Unreal

Moby ID: 330
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Description official descriptions

The prison transport ship Vortex Rikers was on its way to a penal moon colony when an unplanned course change led to it being caught in the gravity well of an uncharted planet. Not many aboard survive the crash landing, and those that do find this new world to be one full of strange beauty, but also many dangers. Not only is it full of dangerous wildlife, but it is the setting of a conflict between the ruthless Skaarj and the peaceful natives they have enslaved, the Nali. As one of the surviving prisoners, the player must escape the wreckage of the Rikers, navigate through Nali villages and temples, Skaarj mines and refineries, other crashed ships and many more locations, with the ultimate goal of finding a way off the planet.

Unreal is a first-person shooter. Its story is mostly told through short text messages, deciphered via a translator from computer stations, personal logs, books and signs. The game features a weapon arsenal of ten guns, each with two firing modes. Besides standard pistols, rocket/grenade launchers, miniguns and sniper rifles, there are such items as the Bio Rifle, which fires blobs of toxic waste which stick to walls and enemies, the Flak Cannon, which sprays deadly shrapnel, and the Razorjack, which shoots spinning blades that ricochet off walls. The secondary firing mode might allow a charged shot, sacrifice accuracy for speed, or even make it possible to guide the projectile.

The game also includes a multiplayer mode. Ten deathmatch maps are available for free-for-all, team deathmatch or a variant called "King of the Hill". A special mode is DarkMatch, for which one special map is available. In DarkMatch, the map is without any illumination, and players must use a searchlight to see anything. The deathmatch modes can be played against bots, and the game also offers a cooperative version of the single player campaign.

Unreal introduced the game engine of the same name, which employs such tricks as colored lighting, curved surfaces, reflective surfaces, "detail" textures (via multi-texturing), and real time interactive mixed digital music.

Spellings

  • 虚幻世界 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

82 People (65 developers, 17 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 90% (based on 42 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 177 ratings with 11 reviews)

What I consider to be the best game ever made.

The Good
Unreal is what I call the perfect game. It was released in '98 and even though "Half-Life" topped the charts, it didn't give you the awesome feeling of being in a colossal world, the big change of environment, the stellar graphics, the great replay value, as huge enemies, as awesome soundtrack, and as great final boss. Now I've played Half-Life. I love the game, I even bought the complete pack in Steam and I've looked at both games and Unreal simply stands out as being the better game. Anyway, in Unreal you get to play through gigantic maps with many incredible weapons. You fight your way through a place called Na Pali to save the peaceful inhabitants called the Nali from their evil overlords called the Raj. Depending on what difficulty you play it can take you weeks to finish this game.

The Bad
Some weapons you can't reload and is sometimes very necessary because you don't know how much ammo is left in a clip.

Too much to read. You get a translator witch picks up messages from all kinds of places, you don't need to read them but can be very helpful sometimes. Some times it will feel like there's a message to be read every 5 meters.

The Bottom Line
A must play game!! You can pick up the Unreal anthology very cheap these days. Out of all the old-school fps games you need to play this one the biggest priority. It can't apply to all gamers but for you who love old Sci-Fi games you need to play this.

Windows · by buckarooskij (2) · 2010

An immersing experience

The Good
Some of the best music ever to be composed for a game (mostly thanks to Alexander "Siren" Brandon), with such memorable tracks as Dusk Horizon carefully placed inside an exceptionally beautiful and an intriguing alien world that was, at its release time, the most detailed ever seen in a game make for the experience that is truly Unreal. The world is believable and you as the story unfolds a little bit at a time you find yourself anxious to find the next piece of information.

The Bad
The game is excessively long and it may be hard to keep yourself interested during a few of the maps that leave room for improvement. The story is only carried through the aural translator messages and doesn't really get that deep at any point. There's nothing special about the ending. The shooting gets a little repetitive at a point as it often tends to in first person shooters.

The Bottom Line
At its time, Unreal had the engine that for the first time surpassed id software's 3D-engine technology. For that alone it is worth a look by any serious gamer. It is one of the most beautiful and atmospheric games I have ever encountered and is able to completely immerse the player inside the world that combines alien and mythical elements. I tend to look at the shooting in Unreal as somewhat irrelevant and would probably advise anyone only now finding it to stick to the easy difficulty. What makes Unreal so great is something different, something that gives me hope the first person shooter genre is going to eventually evolve into something less mechanic and violent.

Windows · by Antti Salminen (58) · 2001

Unreal is strange, and sadly it doesn't hold up as well as its offspring.

The Good
Back in 1998, Unreal looked like no other game anyone had ever seen. It surpassed Quake II visually, and it was one of the few "Quake 2 killers" to turn a few heads. The engine was brilliant in its design, it ran silky smooth even on older computers and looked good regardless of quality, this tradition is continued today as each iteration of the engine looks great and plays great even on slightly dated computers. The tech was always the best part of this game.

The music is nice too, while the galaxy sound system sounds relatively dated in range, there are a few catchy and weird tunes in Unreal.

