Unreal Tournament

aka: Tournament, UT, UT99
Moby ID: 587
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Unreal Tournament is completely different from Unreal: it is now mainly based on multiplayer, like Quake 3.

At the beginning, you have to play classic deathmatch rounds. After you have successfully won some of them, a new game mode becomes available, domination. In domination there are about three or four different areas scattered around the map to be controlled by your team. For a certain amount of seconds you control one area, a point is added to your score. The more areas you control, the faster your team's score rises. When you or the other team reaches a certain score, the game is over. The third mode is called capture the flag, every team has a flag to defend and tries to capture the other team's flag to score a point.

The fourth game mode is called assault. This mode requires completion of real missions, such as attacking an enemy base and destroying a specific object in it. Again, there are two teams, the defenders and the attackers. You have to complete the mission in a certain time, for example five or ten minutes. If you were successful, your team has to defend this time and the other team attacks. But the attacking team now only has as much time as you needed to attack.

All these modes are either playable in single or multiplayer mode. If playing alone, you have a large menu with orders you can give your bots. Also, all weapons were redesigned, and some new ones are added.

Spellings

  • アンリアル トーナメント - Japanese spelling
  • 浴血戰場 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 虚幻竞技场 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

89 People (88 developers, 1 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 89% (based on 76 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 325 ratings with 11 reviews)

Under Linux, it just works

The Good
Loki did a fantastic job eliminating the bugs that had been creeping into UT since its original release. The installer is fantastic, and the game play is functionally the same as under Windows. It's a very smooth experience under Linux; I was happily surprised.

The Bad
It took a VERY long time for the Linux version to become fully playable. Epic and GT had slow development/release cycles in the beginning, but Loki solved all that.

The Bottom Line
A great skinable first-person shooter with great network play.

Linux · by Kees Cook (26) · 2001

Okay conversion of a great game

The Good
t's Unreal Tournament...on Dreamcast. That in itself is pretty impressive. For a long time, console ports of FPS games were always compromises. This did a great job of showing the DC was, for the time at least, able to keep up with the latest games. Of course, that's only part of the equation. Unreal Tournament on Dreamcast has a rather complicated history and must be judged not only on its merits, but relative to its PC and PS2 counterparts as well as its Dreamcast rival, Quake 3.

Quake 3 was its nearest competitor and the easiest comparison to make. Unreal Tournament really shines here, basically doubling all Quake's accomplishments with eight players instead of four, 71 maps instead of 32, 12 weapons with two functions each instead of 9 single-function weapons and an extra game type, domination. The translocator in the Capture the Flag and Domination games greatly changes the game as well. Basically Quake 3 has little in the way of significant gameplay advancements over the original Quake. You merely jump, aim and shoot, whereas Unreal Tournament has much more complex and inventive weapons as well as numerous new options.

Most of the options from PC are here, including practice with bots, the deathmatch, capture the flag and domination game types. It actually comes with more maps out of the box, with a good number of additions in the deathmatch section. Graphics are quite good by Dreamcast standards, looking about what a fairly mid-range PC could accomplish.

It also edges out the PS2 version in terms of sheer number of maps and the textures look somewhat better. More importantly, it supports Internet play with up to eight players while the PS2 was limited to four players via split screen or LAN. While the PS2 is limited to the default controller, Dreamcast allows use of a keyboard and mouse, which are general held to be the preferable method to control a first-person shooter.

The Bad
Unfortunately, only one each keyboard and mouse are allowed per system and they take two controller slots, limiting you to three players per system, tops. More importantly, it limits other players to the controller, which unfortunately is pretty sucky. A lot of this is Sega's fault for making such a limited controller compared tot he PS2 or really any other controller that's come out since 1996 or so. As you need to be able to move in two axes and aim in two axes, the single stick and face buttons are taken to begin with, leaving you with nothing but the D-pad and two triggers. As each weapon has two triggers and you need to be able to jump as well, so something important is going to inconveniently go on the D-pad.

The developers don't really help the situation by only giving you three control options (plus axis-inversion) rather than letting you customize things to your liking. The only option that gives you both triggers on the controller triggers is Goldeneye-style, where the stick move and turns you. I didn't want that. Besides the lack of buttons, the feel of the stick just isn't precise enough for this kind of game, leading you to have to use ridiculous amounts of auto aim.

