Unreal Tournament 3 remains an oddly ugly game, which always seemed a bewildering misfire on the part of an FPS that, so it seemed, existed primarily to pimp an engine. It’s like a milkman painting a picture of a cow with tortured, bleeding udders on the side of his van. While UT3 plays okay (the highlight being its agreeably ridiculous vehicles), its look is just visual noise, a mess of vague, clashing aesthetic ideas that somehow manages to seem devoid of colour despite drawing a silly neon border around everything. What a shame. What I’m still hoping – as a long-term UT player – is that the mod community can yet rescue it from the drab, tokenistic fate Epic themselves damned it to.
There are a few interesting bets catalogued over at Moddb, but today I was looking for something bitesize and stooopid to play before collapsing into bed with ultra-flu. 1.93Mb Mutator Jurassic Rage III looked to be exactly what I was looking for, as there’s none more dumb than throwing in some Velociraptors
It doesn’t replace player/bot characters with the snappy little bastards, but simply spawns them in the standard game alongside everyone else, as a sort of deadly distraction. There are no points to be had from killing them, but they make life amusingly difficult for everyone. It is, after all, rather hard to snipe a rival player when seven foot of angry lizard suddenly attaches itself to the back of your head. Very simple, very stupid, but probably the most fun I’ve had with UT3.
Related Stories:
If you’re going to spend the effort to put dinosaurs in something, you might as well do a small amount of research: The known velociraptors are about the size of a turkey. And were almost definititely fluffy/feathery. Thats a deinonychus if its anything, and it needs some feathers.
A guy by the name of Kevin “Rorschach” Johnstone used to make texture sets for Quake3 level designers – a lot of his work wound up in the Headhunters3 mod. I never liked them personally, because they were all a little too noisy and tended to visually override the level geometry and the players.
Not surprisingly, he’s an art director at Epic now, whose whole approach to visual design seems to be summable with the phrase “you missed a spot.”
The known velociraptors are about the size of a turkey.
The humanoids in the UT3 universe are about the size of a golfball.
I agree with this introductory paragraph 9001%.
Also, UT99 forever. Although one cannot underestimate the awesome of UT2004’s VCTF when teamwork actually happens.
“Graphical quality and artistic merit are two very different things and it’s only in the last couple of years that this has actually become apparent.”
O RLY. Half-Life 1, Deus Ex, and Max Payne all pull amazing feats with their engines, due to excellent artistic direction—DX in particular shines as an example of grubby-but-not-colourless and futuristic-without-neon-overload. If anything, the tendancy to slop-bucket pixel shaders over everything these days seems to be making modellers and texture artists lazy. (Massive exception for Team Fortress 2 applies.)
What impressed me is that you can fit the model, texturing, animation, AI and game rules for a completely new and different character into a less-than 2mb download, in a game that takes up multiple GIGAbytes of room on your HD.
Wizardy, I tell you. WIZARDRY.