Epic Games has given the OK for their 1998 shooter Unreal to be hosted on the Internet Archive, essentially making the classic sci-fi alien blaster free, and preserving it for the future. They've also given the same permission for Unreal Tournament to be hosted there too, making free the multiplayer muckabout that spawned speedier and speedier sequels throughout the early 2000s (not to mention the origin of one of the most memorable multiplayer FPS maps of all time, Facing Worlds).
]]>Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios, has said he'd love to remaster Epic's 90s FPS Unreal. Not familiar with Nightdive? They're the team behind this May's triumphant System Shock remake, which Jeremy Peel described in his review as "a breathtakingly beautiful and astonishingly faithful remake that proves the enduring power of Looking Glass design". They're also the studio behind last week's surprise-released Quake 2 remaster, and a bunch of other classic 90s remasters including the PC version of DOOM 64 and Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition. It's safe to say they know how to pull off a retro (sorry, Kamiya-san) comeback.
]]>I wanted a comfort game. A big, safe, entertaining game to sink into, to distract me from cold-o-geddon. And what better than Unreal? An enormous, superbly built FPS, that's fast, entertaining, and full of... coughing, coughing aliens. Oh no.
]]>Unreal turned 20 years old this month. The extraterrestrial first-person shooter spawned (and showcased) a game engine whose descendants still motor on today. To commemorate all those screaming prisoners and innocent alien creatures killed at the hands of jumpy players, I got in touch with a handful of the original team and asked them to share their memories of making the first Skaarj conflict. This is how Unreal was made, from the perspective of the programmers, designers, artists and musicians who were there.
]]>Wait, didn’t we already answer this question? Never mind, the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is not content with our list of the top 50 first-person shooters. Well, they're mostly fine with it (lists are stupid) but they still want to hash out this ageless question the old-fashioned way. By interrogating each other over the internet.
]]>"Dearest Alice, I do not play video games but fear I am insufficiently aware of my own mortality and am exploring every avenue to remedy that," begins one of the many letters I received in the post this morning seeking my advice as a reputed expert in the field. "Which gaming platform would most frequently remind me that my youth is so very far behind me and all flesh is grass?"
Well, Margo From Bishop's Stortford, PC gaming can definitely help you. Observe how the assembled commenters wail, weep, and tug at their scant remaining hairs as I say this simple sentence: Unreal came out twenty years ago today.
"What is Unreal?" Well Margo, right now you can download it for free to see for yourself.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Unreal barely feels like a game any more. It's an engine. "This is Unreal, not Unity," barely causes a flicker of the original Epic FPS to come to mind. And yet it's one of my favourite shooters ever.
]]>At any big gaming conference or expo I've been to there's been a strong dividing line between mainstream and indie. Both are awful labels, but for sake of simplicity: the former fills cavernous halls with booths, music, and major publisher money, while the latter normally finds itself a corner of carefully curated darlings, most featuring sprite graphics and other symbols signalling that the game is made by one person or a small team.
What of single persons or small teams making indie games with the tools of the mainstream? Do developers making oddities within Unreal Engine 4 find they fall between two stalls, and so find no stall at all at gaming conferences? Would they benefit from Epic offering them one of eight spots at this year's Eurogamer Expo?
]]>Update: Now with trailer.
Epic has announced today that Unreal Engine 4 is to dramatically change its licensing model. From now on anyone can subscribe to Unreal Engine 4 for $19 a month, and then release those games commercially for a 5% gross revenue share with the developer. This means that indies no longer need to stick with the Unreal Development Kit, but get the entire engine at what appears an affordable price. And on top of that, they're releasing the source code to Github. All from 9.30 PT today.
]]>Jim, John and Nathan are all out at GDC for RPS right now, but the lack of any news from them so far leads me to presume they are all either dead, kidnapped, hungover, hiding or trapped inside a branch of The Cheesecake Factory. So, while I've not been out there to see and thus usefully report on any of the following myself, I can at least once again do what is approximately 19% of my daily job, and resize video embed code to fit on our website.
