Slaughters.com

I've spent most of the last two days playing games. My favorite Quake2 server was down for a couple days, and I ended up discovering a new game, Unreal Tournament. It's a Quake-like game with spectacular maps and graphics that maintains the integrity of the game play (for the most part). Quake 3 was a disappointment in a way. The gameplay became secondary to the visuals. The weapons are difficult to distinguish from one another and about equally effective (as opposed to the weapons in Quake2, which each behave very differently). There's plenty to look at though. And the kills are spectacular in a cartoonish way.

UT is visually impressive but also very fun to play. Though we'll have to see. Only the demo is available right now. The full release is due sometime in the next few weeks. The demo offers CTF, DeathMatch, Team DeathMatch and something called Bombing Run, which I'd never heard of before. It has network game server search built right in. You can also play against bots which you can set to various skill levels, including 'auto adjusting'. And these are not kiddie bots. You'll have a very tough time defeating bots set to or above 'skilled'.

The one pain, however, is trying to download gaming files. Inevitabley you are directed to either a 404 or FilePlanet, which charges you to download files. You typically have to look long and hard to find the actual files for a game demo. But because I'm such a nice guy, I'll provide you with direct links to these games right here.

Note, it is quite difficult to get Quake2 working under Linux. At one point, I actually had it working, and it was wonderfully fast and crash-free. But I've not been able to reproduce that installation on my latest Linux box. I've never tried installing Quake3 on my Linux box mainly because I'm not a huge fan of the game. I was able to get the Unreal Tournament demo working on my Linux box, but only after installing the NVIDIA GLX drivers and a new NVIDIA Linux kernel (yikes, scary!). Performance of the UT demo under Linux was, however, dissappointing.

Lastly, if you're going to install UT demo, be sure to install the latest patch. It includes significant bug fixes and smooths game performance noticeably.

G'Day!

~harry