UT3, Now With More Dinosaurs

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.