This is Totally Unreal

Unreal Tournament, one of the uber-shooter franchises for the PC once again rears it's not so ugly head. As one website described it, Unreal seems to be full of Gears of War rejects and graphically depending on your system the game itself can surpass even Gears' graphical splendor. Though that's according to Epic themselves and being that this is an FPS I would imagine that the graphics will indeed be impressive. As you can see from my very ugly screenshot (I can only take 1 at a time and believe me when I say it is HARD to get a good shot in this game while it's playing live. My best screen shot is one I took as I lost...that's rather telling) that even my system can push out a pretty impressive piece.

I do notice however that this may once again be one of those games where having HDR lighting means sacrificing anti-aliasing. It's not a big deal for those people with awesome setups who can bump up the resolution but for those of us who can only run games at a meager 1280 x 720 (ok...that is pretty high, but still...) I wonder if HDR is even worth it then? Though a few jaggies on a hi-res widescreen monitor is better than nothing. It's apparent though I need more RAM as 1 gig isn't sufficient to hold the frame rate at a stable pace. I can imagine that the PS3 version is being capped at 16 players online for that very reason. I did see a server claiming to be able to hold 256 players...though that's obviously NOT a good idea.

Unreal Tournament 3 returns us to the same exact game as previous renditions. What that means is it's the ultimate test of twitch shooting madness. Characters in UT run so fast at times it's hard to aim and snipers really are tested on their skills at that point. Imagine trying to play the game while finding time to hit the screen caps only to realize that you've got about .5 seconds to touch that button or you're minced meat. Hopping around and firing rockets or whatever you may have is once again the best option as the speed of the game is break-neck and forces players to almost spaz out in firing their weapons, sometimes with much luck you can get a kill or two off before you're eventually blown away by that one guy who has a Core 2 Quad + 8800GTSSUPERAWESOMEEDITION. The weapons return all unchanged except for the aesthetics but one thing I have to congratulate Epic on is the vehicles. That screenshot up there? That's something you can drive and as you can see from my perspective that was not a great place to be at all.

Over-all it's more of the same in the same way Halo 3 is more of the same but at the very least they decided that Gears of War looks so good that they should make UT3 look similarly impressive. For me, it's vomit inducing and I couldn't play it for more than 5 minutes. I'm sticking to Team Fortress 2.