To borrow a John-ism: oh my goodness! You’re either about to hate me forever, or laugh and offer to buy me a cupcake. Whatever the hell Nyan cat is, it’s clearly a meme of terrifying scope. The original video’s been viewed 46 million times, and now it’s been snuck into Unreal 3 as a mod for the Redeemer. Just look.
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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 a lot of things right, and it was clearly having a great time in the process. Yet it didn’t turn a profit for devs People Can Fly and Epic.
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“Philosophical First Person Single Player Exploration Puzzle Art Game,” apparently. I spotted Hazard: The Journey Of Life over on Indiegames, but I haven’t had time to get it working yet. The video (below) is definitely worth checking out though, as this minimal Unreal Tournament 3 mod has a fascinating minimalistc presentation and promises some strange-looking puzzles. (More fodder for the first-person puzzle camp.) It seems to be a work in progress as the mod only runs at 800×600 and requires some batch-file fiddling to get working, as explained in the readme. (Which also instructs you to read itself…) Anyway, worth taking a look.
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I wonder if we’re on the cusp of a golden age for Unreal Tournament 3 mods, after all these years of Half-Life 2’s friendly tyranny. In the last few months we’ve had Prometheus, The Ball (which I’ll also write about later, but I had a headache on the day I downloaded it. No, it’s okay – don’t weep for me) and now there’s Airborn – all doing clever and pretty things with Epic’s solid but strangely unlovely multiplayer shootybangbang game. Is this powerful engine gearing up for its community-led day in the sun? Back to Airborn, anyway. It’s kind of like Zelda, but with less wibbling on about fairies and more airships.
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RPS reader Robbie McKnight sent us a link to his new Unreal Tournament 3 map, which can be found here. He’s taken something of an unusual angle on things as UT3 maps go: everything is built in primary colours and pre-school Platonics. I like the sun best of all. Compare and contrast, if you will, with this map. The two ends of the UT3 mapping spectrum, perhaps?

There’s a video of Robbie’s work after the hop.
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Having been messing around with UT3 again in the wake of the ongoing Make Something Unreal competition, I’ve picked up a load of levels and mods, some of which I’ll probably post about here in the next few days. The one that I want to get out of the way first is the excellent third-person demon/zombie shooter, The Haunted. (It’s an Unreal Tournament 3 mod, obviously.) Now I’m betting there are few people here who will sign for a moratorium on zombie games in 2010, but until then this is a genuinely excellent piece of work. There’s a single player game, and multiplayer in which “humans” take on demons controlled by other players. The core concept for solo play is “just try and stay alive”. And that really does become tricky as the ammo runs out and the baddies pile in. It’s beautifully conceived and executed, and supernaturally bleak weather rolls in as the game unfolds, making it even more threatening. Get it here, or watch the video below for more flavour.

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This is splendid, and slightly mysterious. Beneath the click is a kind of promo video for DM-Spectrum, an Unreal Tournament 3 deathmatch level by Matt Bradley. He’s created a kind of disco battlefield, which, according to his Vimeo page, he hasn’t yet distributed. It seems that players have to navigate via the disco light flags to find their enemy, but it’s not obvious how that works. I’ve dropped Mr Bradley a line and will report back with more when I know more, or get hold of the map itself. In the meantime, have a look at the intriguing video below.

This was first on Offworld, which should be the other videogame blog you read.
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We probably should have talked more about what’s been going on with Unreal Tournament 3 over the last couple of weeks. Why didn’t we? Because it’s not a game any of us feel particularly strongly about one way or another, and from earlier comments it didn’t look like you lot did either. Having a famous name and being reasonably fun is no longer enough for a technically adept but fundamentally unambitious multiplayer shooter to grab the attention it once would have done.

Last weekend, that changed dramatically. Unreal Tournament is back, baby, back. And no matter how you or we or anyone else might personally feel about UT3, its unexpected resurgence may signal colossal change for PC games.
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If any reader of any website is likely to have World of Goo, you have to suspect RPS readers are. We did the first review! We never shut up about it! However if for some reason you don’t, Steam are selling it for 75% off this weekend. That’s just over four quid. Go get it.

If you’re feeling even four-quid skint, also over at Steam, Unreal Tournament 3 Black is free to play all weekend – plus 40% off the full game (Making it just over eight quid). It includes the Titan Pack, which is a hefty newly released expansion for the full game which includes lots of stuff which I’ll lob beneath the cut. As it really is a load of stuff, including the word “behemoth”….
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You may remember Kieron doing science a few weeks back about NVIDIA’s CUDA system – clever trickery that allows a GPU to perform processing feats other than pixel-pushing. There’s a lot of real-world algorithm-crunching applications for it, but of most interest to gamers is that it can make your GeForce 8, 9 or 200-series card behave like a PhysX board. NVIDIA bought out PhysX makers Ageia a while back, and we’re soon to see the fruits of such money-labours.

The big question is to what extent simulating cratesplosion will slow down the graphics rendering. We’ll get to find out next week, with the release of the GeForce Experience Pack.
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Lordy lawks, this is the best thing my eyes have ever seen:

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Sad tidings for fans of heavily normal-mapped pretend-man-shoots. Seems both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 haven’t exactly stormed up the charts, which is a tragic and strange state of affairs for what were seemingly two of the most eagerly-anticipated PC games of the year.
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I’ve got an Ageia PhysX card sat around somewhere, a piece of hardware about which I wasn’t entirely complimentary a while back. I don’t use it because a) there’s yet to be a PhysX-enabled game which I’ve wanted to play for any reasonable length of time and b) it’s one more furiously spinning fan in a PC that I can already hear humming like the wrath of Skynet, even when I’m on the next floor of the house.

