Have You Played... Unreal Tournament?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I like to argue about how Quake 3 is better, because I'm an early-'00s scamp, but the truth is that I love Unreal Tournament, too. Particulary its sniper rifle, particularly Facing Worlds.

I spent my fair share of time playing UT against human beings, leaping about DM_Morpheus and attempting to second-guess my floaty opponents, but that's not my preferred way to play UT. If I want competition against human beings, I still play Quake. Unreal Tournament was a weekend morning mess-around game, though.

Load up Facing Worlds with bots, grab a sniper rifle, and sit atop your own team's tower with your sights trained at the enemy's mid-tower teleporter. Wait for a bot to spawn and, blam, blow its head off. They exit the portal in the same way at the same speed every time, so you can just do this all day long, racking up the m-m-m-monster kills.

It's cheap, but as a teenager I had a lot of fun doing this and other related one-sided bot slaughter. I was particularly fond of a custom mutator that let you ride the Redeemer rocket. Think not Strangelove but a surfboard, as you steered it around the level and detonated it outside the enemy's front door. I've yet to play the modern Unreal Tournament namesake, but I won't be happy until it lets me do dumb easy crap to dumb easy bots.