Unreal Tournament

The Good
Unreal Tournament offers endless playability with 6 different game modes, or variations of each other. If you just want to blow people up, you can go for a Tournament Deathmatch, a Team Deathmatch, or a Last Man Standing, in which you have a set amount of lives. Capture the Flag is another awesome mode, no matter how unoriginal, and is probably my personal favorite. In Domination, you need to take and keep control points which are spread around the map to gain points, and in Assault, the first team must try to complete their objectives while the other team tries to stop them. Each game mode has plenty of excellent maps to go with them, and more maps have been put up for free download. One of the best things about Unreal Tournament is its A.I., which acts and plays just like human beings (although maybe not quite as smart). People who have slow internet connections don't have to tolerate laggy game play to have a good fight. And of course the game uses the beautiful Unreal Engine, and has a great soundtrack as well.

The Bad
The Unreal Engine was unfortunately made for Glide users. Running the game under Direct3D or OpenGL will often give you low frame rates.

The Bottom Line
An incredibly fun, endlessly playable first-person shooter.

The Good
The original Unreal Tournament was one of the most out-right addictive games I've ever played. Every time I play, I find myself itching to go just one more map. Even back when I first started playing it, when I only played on a cruddy dial-up connection, I loved the game. Now I play UT2004 when I need an Unreal fix, but the original started it all.

UT came out with some of the sweetest graphics yet seen. From the detailed models and textures to fantastic lighting and translucency, it was a treat for the eyes. Even today, when I look at the game the graphics aren't bad. All that in a game that was tightly coded enough to run well on my Pentium 200.

One of my favorite parts of UT is the weapons. Epic managed to come up with an arsenal that was both balanced and interesting. There are more standard weapons, such as the rocket launcher and the mini-gun, or innovative pieces like the flack cannon and the pulse rifle (some of these weapons actually had their debut in the first Unreal). Every weapon has a secondary fire mode that adds a great deal of depth to gameplay. The shock-rifle, for instance, fires a low-damage beam as primary and a medium-damage ball of energy as secondary. To make things more interesting still, if you fire off an energy ball and then hit it with a faster moving beam shot, it will cause a powerful energy explosion that tears many enemies to bitsies. Even the rocket launcher is innovative in that rather than just firing off shots, you can hold up to six rockets before firing. In secondary mode rockets can be launched as grenades, again allowing you to fire of six of these little bouncing messengers of death. You can kill with pretty much any weapon in the game. Even the starting pistol can be effective in the hands of an experienced player.

Speaking of blowing stuff up, this game is also very visceral. The weapon effects, sounds, and character death animations all create a very gritty and satisfactory experience. There's nothing quite like filling an opponent with mini-gun rounds or blowing them away with a flack cannon shot at point blank range.

The game plays fast and hard, with plenty of over-the-top action going on at any given time if you get a decent number of players. It's exactly the kind of thing you want in a game like this.

Gameplay modes in UT reach beyond the usual deathmatch and CTF, adding in Domination (teams fight over crucial control points) and Assault (one team assaults a series of objectives while the other defends). While Domination is fun, the latter is the truly innovative addition. A good game of Assault with a group of people playing reasonably like a team can be a great experience. Of course, it can be hard to find people who play anything like a team online. But that's not the game's fault.

Then we have mutators. Playing with the various available mutators can give the game a whole new life. From low-grav mode to fat-boy (where-in a player gets more and more obese the more he kills), there's a lot of variety to be had. For a crazy time, try fat-boy instagib.

AI bots are challenging opponents to practice against before you play online. They sometimes play almost like human (sometimes better on higher levels). As with any AI, they have their moments of stupidity. But it's better than most.

No wonder it's so addictive.

The Bad
Well, my only gripe is this: There is really no great first-person experience here. There is no quest, no character progression (in the true sense), no cool scripted events, and there is only a base excuse for plot-line.

The Bottom Line
Online gameplay at its best. Buy this one and soak in all the fragaliciousness.

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.