Schadenfreude

I tried playing Unreal Tournament on the PS3 the other day. The first thing I did was customize my multiplayer character. Made a girl – smaller frame – hopefully harder to hit. I tried a bot match and it played a lot like the original UT, but sadly without the Last Man Standing option or adaptive difficulty. It looked nice visually, but it was too dark. A bit of brightness adjustment in the game fixed that, but I would have preferred a gamma adjustment instead.

Next I tried the “campaign”. What a load. It’s just bot matches with a thin veneer of a story to try to convince you that it isn’t just a bot match. The developers seem to be very aware of this fact too, since that even make fun of it themselves. In what was essentially a capture the flag game in the “campaign”, they refer to the “F.L.A.G” as a “Field LAttice Generator”. Pretty corny. Upon capturing the “F.L.A.G.”, one of the NPCs says “I’ve got the flag!” to which another NPC replies, “You mean the Field Lattice Generator, right?”. Then the original NPS says something like (and this isn’t an exact quote, as I was pretty disgusted by this point), “It looks like a flag, and waves like a flag, so it’s a flag to me.” OK. So at least they admit that it’s a CTF bot match.

The original UT had a single player mode where you just ran through all of the game types on the maps best suited to them. The story was that you were working your way up the tournament ladder until you reached Liandri himself. It had no real plot, but they never pretended otherwise and it was fun enough to play in preparation for online play. I have no problem with bot matches (I like them in fact), but don’t try to sell me a campaign if all I get is bot matches in the same multiplayer maps that I can play online. I was hoping for more of a story and Halo/GRAW style gameplay. Now I only played a bit, so if there is real plot after a few bot matches, then I take back what I’ve said here.

I went back and played by myself on a few maps – Vehicle CTF mostly. I wanted to find that huge vehicle, but never saw it. The vehicles and controls are OK, not as good as the Battlefield games, but perfectly usable. I could see this being a fun game to play online, but I haven’t tried that yet.

This is my first (unofficial) post. To celebrate, I’m giving everyone a link to a webgame called 5 Minutes to Kill (Yourself). It’s set in an office… and who hasn’t wanted to kill themselves (or others) at the office before? Truly inspired with slightly goofy controls – should provide countless seconds of amusement to anyone who’s stuck in a cubicle all day.