But maybe, I thought, Unreal Tournament 3 would be the game to change all that. Eyecandy junkie that I am, I was quite looking forward to testing the explodability of the PhysX-only bonus maps. Tech know-all types Bit-Tech have kind of talked me out of it before I’ve even got a copy of the game, with one page of their typically graphics-centric review of UT3 putting the boot particularly hard into the PhysX stuff. The screenshots sure look good, but it sounds very much as though my feelings about earlier games with PhysX support tending to end up looking like an explosion in a polystyrene factory aren’t going to change any time soon. Worse still, it seems the super-duper maps run at under 10 fps. That’s an ultra-whoops for Ageia, surely. Oh well. I may still be able to summon the energy to remove my PysX card from its dusty anti-static bag once I’ve got hold of UT3, but don’t bank on it.

So, what now for this increasingly beleagured hardware experiment? Can it possibly recover from even its most high-profile implementation turning out to be a little bit tragic? And does anyone else reading this have a PhysX board?

One of the main reasons I’ve been enjoying Unreal Tournament III (aside from the “oh hey, I don’t have to pick a class” relief) is the Scavenger. The Necris vehicles each have their own gunmetal-tentacle thing going on, but the Scavenger seems to be the epitome of what Epic were reaching for in their rendition of Wacky Races: TechnoGoth Edition. It might just be my favourite vehicle in a game, and it’s probably my all-time favourite form multiplayer transport. The reason for this is that it’s completely demented.

While you really have to see it in motion to get the essence of my excitement, this post would look crap without some images. Here ‘s the beast being awesome:

Okay, I know you can’t really make it out. I can only try to convey its nature in words. They are all I have. Click ahoy.

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My review of Unreal Tournament III has gone up on Eurogamer. It was a bit of a wake up call for me: a reminder that multiplayer FPS games are the reason I became so obsessed with the PC in the first place. After the super-beautiful but lacklustre demo I was all set to be bored by UT3, but it soon dragged me. I’m going to be posting a few more bits and pieces about the game in the coming week, because it has gloriously deranged ideas.

What’s perhaps most thrilling, however, is the architecture. Epic really have excelled themselves this time around. While there sure is a lot of brown ‘n gloom, there are colossal tendrils squirming off into the clouds, futurist Persian palaces wrapped in waterfalls and nameless technology… that sort of thing. It’s just the kind of place I want to drive a spider into a tank battle. But more on that later.

“The name’s Malcolm.”

“Reaper.”

Eh?

Anyway, it seems that Unreal Tournament III requires some kind of story mode to explain why you’re locked into a series of battles, and also (according to my sources) why you keep respawning. Here we go:

Eugh, these flu drugs are making me hallucinate.

Here’s a few early impressions of the Unreal Tournament 3 demo, plus bonus anecdote from my gaming past. These are rather tainted by hungover subjectivity, so may very well not match your own feelings, but hell, outspoken nonsense is what you visit this site for, right?

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The beta demo for Unreal Tournament 3 is out, but we can’t find a server that isn’t maxed out. Try here and here, if you’re patient.

Post any other good download links in the comments, y’all.

It’s been everywhere already, but may as well mention it here so folk have somewhere else to express their outrage/joy/paranoia/confusion. Yes, Unreal Tournament 3 system specs! Will the beefy quad-core CPU and GeForce 8800 in my PC be worth the investment at last?

Minimum System Requirements
Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor
512 Mbytes of System RAM
NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card

Recommended System Requirements
2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor
1 GBytes of System RAM
NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card

Huh. Guess not. Surprising, really. Clearly Windows 2000 users will explode in fury, but apart from that it’s about the most reasonable rider I’ve seen any big game demand recently. I mean, apparently my mum’s PC can run Unreal Tournament 3, which is a reality I’m not entirely sure I can deal with. I will be amused to see what the game looks like on a Radeon 9600, however. Not much, I would imagine, like this:

Earlier in the week I was interviewing Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski about Gears Of War on PC. It was a bit of shame really, because what I wanted to ask him about was Unreal Tournament III. I mean Gears looks fun – and I’ll be talking about that in depth in a forthcoming PC Gamer, paper fans – but the true heavyweight for the PC is going to be Unreal Tournament III. Alongside Enemy Territory and Team Fortress, this game is going to arrive at the traffic lights of gaming like a spacecraft pulling up next to a Jeep and an ice cream van. UT3’s new assault levels promise some outlandish possibilities for co-op gaming (the long-ago PC Gamer LAN’s finest hour was playing UT2004 assault vs high skill-level bots). UT3 will have with airbourne assaults, skyscraper sized vehicles, and unnatural environments aplenty. The maps themselves promise to simply outdo anything we’ve ever seen. I mean go back and look at UT2004 – those maps are astonishing enough. UT3 is a year on from Gears Of War… It’s like we’ll never need another game engine. Just look at it:

It actually looks like that.

Anyway, here’s Epic bossman Mike Capps talking about Unreal Tournament III. The most interesting thing that he mentions is that damage will be increased across all weapons. That’s a fairly big deal, dragging it back to the land of one-rocket kills – arguably a major boon for skilled teamplay. Sorry, I’m being all FPS obsessive again…

Also: does anyone else think Gears Of War should have been a game about battlefield engineering?