Altitude
Where/when/why? From the steam store, during the 2009/10 holidays sale for $7.50. Maybe off the back of a free weekend? I think there were two or three other friends who bought the game at the same time, but as to who originally played or suggested playing it, and how and why I or they came across it, well, my memory lacks those details.
What/who? Altitude is a 2D dog-fighting which means plane-fighting game. It’s pretty much a multiplayer-only experience, too. It’s been free-to-play since 2014, but still completely without microtransactions, so far as I can tell.
It’s by Nimbly Games, a 2-man indie responsible for three other games I’d never heard of before I clicked on their website.
First install? Not at all! Apparently I logged up 29 hours of it, probably all in those few weeks around christmas 2009/10. It was hot outside and I was recently unemployed. My main Altitude companion had been a friend who no longer plays videogamez at all, so revisiting it was imbued with a hint of sad nostalgia.
Play time? Just the requisite hour, maybe a little over. I’m unlikely to spend too much time on anything I’m revisiting having already played thoroughly in the past, because hey - this is a big task.
How’d it go? I was sort of expecting the Altitude world to be dead, but that wasn’t completely true. All but two servers on the list were empty, and one of these auto-kicked anyone with a ping above a certain threshold (which ruled me out). The only option left had a couple of people fucking around, trying to do trick-shots in a ball game dominated by bots. It started filling up though, and a couple of map cycles later we had a full 6v6 match on our hands.
Everyone else seemed to know each other, and they chatted in text with a familiarity that felt impenetrable to me as an outsider. They were also a lot better at it than me, rusty and never more than a mediocre loopy and biplaner even in my heyday, so I died a lot and helped out little with many objectives. But honestly, it was still fun, and it still felt playable even though I live in Australia and the only accessible server was (I think) UK.
The thing I always liked about Altitude, other than it’s easy-to-learn difficult-to-master field, other than it’s casual dive-in dive-out pub feel, other than simple aesthetic functionality, was the micro-moments of glory it could produce, moments in which someone would make an incredible play (say a goal-line block or a miraculous survival-and-turn kill) that only a handful of players in the same vicinity might witness, which would then be lost to the world foerever, the only acknowledgement of which would through the text chat in rushed acronyms while the match continued around it. I saw a handful of such things during my brief return to Altitude, and it was wonderful.
Come back to it later? In a parallel life I join the tiny community of dedicated Altitude players. They become the online-family I’ve always craved. I get good at the game, real good. I participate in the competitive league and end up featuring on youtube vods to be watched several hundred times. My evenings become a haze of lazy banter and emotionally divested victories. But not in this life, Altitude.
next up is Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs