Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo Released

JSDopefish writes "The demo for the PC game Unreal Tournament has been released, and Blue's News has a full list of mirrors [including BitTorrent links from GameTab and AIXGaming] for downloading the 209mb Win32 client. If you like classic Deathmatch, it's a great game - I still love one on one deathmatch. The site explains: 'The Unreal Tournament 2004 official demo includes five playable game modes, and offers fans their first taste of Unreal Tournament 2004's two new game modes: the introduction of the hyper-charged Onslaught mode and the return of the fan-favorite Assault mode, which last appeared in the original Unreal Tournament. The demo also features established gametypes like Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Bombing Run'."

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone got an ETA on the linux version?

Once Nvidia becomes a bit more solid on 2.6, I imagine a AMD64 compiled unreal 2004 with 2.6 would be quite a nice experience. Although there are still some K8T800 chipset support problems for linux with the popular boards like MSI K8T neo and others. The Nvidia chipsets don't seem to cut it in the benchmarks at the moment, so unless they drop their price point the VIA is the way to go.

For those of you looking for other games on linux. Savage the battle for Newerth has just released a huge update for their retail version which speeds things up nicely. THE game of late 03 early 04 is Savage. Definitely worth a look-see if you haven't tried it yet.

Thinks are looking up for a linux desktop:

2.6 kernel
open office 1.1 is nice
new KDE and Gnome releases
mozilla 1.6 and firebird steadily approaching a 1 release
GIMP 2 comming up real soon, and that SVG one (name?) too.
Jahshaka and Gstreamer are promising for video editing, as is the commercial Mainactor from Mainconcept.
Enemy Territory native, Savage Native, Quakes, Tons of stuff under WINE.
Seeing some rad stuff from GPL Blender 3D, commercial Maya and Apple Shake working in industry.
Good ol' apache tanking along.
some of the GPL databases slowing moving from mid-commercial to big iron.
Innovation in python and php.

This damned well rocks. I don't code, so thank you to all the coders who have made this the year of the FULL desktop switch.

PC market is underpowered

[Peter Cooper]

There must be about as many PC's that can actually handle this game as there are macs. It's not like my dad's P-II 400 with a matrox G200 is going to be able to handle this.

That's actually an interesting point. The specs on games these days are pretty insane compared to the average PC in the family home. Even if a family has a, say, 1.4GHz machine in the home (and I'd guess way less than half of homes is at that level), it probably has a really crappy video card in it.. or even on-board video. This means that 90%+ of machines out there can barely play these games at 20fps in 640x480.

Given this, it really seems like the PC games industry is propped up by gaming die-hards.. whereas the console gaming market is propped up by everyone who owns one. Perhaps we should all remember this when we start bitching about the gaming freaks who mod their cases crazy all the time.. it's these guys who keep the PC industry in games ;-)

Re:Fun with Torrents

[OverlordQ]

Personally I dont see why 1million+1 people make torrents of the files, all you need is 1. The main problem with large releases like this is keep the tracker up under the strain.

Unreal 2003 was a disappointment

[superpulpsicle]

When I bought Unreal 2003 my expectation was thru the roof. Two months later I find myself only using the game to test video cards.

I am sorry but this company milked the unreal series to the degree of no return. Not sure I can spend any more $$$ on another potential disappointing sequel.

Doom III and half life 2 demo... those should be ready by the year 3004. But that's still before the next Duke 3D which will be here in 4004.

Re:UT 2004 Linux Server bit torrent

[SmittyTheBold]

No, you're looking at the wrogn target market - they're not after those who run Linux servers and might be willing to add game serving to the mix.

They're going for those people who want to set up a cheap, effective dedicated server. Many gaming clans will run a server with two or three games running servers in the background, but since it's a dedicated server there is no need for a GUI - and no need for Windows. If the game has a Linux version of the server, it's much easier on the clans than shelling out a few hundred dollars for a Windows license. These groups like to build a cheapie rack-mount box and lease space at a colo at the end of a fat pipe. For gaming. Gaming is the primary requirement, Linux just makes it cheaper for them.

It also helps that Linux has a reputation for being a "good server" that's stable, and has good remote-admin capabilities.

Re:PC market is underpowered

[caitsith01]

I must disagree, in the friendliest possible way. See reply to parent, above.

PC sales in 2003 were 168.9 MILLION units: http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,84 05079%5e15306%5e%5enbv%5e,00.html . Even back at the start of last year reasonably muscular processors were standard, and by the middle of the year the ATi/nVidia war had sent the price of decent-ish video cards crashing. Right now you would probably struggle to find a mainstream PC with less than 256 megs of ram and a 2GHz processor. My folks got a new PC last year with the lowest end GeForce FX - and it runs most games like a dream.

IMHO there are oodles of PCs that can run newer games around. Let's not forget, too, that most of these monster rigs are used to play stuff at max detail, max textures, 1600x1200 hyper resolution (I know, I have one). For the average home user a game running at 800x600 is still walloping anything on a TV screen for detail and clarity.

Apple may finally have released something with a bit of oomph, but they are hardly gonna dominate the games industry.

I agree to a certain extend with your main thesis, though: that high-end gamers drive the market along. Unfortunately this means games like Deus Ex 2 and Doom III will run like a slideshow on any normal machine. Personally I wish each level of technology was given more time to mature, so that we could see the modern equivalent of running Wolfenstein on a 286...

Re:Unreal 2003 was a disappointment

[DAldredge]

Download the damn demo and try it before you bitch.

Re:UT 2004 Linux Server bit torrent

[augustz]

Give folks who actually admin linux boxes some credit.

Some of us like the ability to easily setup a dedicated server using a server at a colo or other high bandwidth facility...

