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Unreal Tournament 2003

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The original Unreal Tournament was the introduction to online and off-line multiplayer action for a lot of players with its gorgeous graphics, multiple game modes, reliable Net play, and a never-ending supply of intense action made it an instant classic. It’s offline bot modes were also valuable to those who didn’t yet have an internet connection. Its sequel, Unreal Tournament 2003 offers plenty of impressive attributes. 

The graphics is one of the stand out features, implementing a smoothly integrated terrain engine the jagged and harsh lines of most 3D games are gone. The use of the Unreal Engine 2.0 brings beautifully detailed environments, with dynamic lighting and textures. The maps here are big, beautiful, and are full of fine detail. This is truly one of the best-looking games on the market when it was released and it runs remarkably well, even on modern hardware without any rendering flaws.

Audio play’s a big role in UT2003, A variety of diverse and amusing taunts, complaints, and other messages come from both your teammates and your opponents. The soundtrack is powerful and dramatic, although it moves quickly to the background during a heated game, a lot of the tracks are recycled from Unreal championship for the Xbox. It has a KMFDM electro/industrial feel to it that fits with the game’s theme, whilst the Egyptian-themed maps benefit from similar music. Sound effects are really good with plenty of bass-intensive booms and blasts that liven up any gunfight. The game has support for EAX with was supported on certain Creative SoundBlaster cards and gives extra environmental audio effects.

There are five game modes – Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the flag, Domination 2.0, and Bombing Run. The first three should be familiar to anyone who has played any online arena shooter. Domination 2.0 is a popular mode from the first Unreal Tournament but has changed where both teams only need to hold two bases for a few seconds for them to score. Bombing Run mixes team-based death matching with ball sports to create an incredibly appealing and challenging variation, although its mostly just an altered version of Capture the flag.

Although most players will get Unreal Tournament 2003 for its online gameplay, the game also offers a good single-player mode to help you get accustomed to the game’s new maps and mechanics. Single player works much like the multiplayer mode, but with bots as your teammates and enemies. The noticeable improvement is in the AI’s team tactics. When playing a bot-filled team game such as Domination, your computer-controlled teammates will work together, support you, and score points all on their own and they’ll do a decent job. You can dictate the AI’s general behavior before a match (defense, offence, auto, support, and so on), or issue orders to them during play via a quick menu. Most of the online servers have been phased out, following the release of UT2004 but you can still find the odd server still offering online play. Epic did shut off the master server (along with other Unreal titles) but third party servers are available.

The single-player experience in Unreal Tournament 2003 is designed around the concept of a tournament ladder, where players fight through a series of matches to become the champion. You pick your teammates early on, and as you progress, other teams offer you teammate swaps. Each competitor has a rating for things such as accuracy, agility, stamina, and team play that come into play when you trade teammates. There are different races like the Juggernauts that move slower but have more health, that adds a strategy element to the game. Adding to the variety are more than 30 characters and maps to choose from, with the game supporting additional maps and skins. Also, power-ups abound throughout the levels. This lets you unleash mass carnage with the help of double damage, super shields, and even a new adrenaline rush that temporarily increases your abilities. Finally, there’s a horde of mutators that let you alter gameplay elements, allowing for big heads, low gravity, and instant kills, if you want.

There are nine weapons available, including a flak cannon, a rocket launcher, a machine gun, a minigun, a bio-rifle, and a new sniper-riflelike lightning gun. The weapons are paced differently than in the previous game, making accuracy more of an issue and preventing random wild fire. However, the downside of this is that all the guns have been toned down from the original weapons of mass destruction. The biggest complaint that can be levelled at Unreal Tournament 2003 is that it wasn’t improved over the original enough. The game doesn’t pack in as much variety and features as it could have. More game modes and weapons would have helped put it over the top in terms of value. 

UT2003 was only released on Windows and MacOS, the console counterpart would be Unreal Championship that was released for the original Xbox. 

Windows: This version will work on Windows 98 with DirectX 8 or higher, all the way to Windows 11. Some features like DirectPlay will need to be manually installed through the Windows features:

Mac OS: The Macintosh port was only ever released for OS X for PowerPC, no Universal patch was made available. You will need a Mac running OS X Jaguar with a PowerPC G4 or G5 processor for the best experience.

Unreal Tournament

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The spin-off that became more popular that its origin game as it expands on the multiplayer aspect of Unreal.

He asked for a 13 and they drew a 31

There isn’t much point of trying to make sense of the Unreal Tournament lore, especially once the sequels come into play. Basically, the tournaments have become annual sports events (Like Soccer, football or handegg) that are also popular TV events set in a dystopian future where corporations control the government (Just like today).

