Horrific injustice spurs people to take the law into their own hands: the preposterous Stamp Duty caused the War of Independence, the hideous inequalities of the south caused the Civil War, and the almost unbelievable lack of a good game based on the concept of killer robots killing things has forced players to make their own Terminator game.

“FPS Terminator” is built on the Unreal Engine and it’s a better use of it than Unreal itself.  Finally a real justification for an entirely dark-blue-to-black world composed entirely of grit and destroyed things: gritty dark-blue machines went around and destroyed everything!  The first few moments are seriously sweetness, firing heavy machine guns at entirely unfleshed T800s and wondering “Why on Earth hasn’t this been made before?”

But don’t rush off expecting hours of anti-machine entertainment just yet.  The project’s still in “alpha”, developer speak for “horrendously unplayable.”  It’s a fantastic proof of concept (seriously, the setting suits the graphics engine so well Epic’s CliffyB himself gave it a shout-out), but the concept is about the only thing that works.  Either that or it’s a meta-narrative art statement that you will die, repeatedly, and it will be the machines’ fault.

They also made a real mess of the place.
The Alpha 1.0.1 isn’t just about defeating Skynet, it could probably crash a supercomputer all by itself: the demo could slow down the Borg would still stutter if you ran it on HAL9000.  “Optimization” is on the list of things to improve, but since that list also includes everything else in the entire game it might be while before you get to play it.
If at all: it’s a glorious project and the developers should be extremely proud, but many ambitious efforts wither once they get bogged down in the details of actually making it work.  Throwing up a base demonstration is fantastic, to finally see your vision running (sort of), but the extraordinarily fiddly, frustrating and outright immense task of getting from there to a full game has destroyed more wannabe game makers than puberty.

Unlike Terminators, which absolutely will not stop, ever.  (Until you’re dead.)

We can only hope they make it, and we’re only listing all the possible problems to calm ourselves down for the long (possibly infinite) wait.  Of course the best result would be Epic Games getting inspired, the license, and on with making what would be the best shooter in a very long time.  Unreal Tournament is great fun but the “Tag Football” feel of color-coded teams simply can’t compete with the ultimate battle of man vs machine.
Come on, Cliffy, budget these people and make it happen!  We’ll give you three really good reasons, really good because they really weren’t:

>PROTIP: If your game starts with naked men it’s probably not very good

Note how they write TERMINATOR 2 on the screen as there’s no way to tell from the gameplay

This abomination turned Terminators and Shooting Things into not-fun.  How is that even possible?

Do you want us to be stuck with rubbish like that for the rest of time?  Cliffy, please, only you can save the future!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Unreal Tournament 3 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.