Thanks epic for providing one rather than requiring us to purchase windows machines.

Trollin' for love

[mrshowtime]

Well, the basic game has been improved and the weapons seem to basically do the same amount of damage now. The vehicles are horrific though. I was hoping that the vehicles would at least be on par with HALO, but they are far from it. I was wondering why nobody was using the "humvee" aka "warthog," that was until I tried it... It's like the designers said "Hey! lets make a vehicle that nobody can actually drive!" In Halo, the warthog takes a few seconds to get used to, but then it just feels right. I could not get the damn humvee in UT2004 to even turn at all. The flyers in UT2004 are fast, but are generally ineffective. Then there's the tank... Once again the designers seemed like they tried to make the tank as boring as possible. The new maps are pretty well designed and like I said before, the standard (non vehicle) gameplay has been sanitized to the point of being very blaise. Every time I play UT2004 it reminds me of how fantastic just plain old Half-Life's multiplayer weapons were. Ultimately, "Atari," has dropped the ball on this one. It does not hold up against Halo, let alone any of the next-gen titles like HL2.

Re:Unreal 2003 was a disappointment

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I had high hopes for UT2003 too. Until I played the demo and figured out it wasn't much more than UT with prettier graphics, and decided not to buy it. Maybe you should have done the same thing?

Since you're not sure if you can spend more money of a sequel, why don't you try the damn demo first before complaining? Maybe it'll make up for 2003's suckiness. If not, just delete it and move on.

Looking to the past indeed

[KFK - Wildcat]

From the "storyline":

Looking to the past, the nefarious powers hidden in the shadows knew that when threatened by an enemy, the masses would give up their freedoms in the name of patriotism. And so it was that in all but name, the human race was once again ruled by Imperial forces.

Hmm... Reminds me of something [whitehouse.gov]...

DVD special edition!

[LarsWestergren]

Appearently, the game comes on SIX cds! Holy hi-res textures, batman! However, they are going to release a DVD edition, I urge you all to buy it! (You are going to buy the game if you like it...right?)

I am so fed up with having games that come on DVDs for consoles being converted to lots of easy scratchable CDs for the PC release. At least if you are a RPG fan it is beginning to feel like we are back to the good old floppy times. "Please insert next media..."

When it comes to the game itself, I have read that the music and atmosphere resembles the first game, which I think is great news. I loved the original UT for daring to do something different in design and gameplay from just a Q3 clone. When UT2003 came I was disappointed to see they had taken a step closer to Q3 with lots of colored lights and space dungeons all over again. But in UT2004 levels such as the two trains are back (this time called Convoy appearently).

Re:Unreal 2003 was a disappointment

[Pxtl]

I agree - UT had some serious issues, and of course was popular with players who liked to abuse those issues. Many of the CTF maps were unplayable due to the sniper action, and obsurd due to the teleporting action. I think the UT2k3 fixed that. IMHO, the weapon and gametype changes in UT2k3 were excellent.

IMHO, the problem with 2k3 was that they decided to get the Quake players - they made it faster, louder, more "hardcore" - and lost all those nice gamer girls who liked the easy, fuzzy FPS. I used to be able to use UT to convert women into gamers.

Plus, I just find the whole "adrenaline" thing just silly. It adds an unnecessary and uncomfortable complication to the game.

I was reading about the mapping problems - apparently the devs decided to complete the maps before testing them, producing maps that were not much fun but so much work put in already they couldn't tweak them very much.

Still, I wasn't disappointed with 2k3. I thought UT had a better style to it (sleek and fun) but it was still a worthy successory. Its not like the real tragic sequels (AvsP 2, Tribes 2, Total Annihilation Kingdoms, Star Control 3) that completely destroyed a good game.

Re:VERY impressive..

[SlightOverdose]

> "I'm not going to buy a Nvidia graphics card, I refuse to support that company."

Why? Because they have the best commercial linux driver support of any hardware maker I've ever known?

Oh thats right. They don't give away all their trade secrets as well. Gosh. I guess they would be less evil if they had crappy substandard drivers like ATI who removed any serious code so they could open source it for gnuzealots like you- oh wait, no they didn't! ATI just copied nvidia's approach of binary drivers (all the way down the the OS/Product selector thingy).

Hell, they could just not release linux drivers- it wouldn't affect their market share a bit.

I suppose they could release their IP under the GPL. I mean, it certainly worked for 3dfx.

Re:PC market is underpowered

[BerntB]

Addendum:

It might have been my attitude that made UT2K3 boring.

Instead of having fun I was looking over the differences compared with UT and writing a list of what kind of moves I needed to learn.

Maybe it was too close to the attitude I use for work. 1/2 :-)

But, then, lots of other people seem to have had my reaction.

Re:Gotta frag in linux

[Lumpy]

I also agree. I bought every loki game, even though many of them sit still in the shrinkwrap. UT2004 will be played, and its one of them that I will rush out and buy 3 copies right off the bat.

if they can do this with UT over and over then the other game makers have no excuse (except maybe developers that cant write cross platform code)

The funny part is that I still play Unreal,UT, and ut2003... where playing quake3 has really dropped back at the monthly lan parties I host at my house.(usually 4-7 players... set up in the basement with music blaring and never ending flow of pizza and beer.)

Re:Hmmm, Windows only.

[Lev_Arris]

They 'forgot to mention it' because they weren't sure whether the Linux client would be ready when the game would go gold (initially they had planned to release the client later as a download). In the end the client was there so they put it onto the discs as well but of course that far into the production of the game it's hard to make last minute changes to the box design etc.

Re:Unreal 2003 was a disappointment

[analog_line]

Waste bandwidth on it? No thanks. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.