Assault and ctf maps are both a camper's paradise. The secret on ctf is to grab the lg and make for the left door to the chasm and stand just outside it. You have health to the right, more ammo 5 meters behind you, and you can cover all entrances from a safe distance. In one minute you have yourself a rampage. That is until you get kicked by the frustrated server op who can't understand why he's not killing you with the rl from a 15 second distance by rocket. 

Good - looks good, easily controllable, Assault is back, Onslaught has appeared, vehicles are great fun.

Bad - maps are generally vastly overscaled, still too glitzy and cybersporty, bot skill settings are b0rked, some weapons

can feel underpowered.

Most prominent aspects - Well it's more of the same innit. Seems to feel slightly more fun than UT2K3, but still not as solid

and straight-to-the-point as UT. The DM map is quite "trick" reliant which is interesting. Botmatch is still fun except there is a vast

jump in difficulty from Skilled to Adept in DM (i.e., I can win very easily on Skilled, and never come close on Adept). The maps are

often too large, CTF and BR in particular are ridiculous, shooting at pixels as Daz said. Assault is okay. Onslaught is fun,

definitely adds interest to the game, and the vehicles compensate for the map scale. And personally I found the vehicles a lot of

fun, all of them very characterful, I like the ultra-fast skimmer. Pity the bots won't get in the jeep so I can be the gunner =).

To buy or not to buy?? - Maybe. For a quick blast of action it's pretty good, and given it will come with the 2K3 maps, it's

good value. 

Good - looks good, easily controllable, Assault is back, Onslaught has appeared, vehicles are great fun.

Bad - maps are generally vastly overscaled, still too glitzy and cybersporty, bot skill settings are b0rked, some weapons can feel underpowered.

Most prominent aspects - Well it's more of the same innit. Seems to feel slightly more fun than UT2K3, but still not as solid and straight-to-the-point as UT. The DM map is quite "trick" reliant which is interesting. Botmatch is still fun except there is a vast jump in difficulty from Skilled to Adept in DM (i.e., I can win very easily on Skilled, and never come close on Adept). The maps are often too large, CTF and BR in particular are ridiculous, shooting at pixels as Daz said. Assault is okay. Onslaught is fun, definitely adds interest to the game, and the vehicles compensate for the map scale. And personally I found the vehicles a lot of fun, all of them very characterful, I like the ultra-fast skimmer. Pity the bots won't get in the jeep so I can be the gunner =).

To buy or not to buy?? - Maybe. For a quick blast of action it's pretty good, and given it will come with the 2K3 maps, it's good value.

(Reposted as wordwrap fucked the formatting) 

Shambler, just get them to jump in as gunner and then switch seats with them (hit 1, 2 or 3).
And what the hell does 'glitzy and cybersporty' mean? 

 

The maps that come with retail (particularly for Onslaught) are really much better than the demo. Assault has some great maps, and Onslaught's ons_redplanet and ons_crossfire are lovely. 

I wasn't hugely impressed with the Onslaught maps out of the box (finally released in the UK today :), only Dawn and Torlan are really more than 'corridor-room-corridor but made out of rock'.

However, for those that haven't seen, Plutonic ( http://www.planetunreal.com/plutonic/ ) has released an onslaught map set in a more 'traditional' FPS environment. It's really, really good (and making a load of flying scorpions is always a nice thing). 

I don't really care for Torlan. Played it to death in the demo, I guess. Crossfire is nice because of its sheer size--with actual DETAILS in most of the areas. Haven't played Dawn too much. Also: Dria is rather cool. I don't think you can characterize these gigantic, open areas as "corridor maps." They're gigantic, open areas. And they have obstacles in them. Granted, the dark one with the deep brown cliffs (can't remember the name for the life of me) is pretty much just corridors, but it's also my least favorite of them besides Torlan. 

...about a week ago and haven't taken it out of the box yet. Kind of weird as I only buy one or two games a year. One thing I love about the whole UT series, is the skill level of the other players. Q1, Q2 & Q3 I get owned. I might win a couple of games a week if that. With UT, I seem to win loads. I egg shell ego loooooves winning :) 

Am very impressed so far, the title oozes polish and the new game types are excellent.

Dunno why no-one has mentioned the Uber-cool assault maps, AS-Glacier springs instantly to mind, Plasma-ion-tanks, big explosions etc, its great stuff.

AS-Mothership is a bit gimmicky, and the space combat doesn't work too well, but all becomes much better once you get inside the ship. Its a good idea, but lacks proper implentation.

All the vanilla dm/ctf/br etc maps seem much more polished this time around, less "clutered" with static meshes and with much better layouts and gameplay.

S'all good baby. 

Why the hell is it necessary for an online game that uses CD-key authentication to have that Securom copy protection bollocks in it? I had to uninstall a couple of programs (which I had legitimate uses for, incidentally) to get XIII to run a while back, and evidently this new version is even more fascistic about what programs I'm allowed to have on MY fucking PC, since I have to disable Nero's disk check from autorunning on boot in order to run the game (instead of getting a "please insert the original disk not a copy" message, IT IS THE ORIGINAL DISK SECUROM YOU MORONIC CUNTS). And even then, if I quit the game it won't launch again without rebooting.

I don't understand the mentality behind putting it in there. It obviously inconveniences legitimate purchasers of the product but presents no problem to pirates who are just going to replace the protected executables as part of installing the game anyway. Why. WHY!?

PS Deus Ex 2 did this to me as well. I hate Securom.

PPS Securom protected DVD-ROMs don't run in my old DVD drive, only my new burner. I hate Securom.

PPPS I hate Securom.

