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The Reason for the Name Of course, the first UT had a sports feel of its own, with a single-player mode that required you to make your way through a tournament to become champion of a brutal futuristic sport. Unreal Tournament 2003 from MacSoft features a similar single-player option, albeit with beefier graphics, the ability to create a team, and little extra touches. The development team also included an announcer who comments on the action like a play-by-play commentator would on TV. His bombastic style rivals that of John Madden. Boldly Frag. Explore strange new worlds. Each event in the tournament takes place in an arena stocked with a variety of weapons, ammo, and special items. You and several opponents enter the arena and begin shooting each other. Every time you frag, or kill, one of them, you get a point; the first player to reach a predetermined point total wins the match and moves on to the next one. [The sports feel] is why we put the 2003 in the name, Rein explains, referring to the common practice of placing the year in the names of most sports games, which see new versions annually (such as NASCAR Racing Season 2003). I dont know if well do a new game every year, but we love the idea of the game evolving every year, with new stadiums and new weapons. Light Years Beyond UT2K3 also improves on the original UT with a more advanced graphics engine, or base technology that powers the game. Many games, such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, use the original UT engine to drive graphics, and you can expect many future Mac games to take advantage of the UT2K3 engine. The graphics are light years beyond the original, as well as everything else out there right now, says Ryan Gordon, a developer at Epic Games. Rein backs up this statement with some hard data: The characters in UT were (comprised of) maybe 800 polygons, he explains, and the characters in UT2K3 are 3,000 to 3,500 polygons. The world environments are 100 to 200 times more detailed in terms of polygons. Polygons are basic mathematical shapes that developers use to create video game graphics. The more polygons that developers can pack into an area, the more graphical detail you will see. Its All in the Details. Who are these unlucky souls? New Physics and New Abilities More realistic graphics call for more realistic action, and UT2K3 offers a physics system, called karma physics, that activates when a player gets fragged. If youve played many first-person shooters, you know that other players often, for example, hover in mid-air if they get nailed while standing on a ledge. In UT2K3, that player realistically falls to the ground and lies there in a mangled heap for a few seconds before vanishing and respawning. If you hit someone with a rocket, theyll go flying, Rein promises. In addition, there are ways to push your abilities beyond the normal bounds as you run around the arena blasting opponents. For example, every map includes adrenaline pills that you can collect for points; when you reach 100 points, you can activate such special abilities as speed burst and regeneration. The abilities fade after several seconds, but you can continue to collect adrenaline and keep your superpowers going a little bit longer. You also gain adrenaline every time you frag an opponent.
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Unreal Tournament 2004 now available
As if that wasnt enough, UT2K3 also offers you the ability to perform high jumps and flips that are important to master. If another player chases you into a dead end, for example, you can jump, kick off the wall, perform a flip, and land behind him. Suddenly hes the one getting fragged in the back. The guys in the CPL do nothing but wall-jump to navigate their way around some of the levels, says Rein. They do really smart wall-jumps and double-jumps and its almost like ballet. When you see really good players doing them, its astonishingly cool. Team Sports, UT2K3 Style The CPL? The Cyberathlete Professional League. Angel Munoz says he founded the organization in 1997 because we realized that the skill level of the top gamers in the world was far superior to those of the casual gamer. In Your Sights. Its a frag-or-be-fragged world. Rein thinks that Bombing Run, one of UT2K3s new multiplayer modes, could help bridge the gap between sports games and first-person shooters. He says that players have even formed leagues around the game, which he describes as football with guns. Essentially, the players divide into two teams, each with a home base. A ball materializes in the center of the arena, and each team scores points by having a player either carry it into the other teams home base (for 7 points) or shooting it into there (for 3 points). You cant use weapons while carrying the ball, although you can pass it to another teammate if youre about to get fragged. This is Bombing Run 1.0, says Rein, so theres no question that, as we refine the rules, Bombing Run will become a big team sport game. Thunder and Lightning. Gotcha! A New Expression Munoz hasnt seen Bombing Run attain the popularity that traditional multiplayer deathmatch modes have, although he thinks it could attract more players over time. He does take exception with the term sports games for geeks, however. The top professional gamers come from different backgrounds, he explains, and a large number of them have a traditional sports background. Therefore, it would be unfair to categorize all the top gamers as geeks, a term that is mostly associated with nerds that are somewhat disliked by society. I would rather state that electronic game sports are a new expression of the competitive nature of humans. That works for us. Watch out for our lightning gun the next time youre online. If you liked this game, check out: Aliens vs. Predator 2 Quake III: Gold Return to Castle Wolfenstein Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
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