VINTAGE GAMES - Unreal Tournament

Here's a surprising confession from me: I am not very good at first person shooters. I can do a passable job on normal mode, and without selling myself short I have decent enough reflexes to shoot my way through most games with only the minimal amount of creative swearing. When you start going into games with hard and expert modes however, then I struggle like a chimp trying to grasp relativity. The problem is, I cannot aim too well and often take too long over shots. It is also probable I do not see a lot of the enemies around me – in Far Cry 1 & 2 this is less a probability and more an iron-cast certainty where most enemies can hit you from the other side of the world.
    But I digress. In single player this is not quite so important but suddenly gets an urgent wake up call the moment multi-player comes into play. I am not a gracious loser unfortunately, but then the people I play more often than not are not gracious winners. The people I often end up pitted against are so good it is actually embarrassing, even when you take into account you are fighting people who match your 'skill' level, but who then go away and do a Rocky-esque training montage to absolutely slaughter you the next time around. Since I have lots of money to smoke in a huge pound-note reefer and lots of models to sit in hot tubs with, I have no time for such things really. Which is why I have never played shooters online. The ideal situation for me therefore was the feeling of playing online without the inconvenience of actually fighting all the low-vocabulary fuckwits you often meet online. Hence, Unreal Tournament.

     Oh, the game does its best with the smack talk, but at least it isn't 'U SUXORRZ! LOLZ' and nobody tries to teabag your corpse afterwards. The game is pretty old now, and shows it. Skyboxes that looked so sophisticated back in the day glitch hilariously when you fly the camera into them, and the random pointless types of coloured lighting that the Unreal engine loved to use in such abundance are present and correct, making the game feel less like a deathmatch arena and more like an industrial discotheque. It is however, still the most demonically fast deathmatch game in history and is balanced to an absolute tee. I am quite serious.

This is completely and totally awesome.

Unreal Tournament is the creaky great great grandad of the current breed of Digital Extremes productions such as Gears of War, made back when they were the edgy challengers to Quake's crown and not what they are now, specifically corporate manufacturers of sludge brown low-wall crouching tedium. Now, I never really played the Quake games, so I will not compare them, but I shall mention that Unreal Tournament is still the best entry in the entire Unreal series. The first Unreal, though looking damn pretty for the day, has not aged well. It is a pretty boring and uninspiring game, the first levels containing so few enemies they might as well have just been tech showcases. The second Unreal, though looking absolutely luscious, was pretty mediocre. Yes, it had a few flashes of brilliance here and there but by and large it was just quietly bland.
            The Unreal Tournament games fared somewhat better. The successors to Unreal Tournament, specifically editions 2003 and 2004, amped up their graphics engines and level design to improve what made the original so good. And yet despite all the additions, the huge levels and new explosive weapons, they never quite recaptured the near perfect balance of the original Unreal Tournament. UT2003's big cock-up was the inexplicable removal of the sniper rifle, replacing it instead with the horrific lightning gun. Gee, thanks guys. It also wasn't anywhere near as fast as Unreal Tournament had been, and dropped the best deathmatch mode in the whole damned game, specifically Assault mode. Oh but they kept domination, so that's good...if you're a sadist.

The most satisfying feeling in the world is pictured just above.

Which is why I play Unreal Tournament mostly these days, and their successors lurk largely at the bottom of my dusty games boxes. Okay, so UT isn't looking too hot, but I cannot underestimate my main point; this game is fast. Make no mistake, thinking is barely an option. Find ammo, kill, choose spot, shoot bang bang bang. Each mode used this aspect in a different way, and I find it astonishing no game has done it like this since. You had standard deathmatch and capture the flag modes, but also two other variants which I have mentioned before, domination and assault. The weaker of the two is domination mode, essentially a 'king of the castle' game where the capturing of certain energy points on the map adds to a points score: the longer you hold them, the more points you get. The idea is to keep hold of them as long as possible, though there are three points so you have your work cut out. The point counting seems random at best however and occasionally you feel like you are playing the game yourself as your teammates run like headless chickens constantly getting their arses handed to them by superior enemy AI. Not that the mode isn't fun, I just mean be prepared to do most of the work yourself. Although why Digital Extremes decided to retain this mode and drop the far superior Assault mode is beyond me.
    Assault mode is brilliant fun. You and your teammates assault a frigate, castle or what have you and then you have to defend it for longer than it took you to attack them the last time round. Admittedly, when the team numbers grow it becomes less a strategic assault and more a bloodbath in a shopping centre, but hey, that's the fun of it. The weapons are largely souped up versions of weapons from Unreal, and thank goodness they are souped up. The ripper, a weapon that fires sawblades at high speed, is one of the happier weapons passed over, whereas the Ges-Bio rifle, a rifle that fires toxic sludge is just plain annoying. The rocket launcher is a brilliant little weapon that is capable of launching multiple rockets depending on how long you hold down the fire button (with a maximum of eight), and the sniper rifle is one of the best from any videogame ever. Which is logically why it was removed from the follow up game, we can't be having fun can we?

Pictured: Fun.

My memories of this game largely involve getting absolutely destroyed at it by my dorm-mates back in university, when we all needed a fast and furious game that worked on everybody's PCs. Needless to say, I preferred playing single-player. This is because the bots are surprisingly effective, all of them obeying the games' rules and having no more advantage over you than you would expect, and their skill level is completely scalable. This does lead to problems, given that I prefer to play at a slightly lower difficulty and therefore my teammates do the tactical equivalent of the charge of the light brigade because hey, what's an energy turret gun if not for charging at? Annoyingly however it does score the members of your teams individually, meaning there is little or no incentive to let anyone else capture the flag or whatever. So to avoid the embarrassment of an 'average' skilled bot actually scoring more highly than you at capture the flag you often find yourself crossing your fingers and hoping that they drop the buggered thing so you can pull a chariots of fire and run for your sodding life, flag in hand.

The Game of the Year edition had a ton of extra maps, which vary in quality, but which do manage to pass the time once you are done with the single-player campaign. It never quite recaptured the magic, even though UT 2004 reintroduced the sniper rifle, and once Half Life 2 came out online-only shooters of that scale were pretty much a thing of the past. True, there has been a reinvigoration courtesy of the Half Life creators themselves, but the 'pure deathmatch' game never really made much of a comeback. Plus the Unreal and Quake franchises pretty much gave up in their second and fourth instalments respectively. Now that the whole rivalry between the two franchises has died, its fascinating looking back. You should too, and at gog.com for barely £6...why the hell not?