Game Modes

Additional game modes and be downloaded and added to the game, making it very flexible for new ideas for gameplay. Jailbreak is an example of a new game mode. Because of this, Unreal Tournament, and its middleware Unreal Engine because very popular for game modders to add new maps, skins, and mutations to the game, and helped developers become familiar with the Unreal engine which would become the popular engine for various games (in fact, the seventh generations of western games were dominated by Unreal Engine 3)

Capture the Flag

You have to catch the enemy’s flag and bring it back to the base without being killed. If you are killed the flag you were holding would be dropped and someone from your team would have to pick it up, otherwise, it would teleport back to the enemy base should an enemy team member pick it up, or if the flag remains untouched after a certain amount of time.


Here good team communication is key, as you will want someone to be watching the base flag whilst others go after the enemy flag, you may wish to have team members watch certain points of the arena map, especially areas that have narrow corners or corridors. Some maps have secret paths that lead to the flag, so be careful with those.

Jump boots, one of the powerups

Deathmatch

Pure kill or be killed action, there are two main variants of this game mode, Deathmatch, and Team Deathmatch, with the former being you Vs everyone on the map. Team Deathwatch put you on one of two teams (Red Vs Blue) with the team having the most kills winning the game.

Last Man Standing: Another variant of deathmatch, here you have a limited amount of lives and have to be the last player in the arena to have one or more lives remaining. The lives affect the number of times you can spawn, with one life being deducted every time you die and respawn.

Assault

Each map has an equal set of objectives that must be completed before time runs out. One team has the role of attacking, whilst the other has to defend. When one team wins, another role starts where the teams switch sides with the opposing team defending. Spawn points depend on how far the attacking team has managed to progress, with later spawn points being available as objects have become completed.

Domination

In this mode, there are two teams who had to capture 3 bases in order to gain points. Kills are not essential and sometimes hinder your team, since the opposing player will respawn next to the area they are dominating, making it harder to capture the base. You will preferably want to weaken the enemy player, allowing for an easy kill later.
Points are gained when you have captured a base, and the more bases you capture, the faster your team will accumulate points until the maximum has been reached, of which the resulting team will win.

Weapons

Translocator: Not much of a weapon in terms of damage but allows you to quickly teleport around the map. Your fire the beacon and right-click/alt-fire will teleport you to that location. Be careful though, if a player has been destroyed by the translocator, you will die.

Impact Hammer: The weapon that you use when you’ve run out of ammo and can’t find any more so as a last resort you hope you strike lucky with the impact hammer. This only works when you charge it up and sneak behind a player in order to kill them, otherwise it’s best running and finding a new weapon or ammo.

Enforcer: The default weapon that you start and respawn with. Causes minimal damage but gets the job done. The second fire does more dame and has faster speed, but very poor accuracy.

Bio-rifle: Sometimes called the snot gun, fires green-colored gel-like projectiles that stick to any surface. When a player gets in contact it can do some damage. Useful to surround the flag base or the capture point to prevent the flag from being taken. One of those fire and forget guns.

ASMD Shock Rifle: Shoots a stream of energy forward towards the target, the alt-fire shoots a ball of plasma which, when hit with the stream of energy exploded and odes further damage

Pulse Gun: Fires small green balls that are supposed to be energy pulse, nothing really spectacular since it only deals minor damage, but the alt-fire fires a straight green beam which can be linked with the beam from a teammates to increase the damage.

Ripper: Fires off razor blades which bounce off any walls or solid objects, useful for attacking around corners, just be careful since they can bounce back and damage your player

Minigun: Fires a series of bullets after a short delay, since the gun motor has to spin up. Alt fie fires more bullets but is more inaccurate

Flak Cannon: The GOAT weapon, fires a large number of projectiles, deadly upon close contact.

Rocket Launcher: Fires a rocket

Sniper Rifle: It’s a great weapon at a distance, and is somewhat usable at close range. You will really want to use this on CTF or assault games where players are more likely to camp

Redeemer: Fires a nuke into the arenas that deals a lot of damage and a large blast radius, alt-fire shoots a steerable missile but leaves you vulnerable to damage, and the missile can be shot at which will disarm the weapon.

Versions

The game was ported to more platforms than the original Unreal game which makes it more well known with the two console platforms of the time.

Dreamcast

The game was ported to the Sega Dreamcast in 2000, this version came with a few exclusive maps, a redesigned menu system, and HUD and retained keyboard and mouse support. Online play was also supported with you having the modem adaptor and an internet dial-up account.
The VMU is used somewhat, it displays the Unreal logo as a looping animation.

Playstation 2

Released early into the PS2 life, this version suffers from a few framerate issues since the game was not very optimized for the PS2 vector units, and was to serve as a concept for future Unreal Engine titles. You can also see the lower resolution textures as the graphics had to squeeze into the PS2’s 4MB VRAM buffer.

Unlike the Dreamcast version, the PS2 version does not support online play at all, as the PS2 network adaptor was not released at this point (Sony originally intended for the iLink connector to be used for online multiplayer/LAN, but only the US release of Unreal Tournament supports this) This version does support the use of a USB keyboard and mouse which can be used for single-player mode and multiplayer, where up to four players can play from one console with the addition of two controllers and two sets of a keyboard and mouse. This does require a USB hub since the PS2 only has two USB ports, unless you use a combined wireless keyboard and mouse which commonly appears in wireless desktop sets.

