Tron
2.0 captures
the retro-futurism of the 1982 classic while supercharging
the experience
with 21st century
visuals. Not only are the custom pixel shaders of Monolith's
Jupiter engine successful at recreating Tron's trademark
digital glow, but the color saturation of the near-monochromatic
levels injects a Jolly Rancher tartness into the phrase "eye
candy." If you appreciate the Lite Brite look of today's
case mods, you'll love the look of this game.
All is not quite perfect with the
graphics, however. The landscapes' sharp edges and bright
seams produce excessive aliasing. All the screenshots you'll
see here were created with 6x FSAA at 1152 x 864 and 8x anisotropic
filtering. Higher resolutions leave text uncomfortably small
on the game's menus and HUD because these elements fail to
scale as the resolution increases - a common but unfortunate
shortcoming of the game's interface.
It's regrettable that the
audio fails to rise to the standard set by the graphics,
missing an opportunity
to lift this title to something beyond "ooh, ah" territory.
With rare exception, there's nothing memorable about these
riffs, and you'll be hard pressed to hear anything approaching
what might be called a melody. Ambient techno sounds do add
to the atmosphere, however positional audio is buggy to nonexistent.
Casting features Babylon 5's Bruce Boxleitner returning in
his portrayal of Alan Bradley. The voice acting for the main
character, Jet Bradley, is just painful.
But how does the game play?
Very, very well. The Light Cycles are fun, fast, and very
challenging - too
challenging for some. The game's first patch allows players
to skip the races if they find them to be unbeatable. "System
upgrades" give the player choice in how to manage skill
sets, providing an RPG-like element to the game. Pacing is
varied, as are the objectives. Shoot-em-up, find-the-key
("permissions" in Tron's vernacular) and the much-maligned
jumping puzzles are all part of Tron's gameplay. Stealth
play is attempted by the developers but regrettably is barely
playable due to the all-too realistic ability of enemies
to detect your approach. Even with this and other shortcomings,
Tron 2.0 is a great time worthy of any gamer's attention. -
Last Update 07/13/03
Special Notes: Locations of build notes
in Tron 2.0 are dynamic and may not always coincide with
the locations presented in this walkthrough. Also, adhering
to this walkthrough will bring you to the high score of v9.8.3,
despite the final screenshots showing v9.8.1. This walkthrough
is a composite of several passes through each level, and
at one point I
inadvertently loaded the wrong save game. This error was
caught late, and finally identified by Hobag via email. To
make things more complicated, the 1.42 patch changes the
version numbers, raising the best score to v10.0.3.
Acknowledgments:
- Ranma378 for posting the
solution to the IO Node puzzle in Alan's Desktop PC.
- _Absynthe_, FlyingCodeMonkey,
and Duncan (via email) for clueing me in that the
build notes' spawn points are dynamic.
- GameFAQ's Tron 2.0
Codes and Secrets (sorry - GameFAQs does not allow
direct hyperlinks.)
- Peter Oliver for reporting the z-Lot that drops an Alpha
Corrode subroutine in Primary
Digitizing, and for suggesting the Subroutine
Finder.
- Tronfaq for
posting that
the Staging Pit locker changes
each time you play.
- David Schenet for emailing that Ma3a is vulnerable to
Thorne's attack in the Progress
Bar.
- Hobag for pinpointing the missing two build points, and
for identifying a Code Optimization Ware in the Firewall level.
- Jason for alerting me to the new high
score of 10.0.3, implemented after the 1.42 patch.
