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Who's complaining? Not me. |
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Unreal Tournament buffs know how this goes: Guy walks into an arena, snaps up some armor and a half dozen Weapons of Medium Destruction, then engages scads of leaping, jet-packing, missile-chucking opponents in dizzy, gravity-defying gun-fu. Think American Gladiators by way of Warhammer 40k with indulgent physics, tanks and big-wheelers with macho names like "Goliath" and "Leviathan," and over two-dozen weapons you can switch between quick as cards in an electric Rolodex. Factor the odd tweak to old faithfuls like "capture the flag" and "team deathmatch" along with two-player split screen play and Xbox Live's definitive matchmaking and you've got the Swiss army knife of online-purposed old-school shooters.
Hop online and you can throw down with up to 16 others, mix live bodies and bots, or compete in one-on-one deathmatch duels. You're also treated to an offline single-player campaign in Unreal Tournament that brackets incrementally challenging arena-style matches with a story about a team of roughnecks out to get revenge on nano-modified humans who sacked their mining camp. It's really just an excuse to chain a bunch of ad hoc bot battles together, but it's also an elaborate training gauntlet to drill first-timers on the basics of online brawling, especially helpful when you're testing out Unreal Tournament 3's brand new "warfare" mode in which teams of users jockey to control vulnerable nodes that can raise or lower the shields protecting collapsible enemy power cores tagged for demolition.
Supplementing what came with the PC and PS3 versions of Unreal Tournament late last year, the 360 port ships with five exclusive maps, two exclusive characters, 1080p support (the PS3 version peaks at 720p), and all the downloadable stuff Epic cobbled together over the last eight months. Unlike the PC and PS3 versions, however, the 360 port disallows user-generated content due to Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace rules.
New school, same as the old school
When Mark Rein admitted earlier this year in an interview with The Guardian that the reason Unreal Tournament 3 didn't ship simultaneously with its PC and PS3 cousins last November was in part because of Microsoft's draconian rules for Xbox Live content updates, enthusiasts blanched, and understandably. In the interview, Rein hedgingly explained that "Microsoft hasn't said 'no' yet, but then they haven't said 'yes' either."
Make that a resounding "no," then, because with the 360 version of Unreal Tournament, what you see is what you get. That's a shame, especially if you've peeped some of the stuff fans have come up with lately, say an incredibly clever mod that lets you run around in a LEGO-styled level, tumbling virtually any jumbo-sized LEGO structure in sight. PC and PS3 owners can just go download Unreal Tournament, but 360 owners won't be able to unless Epic packs it into some sort of Microsoft-approved bonus pack. If that seems a shortcoming too grave overcome, this isn't the version for you.
If on the other hand you just want a seductively glamorous online shooter that's been bug-tested from here to tomorrow and runs like a Ferrari, here you go. Whether you're battling in marketplaces with waterfalls and pagodas or leaping and pirouetting in half-gravity and zapping yourself around pseudo-Portal style using the Translocator teleport gun, Unreal Tournament 3 keeps you sprinting, double-jumping and twirling on a dime. It's old school draped in new school, kind of like watching football on a high-def TV.
The only definitively new mode, "warfare," is also one of the game's best. Played on the largest maps with vehicles and hover-boards (think Back to the Future, and everyone gets one) it's a harrowing study in zero-sum team coordination, whether it's getting tanks across bridges and holding pressure plates to drop core shields, or disabling enemy re-spawns by removing flags and controlling boats to launch tank attacks.
The silliest not-new feature is the Unreal Tournament's single-player campaign mode, which tries to outfit the same old string of bot-stacked arena matches with an "emotionally gripping" story that's absurdly juxtaposed with gameplay pinioned to capturing flags and infinite re-spawns. Why try to rationalize gameplay like that?