The weapons are... erm, interesting to say the least. Unreal was one of the first games to really stray from the standard First Person Shooter arsenal, offering two triggers for each weapon and extremely strange functions. Many of the weapons are tweaked and reused in Unreal Tournament and are still being used, although others, such as the Razor jack, dispersion pistol, and 8-ball have been sitting out the last few games. The stinger made a surprising return in Unreal Tournament 3 though.

Along with its strange weaponry, the environments were highly immersive - for the time at least - and the game used a design that was new and interesting.

The AI is decent, and botmatches can be fun, but they don't hold up compared to the much better Unreal Tournament.

The Bad
The problem with Unreal is it simply doesn't hold up. While some shooters stand the test of time, others simply lose their charm or playability in the modern world. Unreal falls into the ladder category, and is not given much attention anymore, and when replaying the game 11 years later, its not hard to see why.

First of all, the map design is a bit haphazard. Maps are a little too large, lack complexity, and get redundant and repetitive. While the omission of key hunts and switch runs may please some people, the levels feel like they are on rails and after awhile, you will just want to get off the ride. Despite its bizarre weapons, it just isn't fun to shoot the monsters. Seeing as there are only 6, excluding the annoyingly creepy bug things and wall huggers, there isn't much to shoot at and it gets boring and repetitive only about an hour in. A shooter that makes the task of blasting monsters seem boring simply isn't worth playing.

The multiplayer world is empty, and not many people played it even before the titanic Unreal Tournament showed up, due to a hastily slapped on netcode that required patch after patch after patch to get working. Playing with bots is fun, until you remember that Unreal Tournament has much better weapons and much better bots to fight.

The Bottom Line
Unreal is a strange game in truth, the monsters are strange, the world is strange, the weapons are strange. The sad fact is though, Unreal just isn't that much fun. At the time, the game had great graphics and everyone was marveling at those pretty sights, but looking back on the game without the technical marvels reveals a mediocre, relatively by the book shooter with lacking design. Some may regard it as a classic, but in reality they are talking about the games much more accomplished offspring - Unreal Tournament. Unreal will leave on in UT, but the game will ultimately be forgotten for what it was, or rather, what it wasn't.

Windows · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2009

[ View all 11 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Opinions from FPS fans? Unicorn Lynx (181780) Nov 8, 2011

Trivia

Avatar

One of director James Cameron's pet projects after Titanic was an epic sci-fi extravaganza called Avatar, much hyped in Hollywood circles at the time and poised to redefine the notion of a truly alien world on the big screen.

The project fell apart initially, but the scriptment (a hybrid between a script and a treatment ) by James Cameron still exists. Interestingly, you can find quite a few similarities between it and Unreal:

  • Both feature a basic plot premise where, by virtue of circumstances mostly beyond his control, a reluctant hero becomes the saviour of the native race of an alien planet forced to mine their land for ore of utmost importance to an invading race coming from the skies. In both cases the saviour is seen by the natives as someone who also came from the skies and is thus initially met with some alarm or distrust only to be later hailed as a pseudo-messiah.
  • The native race is called "Na'vi" in Avatar and "Nali" in Unreal. The physical description of the Na'vi by Cameron can be visualised as basically a cross between the Nalis' tall, lean, slender bodies and the IceSkaarjs' blueish skin colour patterns, facial features, ponytail-like dreadlocks and caudal appendages.
  • The Nali in Unreal worship goddess Vandora. The home planet of the Na'vi in Avatar (which the Na'vi worship as a goddess entity) is named Pandora.
  • In Avatar, one of the most dazzling alien settings described is a huge set of sky mountains, "like floating islands among the clouds". One of the most memorable vistas in Unreal is Na Pali, thousands of miles up in the cloudy sky amidst a host of floating mountains. The main sky mountain range in Avatar is called "Hallelujah Mountains". The main Unreal level set in Na Pali is called "Na Pali Haven". Both include beautiful visual references to waterfalls streaming down the cliffs and dissolving into the clouds below.
  • The Earth ship in Avatar is called "ISV-Prometheus". One of the levels in Unreal takes place in the wreck of a Terran ship called "ISV-Kran". Even more striking, in the expansion pack Return to Na Pali, the crashed ship the player is asked to salvage is called "Prometheus".
  • One of the deadly examples of local fauna in Unreal is the Manta, essentially a flying manta-ray. In Avatar, one of the most lethal aerial creatures is the Bansheeray, basically a flying manta-ray. The expansion Return to Na Pali even features a Giant Manta, while in Avatar one of the most formidable predators is a giant Bansheeray, which Cameron dubbed "Great Leonopteryx".
  • In the two stories (especially Return to Na Pali, on Unreal's end), a plot point arises from the fact the precious ore behind the invasion of the planet ("tarydium" in Unreal, "unobtanium" in Avatar) causes problems in the scanners.

