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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Sunday, April 20, 2003

Giving Unreal 2 another chance
I buy virtually all the first-person shooters that come out for the PC, and though I still prefer Quake III Arena over everything that's come out since (I recently completed both Quake III and Quake III Team Arena in Nightmare mode, by the way), I've had some good times with various games, such as Unreal Tournament 2003 and Medal of Honor. While in New York a month and a half ago, I picked up Unreal 2, and after trying it out briefly, I kind of forgot about it. Unreal 2 really stretches the limits of today's top-of-the-line hardware, and on my system (a P4 1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB GeForce 4 Ti 4200), its barely acceptable at 800 x 600 (sort of leisurely in an iMac kind of way). The game is definitely gorgeous, and arguably the most graphically sophisticated 3D video game ever created, but I just found it boring and slow-paced, and hated the fact that non-player character and enemy "skins" didn't look right on my system. The other day, however, having finished the aforementioned Quake titles in the hardest possible mode, I was looking for something different, so I loaded up Unreal 2 again. And after a few days of playing it... hmm.

First of all, the game is beautiful. It's got a plot, which slows things done, frankly. I fixed the skinning issue by loading the latest NVIDIA drivers on XP (I was positive this wasn't going to work, and had actually written to Epic Games for suggestions, but hey, it worked). I've been playing through the game and it's not bad. Some of the levels are quite inventive. Some you just have to get through. But I've come away rather impressed, overall. It's still not as good, in my mind, as an all-out shooter, but it will pass some time while I wait for DOOM III. And I'll definitely finish it, what the heck.

[ Posted at 3:07 PM | Permalink ]