OUTLAWS 9.99repeating^32
10-06-2004, 07:01 PM
One week ago, after looking again at Croteam's site (http://www.croteam.com) and still seeing a page without any updates regarding Serious Sam II, I slouched back in my chair and sighed. Why has Croteam abondended us? I thought to myself. Are all game developers this irresponsibile? How difficult is it to write a short paragraph explaining progress once a month?
I couldn't escape the thought. Unreal. No! I refuse to be one of the 9 million players! I refuse to play for hours and not know anyone that I am playing! Unreal.
But I couldn't resist. Ok, I'll try it out. I reasoned that it's just a small download for the demo, and if it turns out to be crappy, I'll just uninstall it. So I download the demo and installed Unreal.
I start the game, and to my surprise, the game actually runs on my system. I go to "Settings", and am immediately overwhelmed by the myriad of buttons and slider-bars. So I try to go through them, setting the majority of them on the low side to help improve performance. I go to "Join" and look at the demo servers to choose from.
"Capture the Flag, that sounds interesting" I say to myself. "Let's go capture some flags". The first map I play is "Face Classic". As soon as I join, I use my mouse scroll to look through the various weaponry. "Hmm...Assault Rifle..Shield Gun..Translocator..what the hell is a translocator?". I decide that I need some better firepower.
So I enter into my base(Blue) and I see the Shock Rifle and the Rocket Launcher. I pick up the Rocket Launcher and I am reminded immediately of Sam. "Oh great", I said to myself, "this game is going to be a rocket whoring spam fest". A few seconds later, a red team member enters the base. "He's going after the flag! Get him! *Fires rockets*".
But the rockets didn't fire. At least, not what I was used to. The rockets had a small splash damage and did moderate amounts of damage. "What the?! Players actually have to aim? Finally!!".
So I went around collecting a few more weapons and found that there was no weapon that could really be spammed with. All required skill to use. Even the Sniper Rifle required skill; the bullets were not instantaneous.
Later on in the game, I see this white object flying in the air, heading straight for me. "What is that thing?" I thought it looked like a blimp. "Great, I'm being attacked by the Goodyear Blimp". Almost instinctively, I shoot at it. I hear "denied!". "Yeah!", I thought to myself.."there is an announcer, awesome".
Those were some of my first impressions of the game. I've been playing now for one week and have since gotten a few killing sprees, a few multikills, and even one "mega kill".
I know how to use one adrenaline move, "Speed". I just tap forward three times and it works when I have 100 adrenaline.
I still don't know many things about the game, including how to dodge jump. During one of my first capture the flag games, I stole the flag and was being yelled at over the teamspeak by a teammate for not "dodge jumping". He was saying, "Damnit Outlaws! If you don't know how to dodge jump, don't take the flag!". I responded with something like, "Look man, I've had this game for two days, this is a demo server, what do you expect?".
All in all, I'm really enjoying Unreal. So much so, that I bought the full version today and I also installed all of the recent patches and the new "expansion pack" with the new vechicles. I have my buddy list set up and I'm ready to play. I do have some questions, however.
1) What is "dodge jumping" and how does one do it?
2) Should I have the game preload all of the character skins? I have 768 MB of RAM.
3) Is there anyway to set priority of the "best weapon"? I use the "best weapon" button often, but I don't like how it selects the Link Gun over the Shock Rifle. Is there anyway to fix that?
Thanks for reading, and here are some screenies of one of my rare wins in a Capture the Flag game(keep in mind this was in a demo server, so the competition was minimal). I look forward to playing some games with my fellow GM members!
http://tinypic.com/bhcv6
http://tinypic.com/bhcvc
I couldn't escape the thought. Unreal. No! I refuse to be one of the 9 million players! I refuse to play for hours and not know anyone that I am playing! Unreal.
But I couldn't resist. Ok, I'll try it out. I reasoned that it's just a small download for the demo, and if it turns out to be crappy, I'll just uninstall it. So I download the demo and installed Unreal.
I start the game, and to my surprise, the game actually runs on my system. I go to "Settings", and am immediately overwhelmed by the myriad of buttons and slider-bars. So I try to go through them, setting the majority of them on the low side to help improve performance. I go to "Join" and look at the demo servers to choose from.
"Capture the Flag, that sounds interesting" I say to myself. "Let's go capture some flags". The first map I play is "Face Classic". As soon as I join, I use my mouse scroll to look through the various weaponry. "Hmm...Assault Rifle..Shield Gun..Translocator..what the hell is a translocator?". I decide that I need some better firepower.
So I enter into my base(Blue) and I see the Shock Rifle and the Rocket Launcher. I pick up the Rocket Launcher and I am reminded immediately of Sam. "Oh great", I said to myself, "this game is going to be a rocket whoring spam fest". A few seconds later, a red team member enters the base. "He's going after the flag! Get him! *Fires rockets*".
But the rockets didn't fire. At least, not what I was used to. The rockets had a small splash damage and did moderate amounts of damage. "What the?! Players actually have to aim? Finally!!".
So I went around collecting a few more weapons and found that there was no weapon that could really be spammed with. All required skill to use. Even the Sniper Rifle required skill; the bullets were not instantaneous.
Later on in the game, I see this white object flying in the air, heading straight for me. "What is that thing?" I thought it looked like a blimp. "Great, I'm being attacked by the Goodyear Blimp". Almost instinctively, I shoot at it. I hear "denied!". "Yeah!", I thought to myself.."there is an announcer, awesome".
Those were some of my first impressions of the game. I've been playing now for one week and have since gotten a few killing sprees, a few multikills, and even one "mega kill".
I know how to use one adrenaline move, "Speed". I just tap forward three times and it works when I have 100 adrenaline.
I still don't know many things about the game, including how to dodge jump. During one of my first capture the flag games, I stole the flag and was being yelled at over the teamspeak by a teammate for not "dodge jumping". He was saying, "Damnit Outlaws! If you don't know how to dodge jump, don't take the flag!". I responded with something like, "Look man, I've had this game for two days, this is a demo server, what do you expect?".
All in all, I'm really enjoying Unreal. So much so, that I bought the full version today and I also installed all of the recent patches and the new "expansion pack" with the new vechicles. I have my buddy list set up and I'm ready to play. I do have some questions, however.
1) What is "dodge jumping" and how does one do it?
2) Should I have the game preload all of the character skins? I have 768 MB of RAM.
3) Is there anyway to set priority of the "best weapon"? I use the "best weapon" button often, but I don't like how it selects the Link Gun over the Shock Rifle. Is there anyway to fix that?
Thanks for reading, and here are some screenies of one of my rare wins in a Capture the Flag game(keep in mind this was in a demo server, so the competition was minimal). I look forward to playing some games with my fellow GM members!
http://tinypic.com/bhcv6
http://tinypic.com/bhcvc