As four players are on one screen, a big screen TV is recommended like those huge rear projection TVs that were available of the era.

There are also a few console-exclusive maps that didn’t appear in the original PC release, and some existing maps have been altered slightly due to the console’s memory limitations.

PCSX2 1.6 is capable of running the game but will encounter issues with background music stopping abruptly, and the game will randomly lockup when starting or finishing a game.

MacOS

The game was released for the Macintosh platform and is similar to the Windows PC port, and features support for the Macintosh 3D API (Known as RAVE and used the ATI 3D RAGE accelerators, or Nvidia cards on later Macs) and Glide if the Mac has a 3DFX Voodoo card installed. The game runs best on MacOS 9.2 and has issues running through the classic environment on OS X, for both Jaguar and Panther versions of Classic.

A Carbon version exists but this never left the beta stage and lacks a few features compared to the original MacOS version. This uses OpenGL for rendering and a custom User.ini file, which will cause issues if you dual boot with both OS 9 and OS X as they share the same ini file which dictates which 3D renderer the game should use. In order for these to coexist, you will need to have two different install directories of the game.

Windows

The original and lead platform of the game.

Running on an emulated 3DFX Voodoo 2 in PCem

As the game was released in the late 90s, various 3D API’s are supported

  • Direct3D: Initially supported version 6, with patch v413 introducing DirectX 7 support.
  • OpenGL
  • 3DFX Glide: Version 2.4 of the API is supported
  • S3 MeTaL: An API used for S3 Savage graphics card
  • PowerVR SGL
  • Software Rendering: If your PC has no 3D graphics card, or is not supported by Direct3D or OpenGL then you can run the game in software rendering instead which uses the CPU for the rendering functions.

The game will run perfectly on modern Windows systems, even on Windows 11.

Apex (Racing Evoluzione)

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A fine Xbox exclusive racing game

Released in 2003, this was one of the few Xbox exclusive racing games that verges between the arcade racing as seen in Ridge Racer / Metropolis Street Racer and the simulation aspects of Gran Turismo.

The main game mode is the Dream Mode, and features a rags to riches type story where you start off in an old car garage workshop. You are required to race and tune up your vehicle in order to stay competitive. As you win and progress through the game, you are able to finance development of further vehicles that will help with later races. You are provided the choice of which car to develop, which varies based on handling, speed and acceleration.

Essentially you are developing a new series of cars that are financed through the winnings of your races, the better you do, the more funds you can put towards better cars.

You will also see your workshop change and improve over time, with the building expanding as further departments are introduced. The workshop serves as the user interface for the game, using the left. right buttons to move between the different sections of the workshop that are used to access parts of the game. Visiting the garage lets you change settings for the car, and choosing the shelf lets you change game settings (video, audio, controller) and to load/save the game. Its a very creative way of navigation and blends into the game play. Races are started by the LCD display on the wall, giving the impression these races are televised.

1st place isn’t always required but is needed to get more funding for development of better vehicles. You can always repeat races to improve your standing. Some races are set in a Gran Prix series where you must finish a set of races in order. You also have an opportunity to complete a one on one race with a rival opponent, wining these races will give a boost to your research funds.

There are few characters that appears in cut scenes and serve as your staff. These serve a specific purpose in progressing through the game and will appear as you progress through the game.

  • Rick, The Mechanic – Pictured above, One of the first characters you meet, he’s responsible for making and applying changes to the car.
  • Carla, The Receptionist – Handles PR stuff
  • Rebecca – Responsible for managing production of cars which your company sells to also fund research.
  • Benjamin, The Scientist – Appears to the end, mainly responsible for researching high end supercars

The races themselves are straightforward, you start at the bottom and have to race your way to first place. There are typically 6 opponents that you compete with who’s vehicles will also adapt to changes from your vehicle, Keeping the game competitive. Theres a diverse amount of tracks in the game, with some being set in the daytime, evening and nighttime, along with their own background music. As with other Xbox tiles you have the option of using your own playlist if you have imported this onto the Xbox.

There are four main settings for the races, City, Mountain, Stadium and Racetrack.

The racing display is typical of the era, with a mini-map keeping track of your car and opponents, along with a lap counter and time display that shows the current racing time, your best lap and the track record which is shared between the different profiles on the Xbox.

Theres a couple of different camera views to select from, from third person to bonnet view.

No online play, not even system link which is strange for an Xbox exclusive from 2003. There is a head to head display that allows two players to race each other by connecting two controllers.

Sadly this game is not playable on the Xbox One or Series X/S, it is compatible on the Xbox 360 albeit with missing audio on some cutscenes. I suspect due to licensing issues we will never see this emulated officially on another Microsoft console.

Similar games

  • R: Racing Revolution – very similar in driving mechanics.
  • Midnight Club 2 -This is more set in an open world
  • Burnout – A lot more grounded in reality compared to the alter Burnout titles.
  • Ridge Racer V – The tracks and scenery have some similarities