Unreal was in development for several years before its release in 1998. The Avatar scriptment was probably finished as early as 1996-97. Bearing all the above in mind the temptation to start wondering about further suspicious parallels may be quite strong, but in spite of these similarities both titles have few else in common and many aspects actually veer off in wildly different directions. Even so, the coinciding factors can make for an interesting minutia comparison.

Bots

Unreal was the first FPS shooter to official include Bots, A.I. characters which mimic the actions of live players during multiplayer deathmatches. Although previously fan-programmed Bots had been created for games like Quake and DOOM, Unreal was the first game where the Bots were officially included by the game's programmers.

Many features of the Bot A.I. were used to program the A.I. of the game's single player enemies, particularly the Skaarj. As a result Unreal's single player enemies had a degree of flexibility previously unseen in their ability to fight, manuever and navigate levels.

Combined attack

The "combined attack" mentioned in the manual applies to the shock rifle. Fire a plasma blob with the secondary fire button, then, without moving, fire a shot with the primary fire button. The shot will pierce the plasma blob in midair, exploding it (with a nice blast radius).

Cover art

The reason the jewel case is so prominently displayed in the box design is because there were four different jewel case cover designs, all of them screen shots (look carefully at the second box scan and you'll see "Actual Gameplay Screen (2/4)"). This was a clever way to show off the game's graphic superiority.

Cut features

Some Unreal-Previews in 1997 told us about some proposed features which didn't make it into the final game. For example: - the character can morph to four other shapes - you can build your own deathmatch-arenas and - connect them via Internet. So you can - walk from one Deathmatch-Arena to another via teleporters...

Eightball

The eightball weapon in the game is called like that because it originally fired 8 missiles. Play testing revealed 6 made a more balanced weapon, but the name stuck.

Engine

The Unreal engine had a unique feature. It could render using DirectX, OpenGl, and Software Mode. It even included support for 3dfx Glide drivers. Most 3d engines before and since only support DirectX or OpenGL, but not both. It took 4 years to design. It had several features that weren't included in the Quake II engine: * Volumetric Lighting: An effect for generating fog, smoke or plasma. It was used in great effect for obscuring view. * Dynamic Lighting: A real time render of colored lights. You could mix colored light sources to produce other colors. You also could see moving shadows

German version

Violence was reduced for the German version of Unreal. The "reduced gore" option is missing from the menus, enemies simply disappear instead of being gibbed, and severed heads also vanish instead of flying through the air.

But most notable are changes to the opening level: Corpses and blood stains were removed as well as background sound effects and scripted fight scenes - drastically changing the game's atmosphere. Some pain screams and similar background sound effects are also missing in later levels.

Graphics

Unreal has a lot of "scene" tricks, like colored lighting, dithered texturing in software for 8-bit displays, XMs/ITs for music, music from scene musicians, and other engine enhancements. The name "Unreal" is the same name used by a pioneering demo from Future Crew.

Microsoft

The game's technical advances at the time attracted so much attention that even Bill Gates himself requested a meeting, in absolute secrecy, with the developers of Unreal. The meeting took place in early 1997, but by that time GT Interactive had already acquired publishing rights for the game.

References

  • Do you remember the Pirate game in Orlando's Disney World: "Pirates of the Caribbean"? Go to the level "Serpent Canyon". When the boat enters the very long and very dark cave, turn on your flashlight and look to your left. You will find an interesting sign.
  • The Demonlord you meet in level 29 shoots rockets at you - but they aren't the normal rockets! On them, the Canadian flag is printed along with the word 'PEACEMAKER'.
  • The prison ship you arrived on was called the USS Vortex Rikers. It shares a name with Riker's Island prison. Coincidence?

Soundtrack

A soundtrack CD by Straylight Productions was released in 1998. It can be bought at http://www.synsoniq.com.

Tracklist: 1. Main Title - Vertex Rikers - Dusk Horizon - Dig - Chizra - Chizra Ceremony - Visions - Ruins - Skytown - Cellars of Dasa - Erosion - Isotoxin - Crater - Bluff Eversmoking - The Queen - Guardian of Stone - Wargate - The Fifth Hub - End Title - Unreal Euro Dance Mix

The entire music soundtrack is also available in the music folder on both the CD and when you have installed the game. However, the music-format is in UMX and can't be played on your default player. You will need a program that run that sort of format, you can find it here on http://www.modplug.com

UMX

Unreal re-introduced a music format that was popularized on the Amiga computers. The UMX format is a variation of the Mod file.

Mod files are packed files that contain instrument samples and tracker formatted music. The Amiga had dedicated hardware that could load and play instrument samples at various speeds to produce different pitches.

Awards

  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #78 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #26 in the "Readers' All-Time Top 50 Games Poll"

Information also contributed by Alan Chan, Emepol, Felix Knoke, Ghostbreed, Manfred Glubber, MAT, PCGamer77, re_fold, Rúben Alvim, Scott Monster, Silverblade, Zaghadka and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Trixter.

Macintosh added by Ace of Sevens.

Additional contributors: Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, erc, oct, Patrick Bregger, Talos, MrFlibble.

Game added October 28, 1999. Last modified March 25, 2024.