Unreal Tournament

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.

The Good
While I find UT an extremely annoying game, it does have some things going for it. I'll try to sum them up.

• Good-looking (albeit horribly slow) game engine. Don't get me wrong, the graphics are really quite good, but compared to Quake 3 the game engine is simply outdated and slow, and the only thing that truly shines is the flare effect, which is every bit as good as it was in Unreal.
• Good assortment of weapons (my personal favorites being the ASMD and flake gun).
• Overall good level design (although nothing matches DM17 in Q3).
• Outright terrific music! Thumbs up to Alex and Michiel (along with the legendary Necros and Skaven). Amazing work indeed!

The Bad
I'm sorry, Unreal Tournament just isn't better than Quake 3. Not even remotely better. Almost everything said about Unreal Tournament is a complete lie. Want examples?

• Everyone will admit that the Quake 3 engine is better, but what they will not tell you is that it is WAY better. It looks prettier, it is more responsive and it is a hell of a lot faster. Unreal Tournament crawls. On my machine (P2-350, 128mb memory, Riva TNT 1) I can run Quake 3 in 800x600 16 bits with texture and geometric detail levels set at maximum and still get 30ish frames per second. Unreal Tournament in 640x480, 16 bit and lowest texture detail will grind to a 4 fps crawl in even the most small action sequence. It is SLOW. A big battle (e.g. deathmatch in the Liandri map with 6 or 7 opponents) will run so slow you wouldn't be able to aim before you died. That sucks.
• One of UT's most hailed features, the multitude of battle types, is complete hype. While I will admit that Domination is cool, CTF and deathmatch are just as good if not better in Quake 3, and Assault is outright CRAP. It's just no fun, especially with the computer. Furthermore, every kind of game can and has been MODed into Q3. There is even a project in place that aims to convert UT to run on the Quake 3 engine. The results look promising, and runs MUCH faster on Q3 than on the Unreal engine. So what does that say?
• Speaking of AI, another one of the completely overhyped features in UT is its "much more advanced computer AI compared to Quake 3". Bullshit. Unreal Tournament's AI sucks every bit as much compared to Q3. Where a level increase in Q3 results in better aim and quicker reflexes, a corresponding level increase in UT would result in completely erratic behaviour by your computer opponents, which will run like hell in humanly impossible ways, dodge your bullets and release hell at you a lot faster than a human opponent can possibly click the mouse. Along those lines, the friendly AI (that is, the computer players that are on your team) get worse and worse with every level increase, which in most cases means that you will run desperately with the other team's flag, get shot at repeatedly and wonder just where the hell are your team members and why aren't they helping you. So how exactly is UT's AI code better than Q3's?!
• UT's network code is far inferiour to Q3's. Even with an extremely low ping (in Israeli terms) of about 80ms, I still can't aim properly because there is a ridiculously long delay between me pushing the button and the shot actually being fired. With Quake 3 running on a server right next to the one I played UT on (both located in an Israeli ISP) I get the same ping and gameplay is a LOT smoother. And yes, I still use goddamn 64k ISDN dialup. Shoot me. You can't get ADSL/cable/sat. in Israel.
• As for weapons, I think one of the chief complaints regarding Q3 was that its weapon assortment isn't as good as in UT. Huh? Where did that come from? In UT you have four chief weapons (out of ten!) you can actually DO something with (ASMD, flake cannon, rocket launcher and the Redeemer). How is that better than Quake 3, where you have Railgun, shotgun, rocket launcher, plasma cannon etc. that you can use? And in UT you even have the utterly useless impact hammer whereas in Q3 you automatically get the machine gun, with which you can still kill.

In short, Unreal Tournament is simply inferiour.

The Bottom Line
With marginally better single player action, the internet multiplayer-oriented Unreal Tournament falls completely short of Quake 3. Unreal Tournament's chief rivals looks better, plays better and is much faster. In short, Quake 3 is the better game, hands down.

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?