I likes the shooters.
by AC - permalink
The great thing about PC gaming is no matter how old the game is, as long as it will run in your OS, you can play it. I mean, if you drop $400 plus tax for an Xbox 360, you can only play 360 games plus a small percentage of Xbox titles. But I spent $650 plus tax, plus another $250 for a good video card on my PC in January, and I can play virtually every PC game ever. So I've invested in some more recent games like Quake IV, Doom 3, GTA San Andreas, and Half-Life 2. But I can also pick up older games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Quake III, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and GTA Vice City, with the bonus of knowing that not only can I play them, they'll look better and run smoother than their developers can have imagined.
Which is why I finally got around to buying Unreal Tournament 2004. I've been meaning to get this game for a long time now, but I wanted a new copy, and Atari is still selling it for $40, which is way too much for a two-year-old game. Then I stumbled across UT 2004 Editor's Choice DVD edition at Newegg.com for $15. Ordered, done. Three days later it was on one of my hard drives, all ten gigs of it. And now I'm realizing that it might have been worth the forty clams. There's just so much damn depth here. No, the single player game isn't perfect. The difficulty scaling has issues; it goes from way to easy to way, way too hard with no warning at all, but the fact that a multiplayer-centric FPS has such a robust single-player mode at all is pretty amazing. It's much more than I was expecting, and even after almost a week I haven't even popped in the second DVD, which is supposed to be full of free apps and tutorials for modders.
To get back to the game, it's basically bliss for anyone who cut their PC-gaming teeth on FPS deathmatch, like me. I started with Doom deathmatch, then Duke3D, then Quake. At this point, I have to compare UT 2004 to Quake III Arena, and I honestly can't pick a winner here. The biggest beef I have with UT 2004 is the scaling. The maps are so big that the players seem too small. Quake III scaled down the maps to a more realistic size, with slower moving combatants. It made the arenas more realistic. In UT, the maps are more impressive in scope and scale, and certainly in grandeur and wow-factor, but it's harder to pick out the tiny little folks running around in them. Which is important when you're supposed to be shooting them.
But the controls are hyper-responsive and accurate, and the visuals are varied and impressive, at least when it comes to the maps. Weapon models are fairly crude, and the weapons themselves aren't that impressive. Nothing really original or game-changing, like Duke3D's shrinkgun or Half-Life 2's gravity gun. And the variety of gameplay modes can be a little over-complicated and overwhelming at first, but that does testify to the complexity and depth of the game. Then again, the more team-oriented modes like Assault and Onslaught, and even CTF, which give UT it's depth, are made almost more frustrating than fun by obstinate bot AI that requires you to do all the heavy lifting yourself.
I'll give you an example. In a Bombing Run map, you might throw out an order like, "Cover Me," because, I dunno, if you have the bomb, you're completely defenseless. And if they're around, one or two bot teammates will dutifully run along behind you as you try to get to the enemy score zone. But they don't look around. A single enemy bot can take you down because he's shooting you in the back and your dumbass bots aren't really paying attention. This makes certain Bombing Run and CTF makes virtually unwinable unless you get really, really lucky and use the right adrenaline power-up at the right time. That's frustrating.
But overall, UT 2004 may not offer the kind of immediate, visceral combat you can get by jumping into a deathmatch on q3dm7 or q3dm17 in Quake III, but there are just so many things you can do with the game out of the box, at least in the Editor's Choice edition, which is still being printed, that it's probably worth whatever price you find on it.
And it's great for me that I found it at $15, since I'm going to be quitting that stupid, dangerous job I have. Hopefully I can stumble across a few more cheap, quality FPS's soon, because I'm not going out of my way to find good games anymore. I just can't afford it. But that's the beauty of PC gaming, isn't it? Good games get cheap, and you can always run them, no matter how old they are.
by AC - permalink
The great thing about PC gaming is no matter how old the game is, as long as it will run in your OS, you can play it. I mean, if you drop $400 plus tax for an Xbox 360, you can only play 360 games plus a small percentage of Xbox titles. But I spent $650 plus tax, plus another $250 for a good video card on my PC in January, and I can play virtually every PC game ever. So I've invested in some more recent games like Quake IV, Doom 3, GTA San Andreas, and Half-Life 2. But I can also pick up older games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Quake III, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and GTA Vice City, with the bonus of knowing that not only can I play them, they'll look better and run smoother than their developers can have imagined.
Which is why I finally got around to buying Unreal Tournament 2004. I've been meaning to get this game for a long time now, but I wanted a new copy, and Atari is still selling it for $40, which is way too much for a two-year-old game. Then I stumbled across UT 2004 Editor's Choice DVD edition at Newegg.com for $15. Ordered, done. Three days later it was on one of my hard drives, all ten gigs of it. And now I'm realizing that it might have been worth the forty clams. There's just so much damn depth here. No, the single player game isn't perfect. The difficulty scaling has issues; it goes from way to easy to way, way too hard with no warning at all, but the fact that a multiplayer-centric FPS has such a robust single-player mode at all is pretty amazing. It's much more than I was expecting, and even after almost a week I haven't even popped in the second DVD, which is supposed to be full of free apps and tutorials for modders.
To get back to the game, it's basically bliss for anyone who cut their PC-gaming teeth on FPS deathmatch, like me. I started with Doom deathmatch, then Duke3D, then Quake. At this point, I have to compare UT 2004 to Quake III Arena, and I honestly can't pick a winner here. The biggest beef I have with UT 2004 is the scaling. The maps are so big that the players seem too small. Quake III scaled down the maps to a more realistic size, with slower moving combatants. It made the arenas more realistic. In UT, the maps are more impressive in scope and scale, and certainly in grandeur and wow-factor, but it's harder to pick out the tiny little folks running around in them. Which is important when you're supposed to be shooting them.
But the controls are hyper-responsive and accurate, and the visuals are varied and impressive, at least when it comes to the maps. Weapon models are fairly crude, and the weapons themselves aren't that impressive. Nothing really original or game-changing, like Duke3D's shrinkgun or Half-Life 2's gravity gun. And the variety of gameplay modes can be a little over-complicated and overwhelming at first, but that does testify to the complexity and depth of the game. Then again, the more team-oriented modes like Assault and Onslaught, and even CTF, which give UT it's depth, are made almost more frustrating than fun by obstinate bot AI that requires you to do all the heavy lifting yourself.
I'll give you an example. In a Bombing Run map, you might throw out an order like, "Cover Me," because, I dunno, if you have the bomb, you're completely defenseless. And if they're around, one or two bot teammates will dutifully run along behind you as you try to get to the enemy score zone. But they don't look around. A single enemy bot can take you down because he's shooting you in the back and your dumbass bots aren't really paying attention. This makes certain Bombing Run and CTF makes virtually unwinable unless you get really, really lucky and use the right adrenaline power-up at the right time. That's frustrating.
But overall, UT 2004 may not offer the kind of immediate, visceral combat you can get by jumping into a deathmatch on q3dm7 or q3dm17 in Quake III, but there are just so many things you can do with the game out of the box, at least in the Editor's Choice edition, which is still being printed, that it's probably worth whatever price you find on it.
And it's great for me that I found it at $15, since I'm going to be quitting that stupid, dangerous job I have. Hopefully I can stumble across a few more cheap, quality FPS's soon, because I'm not going out of my way to find good games anymore. I just can't afford it. But that's the beauty of PC gaming, isn't it? Good games get cheap, and you can always run them, no matter how old they are.
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