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12 months ago
Feature: 20 years later...
Unreal turned 20 years old this month. The extraterrestrial first-person shooter spawned (and showcased) a game engine whose descendants still motor on today. To commemorate all those screaming prisoners and innocent alien creatures killed at the hands of jumpy players, I got in touch with a handful of the original team and asked them to share their memories of making the first Skaarj conflict. This…
1 year ago
Feature: Listen to these gunshots
Wait, didn’t we already answer this question? Never mind, the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is not content with our list of the top 50 first-person shooters. Well, they're mostly fine with it (lists are stupid) but they still want to hash out this ageless question the old-fashioned way. By interrogating each other over the internet.
"Dearest Alice, I do not play video games but fear I am insufficiently aware of my own mortality and am exploring every avenue to remedy that," begins one of the many letters I received in the post this morning seeking my advice as a reputed expert in the field. "Which gaming platform would most frequently remind me that my youth is so very far behind…
4 years ago
Feature:
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Unreal barely feels like a game any more. It's an engine. "This is Unreal, not Unity," barely causes a flicker of the original Epic FPS to come to mind. And yet it's one of my favourite shooters ever.
5 years ago
At any big gaming conference or expo I've been to there's been a strong dividing line between mainstream and indie. Both are awful labels, but for sake of simplicity: the former fills cavernous halls with booths, music, and major publisher money, while the latter normally finds itself a corner of carefully curated darlings, most featuring sprite graphics and other symbols signalling that the game is…
Update: Now with trailer. Epic has announced today that Unreal Engine 4 is to dramatically change its licensing model. From now on anyone can subscribe to Unreal Engine 4 for $19 a month, and then release those games commercially for a 5% gross revenue share with the developer. This means that indies no longer need to stick with the Unreal Development Kit, but get the…
6 years ago
Jim, John and Nathan are all out at GDC for RPS right now, but the lack of any news from them so far leads me to presume they are all either dead, kidnapped, hungover, hiding or trapped inside a branch of The Cheesecake Factory. So, while I've not been out there to see and thus usefully report on any of the following myself, I can…
7 years ago
D'awww! My cockles are forever warmed by communities keeping olden games alive, and so it is that an email declaring the latest release of a fan-made, Epic-permitted patch of the original Unreal brought about my first smile of this dingy day. OldUnreal's Patch 227 has been kicking around in various forms since 2008, but yesterday brought the first update to it in over a year.
I was going to start with "Well, this came out of nowhere," but given that this year has also seen the doctors depart BioWare and Peter Molyneux pack his bags for the green pastures of indie-dom, it clearly didn't. Cliff "Biff Cliszenski" Bleszinski has been the face of (and a major portion of the brains behind) Epic, Unreal, Gears of War, and - most famously…
Epic Games may be best known for the awesome Jazz Jackrabbit, but it seems like they're ready to move on to other things. Other things on the PC, apparently. Epic's newly teased PC-only project has, in all seriousness, been a long time in coming. "We might be working on a PC-only title," Epic president Mike Capps said during a PAX panel (via Joystiq). Bleszinski then drove…
8 years ago
Last night saw just the latest sign that civilisation is on a nosedive to hell, as the entire internet lost its mind over the prospect of seeing pictures of a new telephone. Subsumed by that news was far more interesting news for people who prefer their technology in a hot metal box: Epic have gotten their Unreal Engine 3 running in Flash. In theory, this…
This kind of thing just scares the hell out of me. While Bulletstorm isn't exactly the kind of game I'm going to put on a pedestal and hail as the one true future of electronic entertainment, it was a new franchise, a rare shooter that didn't take itself deathly seriously, a good-looker and a game that at least attempted a few bonus ideas. It did…
So that next-generation Unreal Engine video was fairly impressive, but getting into the depths of what the tools actually do - and how much of that is actually DX11 stuff - has had to wait until this video over on Kotaku. Real-time beards! That's the fucking future, right there.
Quintin posted about the latest posing from the Unreal engine last week, but lamented the lack of a video with which to demonstrate this new-era graphical clout. Now we can do that. Behold - the worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrld of tomorrow!
10 years ago
Yesterday, in between discussing how much better my Champions build was than his, Rob Hale mentioned the Unreal Mod Prometheus.. He suggested - in the wake of Time Donkey - an RPS theme day of time-travel. What a wonderful thing that would have been. If we could actually have time-travel, I'd have gone back in time to do it. Alas, I can't. Instead, watch the…
11 years ago
It's been coming for a while, if we're honest. Epic have recently been taking it in turns to say disparaging things about the state of PC gaming, to the point that CliffyB's now considered something of a Benedict Arnold figure in some of the more rabid PC camps. And now they're burning another bridge, further confirming that PC is no longer their most beloved (edit…