While the Dreamcast's textures look a little better than PS2's, it doesn't measure up graphically to that version, much less the PC. The problems are mainly in the effects. The overshield belt is now opaque instead of the translucent effect seen on other platforms. The swelling effect is gone, which means the vaccuum chamber in Pressure produces a rather unspectacular death and the fatboy mutator is out.

Other areas have been simplified as well. Armor is now a straight number rather than the separate armor for head, torso and legs seen on the PC and PS2. There is no more ducking, either. Both are presumably because of the control compromises. More importantly, instead of the five character models seen on PC and PS2, there is now only a single model: male soldier. While this model has a nice variety of skins that largely do a decent job of hiding that's it's only one model, the loss is very much felt. This is made even more annoying by the fact that the Skaarj character Dominator is depicted on the cover, despite not appearing in the game along with many other cool bits added in the official free expansion packs, even though these were available well before the Dreamcast version hit. You also won't be able to play rune games, for instance.

The loss that is felt the most is assault mode. Apparently, the existing maps didn't fit in Dreamcast's memory and rather than redesigning them or comign up with new maps, the mode was cut all together. While this still leaves it with one more mode than Quake III, it comes up short compared to other versions of Unreal Tournament.

While the game itself supports eight players, many maps have an actual limit that is lower than this presumably because of memory constraints again. Only five out of the forty-six deathmatch maps support the full complement and only about half the domination and capture the flag maps. Well under half the maps support four-player split-screen as well.

A lot of the appeal of the PC game was its expandability. Of course, this being Dreamcast game, there isn't anywhere to put downloaded content and it unfortunately didn't ship with enough to make up for this loss except in the area of maps. You'll find the list of mutators pathetically short, I've already explained the problems with modes and character models and you might even find yourself wanting for Domination maps.

There are also a few problems that really apply to every version of the game, such as the sometimes-wonky script-based AI. For instance, in the map Pressure, there is a vacuum chamber with a rocket launcher inside that has a button on the side that will kill anyone who enters. The bots repeatedly saw me standing by the button, but ran right in anyway.

Unfortunately, as Sega.net is no longer operating, all the good points of online play are moot since it doesn't work anymore. More annoyingly, two maps are locked until you log into Sega.net. As I had broadband Internet and was unable to find the elusive broadband adapter, I never did this and now can't play these maps.

The Bottom Line
Unreal Tournament is a good game that unfortunately got a bit cramped when Secret Level tried to stuff it into Sega's little box. The lack of system memory and poor controls when trying to use the standard controller make it the weakest release of the game. On the other hand, it holds up quite well compared to other first person shooters on the Dreamcast. While Quake III handled a little better thanks to needing fewer buttons and had a good variety of player model, the sheer number of options (as well as marginally better graphics) make Unreal Tournament the winner out of these two.

However, this isn't terribly important now as the game is rather old and anyone who's reading this almost surely has a PC that can run it quite well unless there's some die-hard out there using the Dreamcast web browser. The PC version is better in every imaginable fashion unless you really like split-screen. The only real reason to buy the Dreamcast edition is to see how well the port went. This answers is that it went about as well as could be expected considering the system's limitations. It's still a very good game, but buying this particular version doesn't make a lot of sense unless you're just curious.

Dreamcast · by Ace of Sevens (4479) · 2006

The first fully-balanced 1st-person shooter.

The Good
Unreal Tournament has to be the pinnacle of "1st-person shooter" games. There's just too many reasons why, so I'll cover some of the reasons I think other reviewers have touched on only briefly:

