Vol.
2, Issue 8
January 11, 2000
Birth
of a Gamer:
Unreal Tournament
(A blow to my ego)
by
Heather "elki"
Haselkorn
wanted senseless violence, and I got it. No plot, no goal, just
kill-or-be-killed fun. In a way I think I'm somewhat ashamed of
myself. I pride myself on being compassionate and eschewing violence
in all its nasty forms. But my goodness, I love Unreal Tournament!
I don't know whether the sudden violent streak is a by-product
of my urban upbringing, or whether I was just particularly stressed
out, but I had the time of my life in the three hours that I played
this game. I've never had such a good time getting my ass kicked.
To be
fair, there is some attempt at a plot, albeit extremely sparse
and seemingly tacked on as an afterthought. No-holds-barred fighting
is legalized in 2022. The year is now 2341 and I'm a member of
a professional fighting league, and my "strength and brutality
are legendary." Woohoo! Whodathunkit? That's about it as
far as plot goes. When I picked my character, I chose a black-haired
babe--hey, why not be gorgeous and deadly?
The first
thing you have to do though, is play through a tutorial. Have
I complained enough about tutorials in my last two columns? Although
this wasn't as bad as the tutorial in Half-Life - it only
took a few minutes, and it explained a lot of terminology. I guess
the elementary level of the explanations might be annoying for
a more experienced player, but for someone like me, it was nice
to finally have the term "frag" precisely defined. One
of the first things I noticed was that I could finally walk! No
more motion sickness! Yay! I could now play without fear of barfing
on the keyboard. I did notice that it was hard to run and shoot
simultaneously, though. I beat Slain, the bot in the tutorial,
and moved on to actually play the game.
Full disclosure
once again: I played on the easiest skill level. I promise that
next time I'll play on the default difficulty level, but at the
time I was still feeling insecure. Okay? I started in single-player
mode because I wanted to get used to the game before submitting
to an ass-whooping by an actual human. Now, you have to get through
a few deathmatches before you can go on to the other parts of
the game. And I have to tell you, I almost stopped playing right
then and there. What if I'm horrible at deathmatch? Why should
I be forced to play it? What if I wanted to move straight into
domination or capture the flag? That's not fair! And true to form,
I lost a couple of times.
I lost
the first deathmatch because I couldn't see where my opponent
was coming from. I didn't frag him once, and I discovered that
I couldn't shoot and move at the same time. I had to stop dead
in my tracks, aim, and fire, and of course by then I was already
dead. I wasn't used to looking around and constantly moving, so
I was a pretty easy target. And it didn't help when the bot told
me I sucked. Thanks. I'll go slit my wrists now. But I decided
to try again. I still lost, but I killed the bot five times. Encouraged,
I gave it a third try. What do you know! I won, 10:1!
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