People criticise modern shooters for having very short story modes, this is shorter. I bought it on release day on PS2 at 4.00 PM after shcool. By 7.30 PM I had finished it, seriously. Multiplayer is quite fun, but meh, short and not really to the point.
There's no denying this is a bad game. It's so bad its good. Ultima 9 was an extraordinarily ambitious attempt at a true open world experience in full 3d years before Morrowind came along and showed the world how to do it right. Yes its the death of Ultima and the original crashed so much the risk of not saving every ten seconds began to add a new terror to gameplay. It is, however a rewarding game to play through, it has its quirks and twists and can at times be quite beautiful.
This game is one of those forgotten gems that was overshadowed by bigger releases and never got the recognition it deserved. It's a fun, funny and challenging adventure romp with a fairly original storyline (in so much as the bad guy kidnapping the heroes girlfriend can be original) and now its on GoG I can shelve my dreamcast version once and for all and say goodbye to the most irritating control system ever conceived for an RPG.
Unreal Tournament is one of those games that fires me with nostaliga. Ten years ago I remember hauling a crappy old Dell complete with heavy CRT monitor halfway across Norfolk to a friends house. There, on his poor punished dining table myself and four other friends were to experience the first LAN party of our lives. Path cables were prepared and mountains of junk food awaited. In our hands were six copies of UT, still in their shrink wrap. For three hours we fought with Windows ME's astonishingly bad networking wizard but eventually we where there. At 6.00 PM the first round began, the next night we were still there, it was a LAN party that was to last nearly a week. Now I've digressed about my youth and imagined those days again, I can tell you that UT is such an astonishing FPS that it still stacks up against needlessly complicated messes like COD and BF3. It's fast, its slick, its over the top. The explosions and the blood, the amazingly designed levels, the seemingly infinite "DUDE did you see THAT!" moments that always accompany a game, they all come together to remind anyone who plays that this is where it all began, back when games were just games, fun, reliable and re-playable.
