Unreal 1 (1998)

Finished replaying Unreal 1. I played it using Unreal Tournament by using the OldSkool Amp'd Lite mod v2.39 (Lets you play Unreal 1 and other mission packs in UT) along with the S3TC textures from the extras cd (disk 2) and an updated ut opengl driver v3.4. I replaced the updated S3TC skybox texture with the original texture due to it not working correctly (Nice sky in the center surrounded by blackness). See far below for ini edits for the opengl driver.


I still think the first few levels are some of the most memorable gaming moments. Waking up not quite knowing where you are. Inside some darkly lit prison thing thats rumbling and shaking. Hearing a fight behind a slowly rising door as the person is killed by something that quickly runs off. Then coming out of the ship into the huge alien world. It was crazy how large the world was when compared to Quake 2 maps.


Jumping from cliffs in many levels was fun just to see how long it took to hit the bottom due to how tall some maps were. The water effects, volumetric lighting and fog along with color and textures all looked amazing at the time if your rig could run it. The S3TC textures are nice in that even close up everything is still clear and detailed, not blurry.


The guns still felt nice with their primary and secondary fire. AI is still good even when compared to current games, depending on the creature being fought. Many will jump and dodge your shots and sometimes retreat. I played on medium and while it wasn't hard to survive the first half the last half took many reloads. Battles where I started with full health and armor ended with my barely surviving.


I still liked how the narrative was passed by using the Universal Translater for reading logs and alien books. Though I did start to ignore most of them at the end and ended up getting lost since I was no longer reading the clues. Also enjoyed the maps that mix some alien-medieval and scifi themes.


This is a very long game compared to current games. The levels seemed to go from sparsely populated to enemy filled events. Some of the early levels, especially after the first few, seemed to drag because of this. I still had fun checking out the architecture and style of the map though. Just feel the 2nd quarter should be condensed into less maps. Still really enjoyed the 1st quarter and last half. The final boss does suck though and is the only place I had to cheat since I got tired of dying.



Not sure if this was needed to make the updated opengl driver work but I updated my unrealtournament.ini with the following changes:

[OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice]
RefreshRate=75
DetailTextures=1
UseTrilinear=1
UseS3TC=1
UseTNT=0
LODBias=0
UseMultiTexture=1
UsePalette=1
UseAlphaPalette=0
Translucency=1
VolumetricLighting=1
ShinySurfaces=1
Coronas=1
HighDetailActors=1
MaxAnisotropy=0
AlwaysMipmap=0
UsePrecache=0
SupportsLazyTextures=0

This was from a thread on techimo.com. This was one of the first I found so I used it but I figure there are other sites posting what changes to make.