Written by Jason Cisarano  on February 29, 2008

Accessory Review: TN Games' 3rd Space Vest will bring out the masochist in you as it provides force feedback across your entire body.

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If your games aren't giving you the adrenaline rush they once did, then TN Games' 3rd Space Vest may be just the thing for you. It's a departure from any other force feedback or rumblepad device you've seen before. Instead of just vibrating in your hands, the vest actually contains pneumatic cells that actually strike your body, front and back as you're struck in-game.

If you're a long-time Gaming Target reader, you'll know that I got the chance to try out a prototype at last year's Game Developer's Conference, and liked what I felt. Well, TN was back at GDC this year with the production model of the vest now available from their website, and they've definitely tightened things up since last year. The vest has some bulk and weight to it, so strapping it on feels something like putting on a military-style flak jacket. It's well-built, and looks like it will stand up to plenty of hours of gaming. TN offers the vest in two sizes and two colors, camouflage and black. Once you've got it zipped up, and buckled to snug it down, you're ready to jump into the game. The vest ships with two games: TN's Space Incursion and Call of Duty 2. Space Incursion looks a lot like an Unreal Tournament 2004 sort of thing, with a few added enemies that prefer hand-to-hand combat. They'll get close to you, punch you in the chest or back, and show off what the vest can do.



And what it does, basically, is beat you up as you play. The pneumatic cells are a bit stronger than they were last year, increasing the immersion factor, but by no means approaching a painful level. There are four cells in the front of the vest and four in the back, and hits on the vest correspond to hits in the game. If you feel a hit to your lower left back, you'll probably want to spin around and look for enemies off to the left. It's like a more detailed version of the hit indicators that appear in a lot of shooters to show you where enemy fire is coming from. I could imagine dedicated players using the vest to get a leg up on the competition in on-line multiplayer play. On top of that, of course, there's the immersion factor. Just putting on the vest and cinching down the buckles made me feel like I was gearing up for a battle. Then, I jumped into the game and started looking for some action. Unlike most times I game, I actually wanted to get hit, so I tried to put myself close to some bad guys and gave them first hit, as it were. As the bullets started flying, I quickly got hit from a few directions at once. It definitely caught my attention and helped ramp up my intensity level and draw me deeper into the action.

If you enjoy that sort of role-playing, you'll also enjoy the helmet currently in the works. It's not available yet, but the test model at GDC looked a whole lot like the current helmets used by the US military, except with a series of six pneumatic cells built inside to slap you in the head as you play. The helmet put the whole package over the top: getting hit in the head in the middle of a game may not sound like fun, but all I can say is, Уdon't knock it until you've tried it.Ф



Right now, TN only lists native support for the vest in the two games that ship with it. They do offer a driver download that adds vest support to about ten games, including Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis, Medal of Honor Airborne, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and several others. They also offer mods for Quake 4 and Doom 3 that use the vest, so there is a decent list of games currently usable with the vest.

At the same time, TN has several other impact-generating products in the works. They're designing a version of the vest specifically for racing games to give players the feel of g-forces during acceleration, braking, and turns. That one will have ten contact points instead of the eight in the current vest, and they'll have a much larger surface area to give more of a dispersed pressure feeling instead of the impact in the standard vest. Another vest is intended for RPG fans and will have force drivers that mimic the feeling of getting slashed with a sword.