Polish scans:
http://www.multiupload.com/9JELSDXQTX
English trans:
Store date in five minutes time: Unreal
=======================================
Unreal is being heard of for a long time now. Big promises, enthusiastic announcements, big money flow around. Epic Megagames has abandoned most of their projects and backed out from the shareware scene to focus on this particular project. Eventually in March the game was finished and most likely ended up on... a shelf, but not the store shelf. It'll await for either the decision to release it or for pull-back to the drawing board.
You awaken with a headache and shards of memories of the events of the past few hours. All you remember is that something happened with your spacecraft's power generators that caused it to crashland on one of the many uncolonized planets. Your name is Thak and all you got from the ship is a plasma pistol and the skills of survival in the most unhospitable of conditions. You move forward slowly, looking around until you notice several huts that may be part of a settlement. You enter the first one cautiously and you see a corpse that belongs to one of your companions. And the huge monster that just jumped out like a jack-out-of-the-box stabs you in the stomach with a blade attached to his hand...
The world of UNREAL is both huge and beautiful and at the same time it is full of danger and mystery. There are times that it takes almost a minute for Thak to run through a great canyon or valley without meeting a single soul along the way. It is seen that the authors merge three concepts here: huge open spaces on the surface of the planet with slave settlements, huge Alien installations made by the now dominant race and remnants of a race that originally inhabited the planet. The open spaces serve mainly as connections between dungeons and corridors so that part is not new. In case of the last ones though, we can observe a peculiar concotion of industrial and ancient motives fused into one. When confronting the enemies, you also get a strange feeling, when Thak is wielding a plasma gun and faces a huge, dumb giant throwing stone blocks. Aliens show up fairly rarely and are divided into several species. The most interesting of them is undoubtedly the Skaarj warrior, reminding of the famous Predator of the movie, highly intelligent (avoiding bullets, trying to circle around Thak while shooting and looking for a chance to attack directly with his blades).
UNREAL is naturally a first person perspective game -- you can run, jump, shoot, swim in water, collect weapons and use them effectively. An interesting option is strafing in circles with a single key pressed and held. As in QUAKE, UNREAL's commands are mostly issued through the console accessible when you press the tilde key, this feature will most likely be met with approval by most of the Quake community.
As for weapons... it seems someone pushed their brain to the limit to come up with something unlike any weapon available in the FPP shooter genre so far. We've got standard issue plasma guns, we've got Eightball (a grenade launcher that can spurt up to eight missiles at once) or Razor Blades (a rifle that shoots out swirling shurikens), we've got energy projectile weapons. All these are unlike any weapons available in other FPSes. The combat system itself is very interesting and deserves to be described in more detail. Every UNREAL gun can be fired in two ways. For example, the Eightball's base shot will be a single missile, but if you hold down the mouse button, all missiles are prepared for a simultaneous shot.
The UNREAL graphics are absolutely beautiful and breathtaking. It might as well be the first time a computer game uses such detailed high resolution textures and 32-bit color that enables us to see a spectacle impossible to describe. Effects like multi-colored particle lights with lens and reflections will be written in the history of the genre, along with translucent, multi-colored and animated water. The textures used as skins for the characters look simply perfect and the characters themselves move with incredible realism.
Unfortunately such multitude of graphic fireworks thrown together into a single game will cost players a substantial amount. UNREAL sets the new standard of gaming rigs in mid-1998. Don't you dare come close without a decent 3D accelerator, Pentium 200 MMX processor and 64 MB RAM. On weaker configurations you may expect frustration and slowdowns you haven't dreamed of in the worst of nightmares. Even the hardware just mentioned won't award you fast and fluid animation -- unless you choose to play in unaccelerated mode in 320x200 resolution. The cause lies in two things. Firstly, huge (and I mean by that, truly GIGANTIC) levels spanning many MB's and being loaded as you play; and secondly, the intelligence of the computer-controlled enemies. The processor is being kept busy with calculating the enemies' algorithms, controlling the complex gameworld and parsing instructions of graphics display and that causes the game to slow down very often, especially when the locations are large. And there is lots to calculate because the author of the AI for UNREAL is the same person that programmed the QUAKE bots. And that is probably the reason that you rarely meet more than two enemies. Of course the slowdowns are not omnipresent -- in narrow corridors they are unnoticeable, but in open spaces they can hurt your eyes good. It seems that to fully enjoy UNREAL one's going to need a supercostly supercomputer. I assume that Pentium II 300 with a Voodoo2 3Dfx accelerator is going to be enough to run the game with full splendor.
UNREAL's bad luck is that QUAKE 2 is available for almost six months now. Q2 is a fantastic shooter with awesome graphics and fluid animation available on a standard machine with a 3D accelerator. In the PC shooter genre, ID SOFTWARE's game is the reigning champion, very difficult to depose for other games. And for now it doesn't look like UNREAL is going to be able to do that.
We were hoping that the old and used up field of the genre is going to be refreshed. Unfortunately, it's hardly the case. The players will get another mindless DOOM clone with obscene system requirements. As a game, UNREAL brings nothing new -- we saw all that before, only the name was different. The beautiful cover contains still the same book -- go forth and kick ass. And despite what I said before, that the game's gorgeous fireworks can make one's heartrate accelerate, the bare bones are generic. Well, maybe it's just my hunger for something new? After all, UNREAL is beautiful, full of danger and insanely addictive. I don't know myself...
According to the latest announcements, UNREAL is going to be released in stores on May 12th this year. However, there is a suspicion within my mind:
Q: Why is the publisher stalling the release date for so long and when is UNREAL going to be actually released? The game is ready, after all.