This time it's looks at what we can expect from Crytek's Cryengine 3 and Epic's Unreal don't-call-it-4 Engine 4. I think you'll all agree that Golfzon (above) is what we most want from the game engines of tomorrow. And if you don't, some of the other stuff in there might well be more to your tastes.
]]>D'awww! My cockles are forever warmed by communities keeping olden games alive, and so it is that an email declaring the latest release of a fan-made, Epic-permitted patch of the original Unreal brought about my first smile of this dingy day. OldUnreal's Patch 227 has been kicking around in various forms since 2008, but yesterday brought the first update to it in over a year.
]]>I was going to start with "Well, this came out of nowhere," but given that this year has also seen the doctors depart BioWare and Peter Molyneux pack his bags for the green pastures of indie-dom, it clearly didn't. Cliff "Biff Cliszenski" Bleszinski has been the face of (and a major portion of the brains behind) Epic, Unreal, Gears of War, and - most famously - Jazz Jackrabbit for 20 years, but now he's calling it quits. Meanwhile, Epic's finally making a renewed PC push with Fortnite, so clearly, CLIFFY HAS ABANDONED US. As for what's next, he's not quite sure at the moment.
]]>Epic Games may be best known for the awesome Jazz Jackrabbit, but it seems like they're ready to move on to other things. Other things on the PC, apparently. Epic's newly teased PC-only project has, in all seriousness, been a long time in coming. "We might be working on a PC-only title," Epic president Mike Capps said during a PAX panel (via Joystiq). Bleszinski then drove the point home in his trademark chainsaw-gun-like fashion. "Let me say that again: we are working on a PC game." Apparently, it's an unannounced project, so that probably rules out the Minecraft-inspired Fortnite. Epic's staying tight-lipped beyond that, but for now "existent" is a step in the right direction.
]]>Last night saw just the latest sign that civilisation is on a nosedive to hell, as the entire internet lost its mind over the prospect of seeing pictures of a new telephone. Subsumed by that news was far more interesting news for people who prefer their technology in a hot metal box: Epic have gotten their Unreal Engine 3 running in Flash. In theory, this means running the likes of Unreal Tournament 3 in a browser - as is demonstrated below.
WITCHCRAFT.
]]>This kind of thing just scares the hell out of me. While Bulletstorm isn't exactly the kind of game I'm going to put on a pedestal and hail as the one true future of electronic entertainment, it was a new franchise, a rare shooter that didn't take itself deathly seriously, a good-looker and a game that at least attempted a few bonus ideas. It did a lot of things right, and it was clearly having a great time in the process. Yet it didn't turn a profit for devs People Can Fly and Epic.
]]>So that next-generation Unreal Engine video was fairly impressive, but getting into the depths of what the tools actually do - and how much of that is actually DX11 stuff - has had to wait until this video over on Kotaku. Real-time beards! That's the fucking future, right there.
]]>Quintin posted about the latest posing from the Unreal engine last week, but lamented the lack of a video with which to demonstrate this new-era graphical clout. Now we can do that. Behold - the worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrld of tomorrow!
]]>Yesterday, in between discussing how much better my Champions build was than his, Rob Hale mentioned the Unreal Mod Prometheus.. He suggested - in the wake of Time Donkey - an RPS theme day of time-travel. What a wonderful thing that would have been. If we could actually have time-travel, I'd have gone back in time to do it. Alas, I can't. Instead, watch the fine video that follows and consider going to play Prometheus: Neat stuff.
]]>It's been coming for a while, if we're honest. Epic have recently been taking it in turns to say disparaging things about the state of PC gaming, to the point that CliffyB's now considered something of a Benedict Arnold figure in some of the more rabid PC camps.
And now they're burning another bridge, further confirming that PC is no longer their most beloved (edit - for those misinterpreting, Epic are not abandoning the PC, just confirming they're developing their next-gen engine for consoles first and foremost). It's hardly a shock, but allow us a teary moment anyway.
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