Game 81 - Unreal Tournament - Week 157 - Dec 22

nreal Tournament (OG) is a game that I never realised it had an origin story. In 2291 in an attempt to reduce fighting among miners, no holds barred violence was legalised. A Grand Tournament was quickly formed which profit growing with every stroke of violence. It attracted the most skewed and violent fighters. Surprisingly ahead of its time with the character creation (3-4 races each gender, 2-4 faces, 2-4 skins and colours, 4 voices, etc).

Fuck this holds up well even against AI. I’m not surprised this was an instant hit that put Epic on the map. To this day all the guns feel unique for the first game, even when compared to its contemporaries such as Doom, Quake, etc. Frags, rail (energy gun), frag gun and my personal favourite the Flak Cannon are all badass AF. Guns have an alternate mode and might be the first game to have such. For example the pistol firing sideways for quicker but less accurate shots or the Flak Cannon turning into a close range ricocheting shotgun into a grenade launcher you can pop around corners. Most importantly movement just feels good, to juke and dodge shots as you return your own volley and oh boy do you feel like the biggest boss on the planet when you hit 30 frags and win.

I had booted this up intending to waste 30 minutes in an empty lobby or against AI and shelve it. But what I got instead was an awesome shooter that after replaying it, is expectedly very active to this day. Or so I thought – turns out most of them are bots (sadly) but there are some servers with actual players and oh boy could I tell the difference. I got smacked in the face by 20+ years of experience so hard it made me miss playing the bots. But still – it’s awesome that’s retain a diehard loyal old school community. Some of the modded servers are ridiculous. Playing licensed music such as Diablo theme music or Bon Jovi - Wanted Dead Or Alive (ugh, a great song played to death). Double and triple jumps. Spawning with a shotgun that has an alt-fire grenade launcher or other ridiculous weapons such as an incendiary minigun that alt fires rockets. Need to swap weapons no longer! Or my favourite The Freezer. Alt fire freeze an enemy or rapid-fire shoot icicles.

My only major issue was no windowed tab and alt tabbing often crashed the game. Which at the end of the day is understandable and I can probably fix this with mods. Considering this is the only issue I had – it’s a testament to Epic’s legacy as developers and engineers. I’d keep this one installed for some old school fragging fun but I feel like I would need 20 years of training to compete with these guys.