  • The editor. UnrealEd is not only fully-functional and chock full of features, but the rendering system (not based on BSP tree compiling) makes it really easy to quickly "compile" and test your map. Half-Life, by comparison, uses BSP trees (which compile in about 3 minutes) and light maps (which compile in about 3 hours).
  • 45+ maps right out of the box. 'nuff said.
  • Music! The music is based on 'scene "tracking" files/editors (similar to Amiga music modules) and ranges from okay to great. Using this custom music format also allows for close to 2+ hours of interactive music per game with plenty of space left on the CD. And since the CD isn't required to play any more (see below), you get music all the time if you want it.
  • Patch level 432. With 432 and above, you don't need the CD in the drive to play any more.
  • Feigning death. You can lie down and play dead if you want to. ;-)
  • Works on low-speed machines. In addition to the many hardware tweaks you can make (type "preferences" at the system console to access that menu), Unreal Tournament also has a high-quality 32-bit software renderer as well -- and by "32-bit" I mean it renders 32-bit color (24-bit color with an 8-bit alpha channel). Many older, simple video cards can support 320x240x32-bit color with no hassle. The end result is that not only does the software rendering look decent, but you can play UT on more platforms than you can other games *cough*Quake3*cough* because UT will fall back to software rendering if your 3D hardware isn't supported properly, like in Linux or Windows NT. The end result of all this is that even if you have a Pentium 166, you can still tweak the game enough so that it runs at 20 fps on your box. And if you think 320x240 gameplay sucks, try doing it on a 32-person LAN in one of the teamplay modes. Doesn't suck now, does it? :)
  • Attitude. Some of the auto-taunts are priceless ("Sit down!", "Try turning the safety off!", "I'm sorry, did I blow your head off?", etc.)
  • Bots! If you want to hone your m@d k1ll1nG sk1llz at home before going online and getting the crap kicked out of you, you can play practice games of any type with any number of 'bots of varying skill levels. You can even give the 'bots personality, like fixing the skill level of each 'bot individually, changing their appearance, even their preferred weapon. You can even have the 'bots auto-adjust their skill level based on your performance.

But most of all, the gameplay is balanced. What does this mean? It means that each weapon has been tweaked to be just as powerful and effective at killing as every other weapon. A player can specialize in any certain weapon and, if he or she is good enough at it, can be just as lethal as any other player. Massively-powerful weapons (like the Redeemer, a miniature nuclear warhead) are offset by their refire rate (the Redeemer is an incredibly slow missle, for example).

Balanced gameplay is good. You want balanced gameplay, trust me.

The Bad
The expandability and customization features are lacking and undocumented. This doesn't mean you can't expand UT -- just the opposite, you can. But it's not made very easy for the end-user, and documentation on doing it is very hard to come by (the only docs I could find on the subject were written by other UT fans, which makes me wonder where they got the info). In fact, I didn't even know it was possible to upload your own sounds until I came across an Internet deathmatch server that had custom sounds.

With the exception of the Sniper Rifle, the weapons are not "traditional" weapons. (Last I checked, guns that 1. spew rotary saw blades, 2. emit a continuous stream of energy, 3. pummel human flesh into pulp, and 4. spew toxic green goop are not considered "normal".) This is offputting to those who are used to "normal" weapons, like those found in Half-Life/Team Fortress/Counter-Strike.

The "balanced gameplay" design falls short in one area: The original gun you start out with. It's pretty wimpy compared to the rest of the weapons. But even this is remedied if you manage to pick up another one, because then you can wield one in each hand for some John Woo-esque action.

The Bottom Line
There simply isn't a reason not to like this game! It's balanced, it's expandable, it comes with a great world editor, has tons of dedicated fans/fan sites/mods, and it has solid networking code. What's not to like? The original version at the time of this writing was $29.95 US, with the "gold" edition right around the corner with even more extras, so pick this game up! What are you waiting for, Daikatana 2?

Windows · by Trixter (8952) · 2000

[ View all 11 player reviews ]

Trivia

German index

Unreal Tournament is on the Index of the BPjS in Germany. This occurred on 28.02.2002, over 2 years past release. More information about the topic can be found in the game group.

References

If you manage to collect a chainsaw (can only be found in custom made maps or via cheat code), you get instead of the expected "You got the Chainsaw". message actually the following message: "Its been five years since I've seen one of these." The sentence clearly refers to DOOM II, which was indeed released just a bit over 5 years earlier then Unreal Tournament was.

Version differences

The Dreamcast version does not have assault mode as all the maps save one were too large to fit in Dreamcast's memory. It is replaced in single-player by a new challenge mode, which is a series of one-on-one battles.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2000 (Issue #188) – Action Game of the Year
    • March 2000 (Issue #188) – Best Level Design of the Year
    • October 2004 (Issue #243) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
  • GameSpy
    • 1999 – Game of the Year
    • 1999 - Special Achievement in Artificial Intelligence
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 03/2000 - Best Multiplayer Game in 1999
  • PC Player (Germany)
    • Issue 01/2000 - Best First Person Shooter in 1999

Information also contributed by Ace of Sevens, Monkeyhead and Xoleras

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

Macintosh added by Kabushi. Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 added by Adam Baratz.

Additional contributors: Brian Hirt, Trixter, Eric Barbara, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Wizo, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Plok, Rik Hideto.

Game added December 17, 1999. Last modified March 24, 2024.