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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Monday, March 22, 2004
Unreal Tournament 2004: The King Is Back
If you like first person shooters, this is going to be a very good year. Sometime later this year, so they say, we're going to be treated to Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. I can honestly say, however, that I can wait for these releases. Let the developers spend as much time as they want on tweaking and refining these games, which I'm sure are going to be just spectacular. I can wait, for I have Unreal Tournament 2004.
The original Unreal Tournament was the finest first person shooter of its day. It's a great game even today. It still looks good, it still sounds good, and of course it's a good performer. The single-player game was a little thin, but for an after-work fragfest, you couldn't really beat UT... until now.
I have been playing the UT2004 Demo for a few days, but it was just so mind-blowingly good that I had to rush out this weekend, the first weekend that UT2004 was available as a general release, and get my own copy. I haven't done that sort of thing in years. I expected that the other FPS fans at the office -- there are at least four other guys besides me who like to play -- would do the same, and indeed on Monday I discovered that they had.
This isn't the place to post a review, which I don't want to do anyway, and in any case I haven't played this game more than a few hours. Nevertheless, I'm fairly confident that this is going to be my favorite FPS of all time, but it does have one little flaw. You see, it's a pig.
UT2004 is not the lean, mean, FPS that the original Unreal Tournament was. That game is a classic, and it still plays beautifully. No, UT2004 is a pig. Did I say that already? It comes on 6 CD-ROMs, it takes about an hour to install, and it takes 5.5 GIGs on your hard drive. It also takes several LONG minutes to do its initial load, and each level is equally slow. The load times are very poor, and should have been dealt with during development. Plus, the performance is poor unless I turn a lot of details off. Now, my machine is no slouch, but it sure feels like one when I'm loading this game. However, once we're in the level ... man, oh, man, is this one sweet game. It's polished, it's slick, it looks pretty and sounds great, and the game play (always the most important thing to me) is excellent.
I already know that in order to really enjoy UT2004, I'm going to have to buy a new machine altogether, and not skimp on any of the specs, either. The new box is going to have to have a really fast processor, the best video, the most memory, and the fattest disk I can get. Well, except that that's going to be pretty expensive, that's not a horrible prospect.
So Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 can take their time. They will be ready when they're ready, and I'm sure they will be very, very good. In the meantime, go buy UT2004. They're only charging $39.95 for it! And in the meantime, upgrade your machine. (If those other games take up the kind of disk that UT2004 does, you'll have to updgrade just for that reason alone!) The King is Back!
If you like first person shooters, this is going to be a very good year. Sometime later this year, so they say, we're going to be treated to Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. I can honestly say, however, that I can wait for these releases. Let the developers spend as much time as they want on tweaking and refining these games, which I'm sure are going to be just spectacular. I can wait, for I have Unreal Tournament 2004.
The original Unreal Tournament was the finest first person shooter of its day. It's a great game even today. It still looks good, it still sounds good, and of course it's a good performer. The single-player game was a little thin, but for an after-work fragfest, you couldn't really beat UT... until now.
I have been playing the UT2004 Demo for a few days, but it was just so mind-blowingly good that I had to rush out this weekend, the first weekend that UT2004 was available as a general release, and get my own copy. I haven't done that sort of thing in years. I expected that the other FPS fans at the office -- there are at least four other guys besides me who like to play -- would do the same, and indeed on Monday I discovered that they had.
This isn't the place to post a review, which I don't want to do anyway, and in any case I haven't played this game more than a few hours. Nevertheless, I'm fairly confident that this is going to be my favorite FPS of all time, but it does have one little flaw. You see, it's a pig.
UT2004 is not the lean, mean, FPS that the original Unreal Tournament was. That game is a classic, and it still plays beautifully. No, UT2004 is a pig. Did I say that already? It comes on 6 CD-ROMs, it takes about an hour to install, and it takes 5.5 GIGs on your hard drive. It also takes several LONG minutes to do its initial load, and each level is equally slow. The load times are very poor, and should have been dealt with during development. Plus, the performance is poor unless I turn a lot of details off. Now, my machine is no slouch, but it sure feels like one when I'm loading this game. However, once we're in the level ... man, oh, man, is this one sweet game. It's polished, it's slick, it looks pretty and sounds great, and the game play (always the most important thing to me) is excellent.
I already know that in order to really enjoy UT2004, I'm going to have to buy a new machine altogether, and not skimp on any of the specs, either. The new box is going to have to have a really fast processor, the best video, the most memory, and the fattest disk I can get. Well, except that that's going to be pretty expensive, that's not a horrible prospect.
So Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 can take their time. They will be ready when they're ready, and I'm sure they will be very, very good. In the meantime, go buy UT2004. They're only charging $39.95 for it! And in the meantime, upgrade your machine. (If those other games take up the kind of disk that UT2004 does, you'll have to updgrade just for that reason alone!) The King is Back!