign mode – including bonus games, such as the immortal Anaconda – was perfectly complemented by its seemingly endless one-player challenges, which involved monkeys, bricks, barrels, brains, zombies and more. It took the torch from Perfect Dark by delivering true single-player satisfaction, endless unlockables, as well as a British sense of humour that was starting to disappear from contemporary games.

This fun and silliness inevitably bled into a superb multiplayer experience. The daft caricatures such as demented clown Mister Giggles, B-movie alien Ozor Mox, and Snowman – who travelled via magic carpet – combined perfectly with an almost limitless suite of customization. For months, it felt like it was all we played at Rich’s house; two, three or four of us would crowd around his small bedroom TV and battle for hours. 

Sadly, it took me months to finally get TimeSplitters 2 on my own console, thanks to a simple, stupid mistake: limited pocket money, and no patience, led me to spend my cash on the original TimeSplitters at my local second-hand shop, hoping for a half-priced alternative. While it was a good game, it was a shadow of what I’d seen follow it.

When TS2 finally arrived on my PS2 during one Easter, I must’ve played it for 40 or 50 hours, without a care in the world, in the space of just a few days, spurning the likes of a still-fresh Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 in favour of those endless challenges, or multiplayer games with bots.

Sadly, we may never see a TS2 remaster; not only is the licensing still a bit of a mess, but THQ Nordic explained that a recent tease of TimeSplitters 2 was just a “joke”, driving stakes through the hearts of fans once again. However, that ruse may’ve highlighted just how many people want it, so fingers crossed. 

It’s not all bad. While I’m now largely grown up, and I barely have any time to play multiplayer FPS games, one of the geniuses behind the game – Dr Doak himself – follows me on Twitter. Not only that, but he actually spoke to me a few times, as if I’m somehow equal to him. Every time it happens, 16-year-old me shakes with excitement, and takes me back to those heady days of being sat on the end of my friend’s bed, in a stuffy attic, playing TS2 until my eyes stung.

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Top of the charts for week ending 19 October 2002:

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