A: And when will most players have a Pentium II 300 rig with a Voodoo2 accelerator to fully enjoy it?
http://www.multiupload.com/9JELSDXQTX
English trans:
Store date in five minutes time: Unreal
=======================================
Unreal is being heard of for a long time now. Big promises, enthusiastic announcements, big money flow around. Epic Megagames has abandoned most of their projects and backed out from the shareware scene to focus on this particular project. Eventually in March the game was finished and most likely ended up on... a shelf, but not the store shelf. It'll await for either the decision to release it or for pull-back to the drawing board.
You awaken with a headache and shards of memories of the events of the past few hours. All you remember is that something happened with your spacecraft's power generators that caused it to crashland on one of the many uncolonized planets. Your name is Thak and all you got from the ship is a plasma pistol and the skills of survival in the most unhospitable of conditions. You move forward slowly, looking around until you notice several huts that may be part of a settlement. You enter the first one cautiously and you see a corpse that belongs to one of your companions. And the huge monster that just jumped out like a jack-out-of-the-box stabs you in the stomach with a blade attached to his hand...
The world of UNREAL is both huge and beautiful and at the same time it is full of danger and mystery. There are times that it takes almost a minute for Thak to run through a great canyon or valley without meeting a single soul along the way. It is seen that the authors merge three concepts here: huge open spaces on the surface of the planet with slave settlements, huge Alien installations made by the now dominant race and remnants of a race that originally inhabited the planet. The open spaces serve mainly as connections between dungeons and corridors so that part is not new. In case of the last ones though, we can observe a peculiar concotion of industrial and ancient motives fused into one. When confronting the enemies, you also get a strange feeling, when Thak is wielding a plasma gun and faces a huge, dumb giant throwing stone blocks. Aliens show up fairly rarely and are divided into several species. The most interesting of them is undoubtedly the Skaarj warrior, reminding of the famous Predator of the movie, highly intelligent (avoiding bullets, trying to circle around Thak while shooting and looking for a chance to attack directly with his blades).
UNREAL is naturally a first person perspective game -- you can run, jump, shoot, swim in water, collect weapons and use them effectively. An interesting option is strafing in circles with a single key pressed and held. As in QUAKE, UNREAL's commands are mostly issued through the console accessible when you press the tilde key, this feature will most likely be met with approval by most of the Quake community.
As for weapons... it seems someone pushed their brain to the limit to come up with something unlike any weapon available in the FPP shooter genre so far. We've got standard issue plasma guns, we've got Eightball (a grenade launcher that can spurt up to eight missiles at once) or Razor Blades (a rifle that shoots out swirling shurikens), we've got energy projectile weapons. All these are unlike any weapons available in other FPSes. The combat system itself is very interesting and deserves to be described in more detail. Every UNREAL gun can be fired in two ways. For example, the Eightball's base shot will be a single missile, but if you hold down the mouse button, all missiles are prepared for a simultaneous shot.
The UNREAL graphics are absolutely beautiful and breathtaking. It might as well be the first time a computer game uses such detailed high resolution textures and 32-bit color that enables us to see a spectacle impossible to describe. Effects like multi-colored particle lights with lens and reflections will be written in the history of the genre, along with translucent, multi-colored and animated water. The textures used as skins for the characters look simply perfect and the characters themselves move with incredible realism.
Unfortunately such multitude of graphic fireworks thrown together into a single game will cost players a substantial amount. UNREAL sets the new standard of gaming rigs in mid-1998. Don't you dare come close without a decent 3D accelerator, Pentium 200 MMX processor and 64 MB RAM. On weaker configurations you may expect frustration and slowdowns you haven't dreamed of in the worst of nightmares. Even the hardware just mentioned won't award you fast and fluid animation -- unless you choose to play in unaccelerated mode in 320x200 resolution. The cause lies in two things. Firstly, huge (and I mean by that, truly GIGANTIC) levels spanning many MB's and being loaded as you play; and secondly, the intelligence of the computer-controlled enemies. The processor is being kept busy with calculating the enemies' algorithms, controlling the complex gameworld and parsing instructions of graphics display and that causes the game to slow down very often, especially when the locations are large. And there is lots to calculate because the author of the AI for UNREAL is the same person that programmed the QUAKE bots. And that is probably the reason that you rarely meet more than two enemies. Of course the slowdowns are not omnipresent -- in narrow corridors they are unnoticeable, but in open spaces they can hurt your eyes good. It seems that to fully enjoy UNREAL one's going to need a supercostly supercomputer. I assume that Pentium II 300 with a Voodoo2 3Dfx accelerator is going to be enough to run the game with full splendor.
UNREAL's bad luck is that QUAKE 2 is available for almost six months now. Q2 is a fantastic shooter with awesome graphics and fluid animation available on a standard machine with a 3D accelerator. In the PC shooter genre, ID SOFTWARE's game is the reigning champion, very difficult to depose for other games. And for now it doesn't look like UNREAL is going to be able to do that.
We were hoping that the old and used up field of the genre is going to be refreshed. Unfortunately, it's hardly the case. The players will get another mindless DOOM clone with obscene system requirements. As a game, UNREAL brings nothing new -- we saw all that before, only the name was different. The beautiful cover contains still the same book -- go forth and kick ass. And despite what I said before, that the game's gorgeous fireworks can make one's heartrate accelerate, the bare bones are generic. Well, maybe it's just my hunger for something new? After all, UNREAL is beautiful, full of danger and insanely addictive. I don't know myself...
According to the latest announcements, UNREAL is going to be released in stores on May 12th this year. However, there is a suspicion within my mind:
Q: Why is the publisher stalling the release date for so long and when is UNREAL going to be actually released? The game is ready, after all.
A: And when will most players have a Pentium II 300 rig with a Voodoo2 accelerator to fully enjoy it?