But now I'm nitpicking. The story's ignorable, the campaign's just an aperitif for the online entree, and hey, the cutscenes in Unreal Tournament are sure pretty to look at. Who's complaining? Not me. But I do know some of you expect a game like tag to be "tag-plus-one" every time a developer splashes an oldie with a coat of fresh lacquer. That's a wrongheaded way to approach an old-schooler like Unreal Tournament, where one step back plays like two steps forward.
Sometimes golf's just golf and football's just football. Nothing wrong with that.
-Matt
Hop online and you can throw down with up to 16 others, mix live bodies and bots, or compete in one-on-one deathmatch duels. You're also treated to an offline single-player campaign in Unreal Tournament that brackets incrementally challenging arena-style matches with a story about a team of roughnecks out to get revenge on nano-modified humans who sacked their mining camp. It's really just an excuse to chain a bunch of ad hoc bot battles together, but it's also an elaborate training gauntlet to drill first-timers on the basics of online brawling, especially helpful when you're testing out Unreal Tournament 3's brand new "warfare" mode in which teams of users jockey to control vulnerable nodes that can raise or lower the shields protecting collapsible enemy power cores tagged for demolition.
Supplementing what came with the PC and PS3 versions of Unreal Tournament late last year, the 360 port ships with five exclusive maps, two exclusive characters, 1080p support (the PS3 version peaks at 720p), and all the downloadable stuff Epic cobbled together over the last eight months. Unlike the PC and PS3 versions, however, the 360 port disallows user-generated content due to Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace rules.
New school, same as the old school
When Mark Rein admitted earlier this year in an interview with The Guardian that the reason Unreal Tournament 3 didn't ship simultaneously with its PC and PS3 cousins last November was in part because of Microsoft's draconian rules for Xbox Live content updates, enthusiasts blanched, and understandably. In the interview, Rein hedgingly explained that "Microsoft hasn't said 'no' yet, but then they haven't said 'yes' either."Make that a resounding "no," then, because with the 360 version of Unreal Tournament, what you see is what you get. That's a shame, especially if you've peeped some of the stuff fans have come up with lately, say an incredibly clever mod that lets you run around in a LEGO-styled level, tumbling virtually any jumbo-sized LEGO structure in sight. PC and PS3 owners can just go download Unreal Tournament, but 360 owners won't be able to unless Epic packs it into some sort of Microsoft-approved bonus pack. If that seems a shortcoming too grave overcome, this isn't the version for you.
If on the other hand you just want a seductively glamorous online shooter that's been bug-tested from here to tomorrow and runs like a Ferrari, here you go. Whether you're battling in marketplaces with waterfalls and pagodas or leaping and pirouetting in half-gravity and zapping yourself around pseudo-Portal style using the Translocator teleport gun, Unreal Tournament 3 keeps you sprinting, double-jumping and twirling on a dime. It's old school draped in new school, kind of like watching football on a high-def TV.
The only definitively new mode, "warfare," is also one of the game's best. Played on the largest maps with vehicles and hover-boards (think Back to the Future, and everyone gets one) it's a harrowing study in zero-sum team coordination, whether it's getting tanks across bridges and holding pressure plates to drop core shields, or disabling enemy re-spawns by removing flags and controlling boats to launch tank attacks.
The silliest not-new feature is the Unreal Tournament's single-player campaign mode, which tries to outfit the same old string of bot-stacked arena matches with an "emotionally gripping" story that's absurdly juxtaposed with gameplay pinioned to capturing flags and infinite re-spawns. Why try to rationalize gameplay like that?
But now I'm nitpicking. The story's ignorable, the campaign's just an aperitif for the online entree, and hey, the cutscenes in Unreal Tournament are sure pretty to look at. Who's complaining? Not me. But I do know some of you expect a game like tag to be "tag-plus-one" every time a developer splashes an oldie with a coat of fresh lacquer. That's a wrongheaded way to approach an old-schooler like Unreal Tournament, where one step back plays like two steps forward.
Sometimes golf's just golf and football's just football. Nothing wrong with that.
-Matt
