To borrow a John-ism: oh my goodness! You're either about to hate me forever, or laugh and offer to buy me a cupcake. Whatever the hell Nyan cat is, it's clearly a meme of terrifying scope. The original video's been viewed 46 million times, and now it's been snuck into Unreal 3 as a mod for the Redeemer. Just look.
]]>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.
]]>"Philosophical First Person Single Player Exploration Puzzle Art Game," apparently. I spotted Hazard: The Journey Of Life over on Indiegames, but I haven't had time to get it working yet. The video (below) is definitely worth checking out though, as this minimal Unreal Tournament 3 mod has a fascinating minimalistc presentation and promises some strange-looking puzzles. (More fodder for the first-person puzzle camp.) It seems to be a work in progress as the mod only runs at 800x600 and requires some batch-file fiddling to get working, as explained in the readme. (Which also instructs you to read itself...) Anyway, worth taking a look.
]]>And that's on Steam, obviously. Epic send word that the free weekend is intended to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of the original Unreal Tournament demo. Anyway, that means you can download Unreal Tournament 3 Black (which is the 2007 shooter plus add-on packs) and play the game through the weekend for no pennies.
]]>I wonder if we're on the cusp of a golden age for Unreal Tournament 3 mods, after all these years of Half-Life 2's friendly tyranny. In the last few months we've had Prometheus, The Ball (which I'll also write about later, but I had a headache on the day I downloaded it. No, it's okay - don't weep for me) and now there's Airborn - all doing clever and pretty things with Epic's solid but strangely unlovely multiplayer shootybangbang game. Is this powerful engine gearing up for its community-led day in the sun? Back to Airborn, anyway. It's kind of like Zelda, but with less wibbling on about fairies and more airships.
]]>RPS reader Robbie McKnight sent us a link to his new Unreal Tournament 3 map, which can be found here. He's taken something of an unusual angle on things as UT3 maps go: everything is built in primary colours and pre-school Platonics. I like the sun best of all. Compare and contrast, if you will, with this map. The two ends of the UT3 mapping spectrum, perhaps?
There's a video of Robbie's work after the hop.
]]>Having been messing around with UT3 again in the wake of the ongoing Make Something Unreal competition, I've picked up a load of levels and mods, some of which I'll probably post about here in the next few days. The one that I want to get out of the way first is the excellent third-person demon/zombie shooter, The Haunted. (It's an Unreal Tournament 3 mod, obviously.) Now I'm betting there are few people here who will sign for a moratorium on zombie games in 2010, but until then this is a genuinely excellent piece of work. There's a single player game, and multiplayer in which "humans" take on demons controlled by other players. The core concept for solo play is "just try and stay alive". And that really does become tricky as the ammo runs out and the baddies pile in. It's beautifully conceived and executed, and supernaturally bleak weather rolls in as the game unfolds, making it even more threatening. Get it here, or watch the video below for more flavour.
]]>This is splendid, and slightly mysterious. Beneath the click is a kind of promo video for DM-Spectrum, an Unreal Tournament 3 deathmatch level by Matt Bradley. He's created a kind of disco battlefield, which, according to his Vimeo page, he hasn't yet distributed. It seems that players have to navigate via the disco light flags to find their enemy, but it's not obvious how that works. I've dropped Mr Bradley a line and will report back with more when I know more, or get hold of the map itself. In the meantime, have a look at the intriguing video below.
This was first on Offworld, which should be the other videogame blog you read.
]]>We probably should have talked more about what's been going on with Unreal Tournament 3 over the last couple of weeks. Why didn't we? Because it's not a game any of us feel particularly strongly about one way or another, and from earlier comments it didn't look like you lot did either. Having a famous name and being reasonably fun is no longer enough for a technically adept but fundamentally unambitious multiplayer shooter to grab the attention it once would have done.
Last weekend, that changed dramatically. Unreal Tournament is back, baby, back. And no matter how you or we or anyone else might personally feel about UT3, its unexpected resurgence may signal colossal change for PC games.
]]>If any reader of any website is likely to have World of Goo, you have to suspect RPS readers are. We did the first review! We never shut up about it! However if for some reason you don't, Steam are selling it for 75% off this weekend. That's just over four quid. Go get it.
If you're feeling even four-quid skint, also over at Steam, Unreal Tournament 3 Black is free to play all weekend - plus 40% off the full game (Making it just over eight quid). It includes the Titan Pack, which is a hefty newly released expansion for the full game which includes lots of stuff which I'll lob beneath the cut. As it really is a load of stuff, including the word "behemoth"....
]]>It's early in the morning, and this side-scrolling deathmatch mod makes me feel somewhat queasy. I found it while poking around on Offworld, and while it's not new it certainly deserves a mention. If just for weirdness: 2D deathmatch with the UT3 weapons and avatars, but with the sounds and background music of SuperMario. It is distinctly not right. You can download it from here, or watch it in motion after the jump.
