Immersive, impressive, violent

Author's Rating:

Pros: Realistic to a hypnotic degree

Cons: High system requirements, violent

Author's Review
Of all the interesting technology to come over the horizon in the 90s, Unreal was one of the most breathtaking. I know it's just a game, but until you've played it you don't understand the state of interactive technology in the world today. This game had such a realistic feel that for the time you're playing it, you respond physically and emotionally only to what you see on the screen. The room around you fades and you blur with the graphics. A spider jumps out from a dark corner and you fall off your chair... You mother/girlfriend/wife yells at you from the other room. But you don't hear what she says....

I should warn you that this game is pretty violent. It's not unnecessarily gruesome, there's not a lot of limb-rending and eyeball-squishing or anything truly gross. But there is a good deal of spurting blood and screaming. The death-matches are particularly brutal, where it's just you and one other character (another networked human player or a "bot") let loose in an elaborate maze-like setting with one goal: kill your opponent more times than he or she kills you. To be fair, the game is somewhat liberated in that you can be either a male or a female obliterationist.

Games are changing. This one clearly shows how much they are becoming about experience rather than challenge or puzzle-solving. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's quite a bit of fun to move around in a fantasy world that wraps around you and zips up behind you. I had a lot of fun jumping off of cliffs and savoring the sensation of falling to the ground. Unreal offers plenty of this kind of dreamscape frivolity.

The art that went into the game is amazing, the graphics rendered with a VOODOO graphics card (from 3Dfx, Inc.) are totally unbelievable. Unreal is specifically designed to take advantage of the Glide API, supported by gaming graphics cards from 3Dfx and it is quite a different experience with one of those than without one. Without one, it's a pixely, quick-paced shoot-em-up. With a VOODOO card, the detail is truly unbelievable. It's difficult to explain how immersive the game is, but I'll say that you can get very close to objects without seeing any pixels at all, just smooth, realistically textured surfaces. You can alos move very far away from other characters and watch them move around in the distance, tiny but recognizable. The lighting has a lot to do with how the game feels. Some parts are total darkness, some are moody and mysterious. Some take place underwater, and mirrors also play an important part. If a window separates you and your enemy, but his side is better lit, you will see him be he won't see you, just his own reflection. It's that realistic.

More realism could have been built into the game, but not in techincal terms. When you fire a gatling-gun at a light bulb but it doesn't shatter, you know for sure you're in a video game. When you come back to the spot where you killed someone 30 seconds ago and their body has vansihed, you know you're in a video game. Some environment programming could have enhanced the feel of the game.

But I've said enough. Buy Unreal and a VOODOO graphics accellerator if you want to enjoy a really wild experience. A fast computer helps, too. I recommend a G3 or a PIII of at least 250MHz and 128MB of RAM for the full experience. If you don't have the technology to enjoy Unreal to its fullest, wait until you do. Without the immersive graphics and lighting, it's just another bloody video game.