I bought the Unreal pack on this Steam summer sale, and started playing the first Unreal for the first time. It's a fun little game, but so far I'm not impressed. It feels like a Turok with better physics.

They employed a number of tricks in the renderer, like skipping dynamic lighting on huge walls, to make big areas faster to render. This allows for more varied areas, at some loss of visual cohesion.

And it's interesting to realize that Unreal had a "storytelling through PDAs" mechanic long before Doom 3. 

I always suspect that people who found Quake 2 to have a boring or samey theme can't have gotten very far through the game. 

Unreal is great, I still play it every now and then, although the level design can be frustratingly obtuse in that way that no one has the patience for any more. I haven't played quake 2 since the 90s and doubt I ever will again. I just found it dreary.

Note: they ruined the atmosphere in Unreal with an update that changed all the weapon sounds to loud, ugly versions that ruin the soundscape. You can find a mod that restores the sounds to the original versions. 

If I remember right...if you're using patch 227, then the old weapon sounds are available in the mutators menu. 

Sounds like you're playing Unreal through UT? 

patch 227i is an "unofficial" patch for Unreal Gold. I think it's essential if you want to run the game with any sort of vaguely modern hardware. The old sounds are just a nice bonus. 

in just 658 days, Quake's more colourful (gayer?) cousin, Unreal, will be 20 years old too... 

I should still have the original Unreal stored away somewhere. As far as I can remember, I only played it once and didn't like it all that much. I may have to dig it out and give it another try.

I know a lot of people didn't like Unreal 2, but I played it through several times and didn't think it was all that bad. 

I never played Unreal 2, because it got some pretty bad reviews, and also it was made by the guys who did the Return to Na Pali expansion for Unreal 1, which I thought was pretty poor. 

on Unreal Gold (no UT, i haven't tried to use Unreal on UT yet and don't know how) and works perfectly, so it runs in ''modern'' hardware. On the other side, i am not using a laptop (which tend to have more problems with older games in my experience) and the OS i use has a decade, which could explain it.

About the game itself, for me I played it one year ago again, and i remember it being good overall, highlighting ambiance (that first part inside the spaceship was godly to me back when i played it on 199x), music and some enemies, but just lacking in the layout side on several parts (too many corridors and linear layout), the brushwork seems more ''squarish'' and ''blockish'' in the base and temple parts than in Quake, and that while the weapons are good for DM, and are nicely designed individually and very well differentiated, as a whole feel like they are a bit weak, maybe because how elusive and powerful half the enemies in this game are, i still don't know. 

Yeah that was a turn-off for a lot of people. I think they attempted to compensate for the (presumably performance-driven) very low enemy count by making all the enemies massive bullet sponges (a bad idea). I never minded the slightly sucky combat because the environment and atmosphere was so incredible to me at the time.

It's also another reason I hate the updated weapon sounds - they made all the guns sound like you're launching Tomahawk missiles at the enemies, but then they still do as much damage as flicking a damp bit of tissue paper at them :p 

After playing some more I noticed the same: The combat in Unreal gets boring due to enemies having too much health.

Also, the enemies have no rhythm and no speed variation. They move around like they're adrift, which looks really bad.

However, I started some DM maps to take a look, and noticed that Unreal had plenty of really impressive effects for its time. Mirrors, portals, lit liquids, really good skyboxes and plenty of refraction effects are very impressive for a 1998 game.

Also, the Nali npc secrets are fun.

When compared to Quake 2, I'd say that Quake 2 aged better due to better enemy programming and a more detailed sp level design. Unreal has more atmosphere, but with a lower level of detailing. 

For me Unreal wins LD-wise because of the way it seamlessly intertwines huge exteriors with interiors, has much better non-linearity and exploration, has a lot more environment themes, and lots of very memorable locations. Q2 just felt like a monotonous grey and orange trudge through a bunch of forgettable space warehouses.

Unreal's not all roses though: many of the sci-fi/spaceship levels in Unreal are tedious mazes of wank.

I agree also that the Unreal enemies kinda suck and are annoying to fight. 

Theres a bunch of well known guys behind of the Return to NaPali though

Willem, M.Worch, Kevlar? to name a few 

New weapons: obnoxious, ugly, oversized screen-filling embarrassments with amateurish and muddy looking skins, that had nothing to do with the art style of the original weapons, and pretty much just duplicated their functionality.

New monsters: annoying, cheap, crap things that took all the aspects that were bad about vanilla Unreal's enemy movement and combat, and made them ten times worse.

Level Design: I actually can't remember if it was good or not, but I think it was the least bad thing about the game. Seems to have included a lot of areas that were cut from the original, and new levels that were similar / made in the same style to the original levels.

I'd be up for trying it again if there's a mod that replaces all the new shit weapons and enemies with ones from vanilla. 

I found my Unreal box. I assume the disk is in it but I didn't check because I also found SiN and I might try to play that instead. I only vaguely remember it. I certainly didn't play it more than once and may never have actually finished it. I do remember stupidly long loading times for saves. Maybe that'll be tolerable on a modern computer with an SSD, or maybe it won't run at all. 

do we need a "1990s - The Golden Age of FPS" thread? 

Unreal 2 getting flak was a typical "they changed it, now it sucks" situation. It was a completely different game compared to the original.

Not saying it was perfect, but it was a decent story-driven FPS with impressive visuals. 

do we need a "1990s - The Golden Age of FPS" thread?

Isn't that what this entire forum is about? 

Q2 just felt like a monotonous grey and orange trudge through a bunch of forgettable space warehouses.

This touches on a remark I made above: you can't have gotten too far through the game if that's the impression you took away.

OK, it's true that the first two units are well-described by what you say, but after that the units become much more varied. 

Doom 3 has a similar problem: technically, the themes are different, but the levels are constructed in such a way that it all feels about the same. 

I will always defend it but ffs pretending it was anything other than utilitarian spaces with lighting that is either gray, orange, occasionally blue, and white maybe once in the mines unit, is just typical mh contrarian trolling.

Even the dedicated "outdoors" level was just a single linear path. Boom what a varied unit! 

This touches on a remark I made above: you can't have gotten too far through the game if that's the impression you took away.

Hehe. I played the game through twice, back to back - first on normal and then on hard. It didn't really matter what the fiction said "this is a jail, this is a sewer, this is a factory, etc etc.", the entire game was just a homogeneous, seamless flow through a series of grey chunky concrete, and concrete-like metal, interior spaces. I don't even remember it having any iconic scene-setting exterior landmarks. (even Quake 1 had plenty of cool castle frontages that stuck in the mind). 

And yes, Doom 3 suffers from the exact same problem.

On that subject, I really cringe when I hear Carmack lamenting about how "random" and "unplanned" Quake 1 was, talking about the mish-mash of themes as if it's a bad thing. Seeing what happens design-wise when they have more of a focus (Quake 2, Doom 3)...yeah I know which id software I prefer. 

I don't even remember it having any iconic scene-setting exterior landmarks

Oh come on, we surely can't be talking about the same game?

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