Revenge Of The Cats: Ethernet is NOT your ordinarily Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter (MOFPS) game, far from it….
Rotc uses the Torque Game Engine and is cross platform, it’s still in development but a GNU/Linux version is very playable, unfortunately it is not FREE/Open Source Software (FOSS) ….at least not yet 😉
In Rotc you can’t really die like in other FPS games, instead you (and your team) win by conquering zones.
You can travel in Etherform form which is much faster and also used to regenerate health and energy, or as a CAT, the fighter – which conquer zones and shoot at enemies, the other team members.
Once a zone is free from the enemy (or the enemy is at Etherform form) , it could be conquered.
The fighting in this game is VERY cool and much different then in other FPS games
You have unlimited ammo but when you shoot your energy draws if you miss the enemy, and your health grows when you hit an enemy.
You have few different weapons one of which is homing-missile or as it called in game a sceptre.
This cool weapon could hit the target even when you are not directly aiming at him, it can also be deflected by obstacles and still reach the target – you got to see the video for it.
But how can the enemy defend itself against it you ask ? for that we have shields !
Every weapon draws different amount of energy and you can zoom in/out fast and to the last detail – I was very impressed by it.
Revenge Of The Cats: Ethernet, or just Ethernet for short. Ethernet aims to be a fast-paced, teamwork-oriented, non-stop-action multiplayer FPS game combining elements from games such as Starsiege: Tribes and Subspace/Continuum.
Players can’t really die, if they take enough damage, they simply lose their physical manifestation, which is something they can also do voluntarily.
Players have energy that constantly regenerates. Energy is both used to fire weapons as well as powering the player’s shield. While the energy used to fire a shot is restored if the shot hits an enemy, missing an enemy leaves the player with a decreased energy level and thus lowered shields which make him more vulnerable to damage.
Players have a “damage buffer” which constantly regenerates. If a player has full energy, weaker weapons don’t do enough damage with a single hit to cause “permanent” damage.
Apropos “permanent” damage: There are no health kits. Health is primarily restored by inflicting damage to enemies: If a player inflicts damage on another player, health lost by the victim is transferred to the attacker, if the attacker already has full health, the excess health “overflows” the player’s damage buffer, giving him more than 100% health until all the excess health has been removed by damage or has slowly “leaked” away.
In Ethernet, every map is divided into different zones and two teams of ethereal beings (“Reds” and “Blues”) fight over control of these zones. Players can exist in two different forms: The freely moving, indestructible “Etherform” and a humanoid, weapon-wielding physical manifestation called a “CAT”.
Players start out in Etherform and need to find a zone owned by their team in order to manifest as a CAT. As CAT, players take zones for their team simply by being inside the zone while no enemy CAT is also present in the zone. The zone then turns red or blue, depending on which team captured it. If CATs of both teams are present, the zone remains white.
The game is won if the opposing team has lost all their zones and has no more players manifested as CATs.
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A few screenshots :
Videos !
ROTC: Ethernet – Demo/Tutorial (Prototype 1.7)
Revenge Of The Cats: Ethernet – Sceptre HowTo (Prototype 1.4)
They also have an IRC channel at #rotc channel at Freenodes.
I definitely recommend you to try this game out, but read the manual before so you won’t be lost in the game (the manual is published at their website and also included with the game).