Unreal Tournament Review
Unreal Tournament on the PS2 mirrors its PC counterpart closely, with all the levels and weapons you’ve seen before. Team play is stressed even in the single player game, with Assault, Domination, and Capture the Flag modes all being team-based and only the basic Deathmatch leaving players to their own individual devices. Where the PC game focused heavily on online play – something that’s obviously not an option with the PS2 at this point – the PS2 version is a single-player or split-screen experience (there’s also an option for using a Firewire link cable – sorry Sony, we’ll never call it “iLink”).
Well, it seems console gamers are finally starting to get some respect in the FPS genre. While previous generations saw PC ports of games such as Doom and Quake coming in usually lame, half-hearted attempts sometimes years after the PC release, the power of today’s systems means developers are beginning to port the latest and greatest with ease and quickness – often with enhancements over the PC original (as in the Dreamcast’s Quake 3 or Half Life), and always with at least passable graphical quality and the same gameplay as the original. We’re even starting to see full keyboard and mouse support becoming a standard feature on console FPS games, and Unreal Tournament is no exception – it’s the first game to support the USB features of the PS2.
Inferiority Complex
As in any PC port, there’s the obvious comparison – and we’ll tell you right now after doing a direct A/B look back and forth (at the same resolution, just to be fair) the PC version of this game looks sharper and more colorful and also runs smoother even on a mid-range PII-400 computer. Part of that’s the difference between a PC monitor and a TV, but the real difference is still obvious, especially in frame rate. Which is not to say the game looks bad on the PS2 – it’s still one of the best looking games on the system – but compared to the original, one of the most amazing looking games out of the thousands on the PC platform, the port doesn’t quite hold up. The textures are a bit muddier, the frame rate topped at 30 and often lower than that, a few weapons effects missing here and there. On the other hand, this was an extremely quick port that was only confirmed a few months ago, so what Epic did accomplish here is commendable. The game is certainly playable at all times and without doing a direct comparison you’d never know the difference.
We tried the game out with both the standard gamepad and a compatible Logitech USB keyboard/optical mouse combo. The Dual Shock controller has always been the best console controller around for FPS games and was probably designed specifically with them in mind, allowing movement, turning, and strafing with ease using both analog sticks. The default stick sensitivity for both horizontal and vertical movement is set way too low (it’s ridiculously slow for a game this fast) but luckily almost everything is adjustable control-wise. Of course, the keyboard and mouse is far and away the better way to play this game – you’ll be fragging like a PC pro in no time.
Caveat Emperor
Unreal Tournament is still as much fun to play on the PS2 as it ever was on the PC, with a couple of caveats. If you own the PC version there’s really very little reason to purchase the PS2 port, and if you don’t there’s very little reason to buy this port over the just-released UT: Game of the Year Edition for the PC. Even among console-only owners this may not be the best version of the game available, as Infogrames will be releasing a technically equal Dreamcast port containing 20 new levels and online play shortly. In other words, the question is who is the audience for this game on the PS2? The answer is really only those who don’t own either a Dreamcast or a decent PC, and that’s probably not too many people.
