Mirror's Edge Third Person Hack
Alec pinpoints Mirror's Edge's failures and successes like a laser-guided missile of critical accuracy in last week's Wot I Think. When playing it recently, I was extremely surprised to find the game making mistakes that were ironed out of the Tomb Raider/Prince of Persia games years ago, as I haplessly tried to guide the suicidal Faith away from her determined attempts to plunge off every rooftop. I couldn't help but feel this pro-active Samaritans simulator might be interesting to play in the third-person, so I could at least see what ledge she would be aiming to plummet from next. My wish has been granted.
And like the wishes of malevolent genies, it's a cursed result. Using a cunning-o-hack, Dutch YouTube user, jbdvrock, has found a way to rotate through various cameras, including a behind-the-back (as opposed to over-the-shoulder) perspective of Faith's activity.
However, it's pretty pointless. Which shouldn't be a surprise, as Dice had no intention of the game being played this way. This is first revealed in the hilarious running animations the Faith model uses, with her arms flailing wildly. But, as the evil genie planned, it doesn't aid with seeing what's coming up at all. In fact, now Faith's just in the way. However, it's still interesting enough to play with, and other camera angles let you get some much better screenshots if you're into that sort of thing.
To achieve this, follow the following:
Go to "Documents\EA Games\Mirror's Edge\TdGame\Config\"
Open the file "TDInput".
Then stick the following line in with the other Fkey commands:
Bindings=(Name="F4",Command="FreeFlightCamera",Control=False,Shift=False,Alt=False)
(Be careful when pasting this in that no weird blips happen with the quotemarks.)
Then in game, F4 will cycle through a few different cameras. Be aware there's two third-person views, one that will let you turn the camera, but not Faith, and one that will let you turn Faith but not move the camera up and down. You'll need the latter, obviously, but it's why you can't see ahead.
Thanks to GameZine for bringing this to our attention. And to see quite how silly it all looks, here's jbdvrock's video of the mode in action: