Sunday, September 04, 2005

Unreal Tournament 2004

I play Unreal Tournament 2004 a lot. Before that I played UT2003, Quake III, Unreal Tournament, and the original Unreal online. Before online gaming I played Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D on the office LAN (back when office computers were capable of playing current games). I also once played Quake II on the Microsoft campus server with a friend, and was lambasted by many Microsoft employees for team-killing (I didn't know it was a team game and kept killing my team-mates).

Nowadays, with UT2004, I have fallen into a strange comfort zone in that I only basically play the four low gravity maps (Plunge, Morpheus3, TokaraForest, and Phobos2) in Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch mode. I really don't like anything more complicated than "see someone else, quickly determine if they are on your team or not (not necessary in regular deathmatch), shoot them". And I've found that the maps where you jump around in the air without fear of hurting yourself when you land and where you can possibly knock people off into space (and win a frag) are the kind I like best.

Let me take a moment to send some shout-outs to my UT2004 low grav crew: Shane1V, [DoW]-shatter-, MAQUINADEMATAR, MenZ, Hedge_Mgr, Tom_PQ, HIDEATHFINITION, and Tj-hubble. I'm not gonna say my name here but suffice it to say I demonstrate P.R.I.D.E. in my gaming.

Now that the UT2004 is approaching two years on the market, I worry that it is getting harder and harder to find servers and players, particularly given my very particular preferences for maps and game types. In fact I started writing this entry because there's only one server running that meets my criteria right now and I do not have a very good connection to it. I bought both Doom 3 and Half Life 2 when they came out to hedge my bets against the inevitable eclipse of UT2004 by these games, but I didn't like them anywhere near as much as UT2004 so I stopped playing them after a few games. So I am stuck with UT2004 until they replace it with something new, at which time I look forward to many new players and places to play.

However, I just learned recently that there will be a UT2007. (Yeah, I'm kinda slow with this stuff.) The screenshots on Shacknews make it look like it's all about spaceships and cars which doesn't excite me (I've played with the cars in UT2004 no more then a half-dozen times) but I am sure they will deliver a solid deathmatch/TDM experience. At the very least they are getting my money for keeping the franchise going and continuing to innovate. As long as there is the ability to jump around and rain rockets on my online enemies or zap them with shock rifles, I will be playing.

Technorati tag(s): UT2004

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Comments:
For more UT2004 goodness, check out Crazy Uncle BoB's blog, here:
http://crazyunclebob.blogspot.com/

We play BR, instead of [T]DM... Still huge fans of UT2004, tho'.
 
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