PPPPS The game is quite nice, it feels a bit more solid that UT2K3. 

I had the same problem, which kind of freaked me out. However, I download a new ut2004.exe from here (rename the current one to ut2004.old) and it sorted it :

http://www.securom.com/support/customers/atari/ut2k4_t034/ut2004.zip

The forum post where I found there answer =

http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=ddf32128f54ee282bd74111c50a34c79&threadid=361965&highlight=original+Securom 

If you don't want them to use Securom, return the game with a polite note saying why. 

And you know the best bit...

It took me the whole of 30 minutes to create a working image of the CD despite the copy protection :)

I dunno why they bother 

I haven't had any securom problems, and im running nero & daemon tools. Dunno if that means anything though.... :? 

Cheers for the link Megazoid - I got a couple of good runs without needing to reboot out of that exe last night, but then the next time I tried starting (after booting up this morning and browsing/emailing for a bit) it was back on its 'no backups!' trip unfortunately.

I have discovered that ejecting and reinserting the disk seems to work - I'd hazard a guess that Securom's disk validation has trouble if it needs to wait for the disk to spin up, which is pretty pathetic. Either that or it was running the game with the CD autorun program that did it. Dunno.

Maj, I'm thinking quite seriously about starting to write letters to people about this stuff, on paper using stamps and stuff. It's so much more personal than an email :)

I do wonder how many of these Securom games are being returned because people can't get them to run - everyone who posts here is savvy enough to find workarounds or 'fixes' but there's a lot of clueless people out there buying PC games too...

Daz, that's quite funny, since I think one of Securom's 'features' is detecting the presence of daemon tools.

nonentity, it's amusing that I've learnt more about how to copy and crack games in my last few weeks of Securom fun than in all my preceding years of PC gaming. 

If you are still taking sh*t from the game (which I was), try this full-blown no CD crack.

http://spacetarget.com/games/pc_unreal_tournament_2004.shtml

People are so pissed off they have posted it in Atari's own forums. 

Even better, the advice various people have recieved from Atari tech support on the issue is to use a No CD crack :)

Oh, and I wasn't aware Securom detected what you have installed. I mean, I would have thought it would detect I have daemon tools... and alcohol 120%... and a variety of other 'piracy' tools on my PC. 

UT2K4 is cool, but not going to play it anyway.
Cool idea with those vehicles, however, I'm waiting for a game, where will be about 20 vs 20 tanks, 50 vs 50 starships, 200 vs 200 walking players in one game + real physics :E 

400 retards with headsets. with tanks. yeah, can't fucking wait.

---

see also; Planetside. 

...and welcome to wrath's day of total bitching && bad attitude! Like they always say, when there's sticks to be kindled, light a fire! 

Last time I checked, you people weren't exactly paying me to dole out the feel-goods... 

As wrath said, PlanetSide.

Used to play it a lot, was amazing, except for the appalling engine (whichever retard decided to use the EverQuest engine for an FPS should be shot). 

Been playing the full of this for a while. Idea was to get used to a slightly improved config so I could play HL2DM etc better. Got used to the new config so might give up on this.

Or maybe just play individual maps instead of the campaign. Campaign was fun to start but it's got boring now. Matches are often a drag and the bloodrites / earning money / challenges stuff which was great fun at first is now more of a hinderance than a help. I think I've got the wrong level of skill to play this game as it starts pretty easy and gets too hard. If you're a noob you'd improve quite rapidly, if you're 1337 then the increased difficulty would be fine. But I've been playing FPS for years now and my skill level has pretty much plateaued, without a lot of practice or something radical happening I'm not going to improve much, so UT2K4 starts out comfortable, rapidly flicks through pleasingly challenging, and settles permanently in the realms of vaguely irritating for me.

This is also due to the AI - well specifically the totally fucked AI balance - as well as other issues. AI jumps hugely between Adept and Skilled (or whichever way around it is) and the campaign skill is similarly jumpy. Also the AI increases by over-increased accuracy and tedious amounts of dodging all the fucking time. I.e. it's unrealistically skewed in those directions. Oh and it's totally obvious that the AI doesn't take into account vision obscurance due to weapons hits/effects at all so whilst the player has his vision filled with explosions, the AI aims just as normal. However, to give it some credit, the teamplay AI is as good as usual, the tactical side, at least collecting items DOES increase (it just needs to be rebalanced, I mean any noob knows how to collect a fucking quad, that side should increase way more than aim), and the AI doesn't cheat by knowing exactly where you are (hurrah for that at least).

On the same tip however: The huge ASS/CTF/whatever maps are very annoying most of the time with long boring distances to cover and the ludicrous AI distance aiming - basically their aim doesn't seem to change one little bit with distance, sure it's not perfect at any distance, but if you are in their FOV they will shoot at you even from ridiculous distances i.e. distances where the player can't even see the enemy exists (below 1 pixel in size sometimes, I reckon), but they still shoot you. Obviously flawed design decision. Another one being Double Domination, worst pile of shit ever. Basically won/lost by luck and random chance, either you die and respawn too far away to retake a point or the enemy dies and respawns too far away to take a point. Most of the time games are over very quickly with little combat and no tactical possibilities.

But aside from that ranting...

Other gameplay types are mostly fine and work as usual. Bombing Run is a good addition. Maps are often good and plenty varied too. The team / money etc etc bullshit is a nice idea and is fun at first, it would work fine if the skill was different. I've got enough fun out of it to make it worth getting but I think it's time for a change now.

rant rant etc etc stfu noob 

rant rant etc etc stfu noob

I always love your informative and sensible posts, Smabler.