]]>Unreal Tournament 3 remains an oddly ugly game, which always seemed a bewildering misfire on the part of an FPS that, so it seemed, existed primarily to pimp an engine. It's like a milkman painting a picture of a cow with tortured, bleeding udders on the side of his van. While UT3 plays okay (the highlight being its agreeably ridiculous vehicles), its look is just visual noise, a mess of vague, clashing aesthetic ideas that somehow manages to seem devoid of colour despite drawing a silly neon border around everything. What a shame. What I'm still hoping - as a long-term UT player - is that the mod community can yet rescue it from the drab, tokenistic fate Epic themselves damned it to.
]]>You may remember Kieron doing science a few weeks back about NVIDIA's CUDA system - clever trickery that allows a GPU to perform processing feats other than pixel-pushing. There's a lot of real-world algorithm-crunching applications for it, but of most interest to gamers is that it can make your GeForce 8, 9 or 200-series card behave like a PhysX board. NVIDIA bought out PhysX makers Ageia a while back, and we're soon to see the fruits of such money-labours.
The big question is to what extent simulating cratesplosion will slow down the graphics rendering. We'll get to find out next week, with the release of the GeForce Experience Pack.
]]>He's joking, obviously. Cliffy B's lovely. Eurogamer mentioned this quote yesterday, but have put up the full interview today. In it, after the terrier of Eurogamer Tom Bramwell stops trying to make him talk about Gears of War 2 for a whole page, he starts talking PC...
]]>Lordy lawks, this is the best thing my eyes have ever seen:
]]>Sad tidings for fans of heavily normal-mapped pretend-man-shoots. Seems both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 haven't exactly stormed up the charts, which is a tragic and strange state of affairs for what were seemingly two of the most eagerly-anticipated PC games of the year.
]]>I've got an Ageia PhysX card sat around somewhere, a piece of hardware about which I wasn't entirely complimentary a while back. I don't use it because a) there's yet to be a PhysX-enabled game which I've wanted to play for any reasonable length of time and b) it's one more furiously spinning fan in a PC that I can already hear humming like the wrath of Skynet, even when I'm on the next floor of the house.
]]>One of the main reasons I've been enjoying Unreal Tournament III (aside from the “oh hey, I don't have to pick a class” relief) is the Scavenger. The Necris vehicles each have their own gunmetal-tentacle thing going on, but the Scavenger seems to be the epitome of what Epic were reaching for in their rendition of Wacky Races: TechnoGoth Edition. It might just be my favourite vehicle in a game, and it's probably my all-time favourite form multiplayer transport. The reason for this is that it's completely demented.
While you really have to see it in motion to get the essence of my excitement, this post would look crap without some images. Here 's the beast being awesome:
Okay, I know you can't really make it out. I can only try to convey its nature in words. They are all I have. Click ahoy.
]]>My review of Unreal Tournament III has gone up on Eurogamer. It was a bit of a wake up call for me: a reminder that multiplayer FPS games are the reason I became so obsessed with the PC in the first place. After the super-beautiful but lacklustre demo I was all set to be bored by UT3, but it soon dragged me. I'm going to be posting a few more bits and pieces about the game in the coming week, because it has gloriously deranged ideas.
]]>"The name's Malcolm."
]]>Here's a few early impressions of the Unreal Tournament 3 demo, plus bonus anecdote from my gaming past. These are rather tainted by hungover subjectivity, so may very well not match your own feelings, but hell, outspoken nonsense is what you visit this site for, right?
]]>The beta demo for Unreal Tournament 3 is out, but we can't find a server that isn't maxed out. Try here and here, if you're patient.
]]>It's been everywhere already, but may as well mention it here so folk have somewhere else to express their outrage/joy/paranoia/confusion. Yes, Unreal Tournament 3 system specs! Will the beefy quad-core CPU and GeForce 8800 in my PC be worth the investment at last?
]]>Earlier in the week I was interviewing Epic's Cliff Bleszinski about Gears Of War on PC. It was a bit of shame really, because what I wanted to ask him about was Unreal Tournament III. I mean Gears looks fun - and I'll be talking about that in depth in a forthcoming PC Gamer, paper fans - but the true heavyweight for the PC is going to be Unreal Tournament III. Alongside Enemy Territory and Team Fortress, this game is going to arrive at the traffic lights of gaming like a spacecraft pulling up next to a Jeep and an ice cream van. UT3's new assault levels promise some outlandish possibilities for co-op gaming (the long-ago PC Gamer LAN's finest hour was playing UT2004 assault vs high skill-level bots). UT3 will have with airbourne assaults, skyscraper sized vehicles, and unnatural environments aplenty. The maps themselves promise to simply outdo anything we've ever seen. I mean go back and look at UT2004 - those maps are astonishing enough. UT3 is a year on from Gears Of War... It's like we'll never need another game engine. Just look at it:
]]>
