I've been playing Unreal Tournament (a copy I borrowed from Steve, and I'm pretty sure it's not a pirated copy). Since it's just a bunch arena levels that you can play with friends or by yourself against robots, it's not as interesting as a real game with a real objective. There's no sense of trying to beat something to win the game.

But after letting it lie there for a couple of weeks as I had no intention of playing it. I decided that I might as well play it before I give it back to Steve. I played it on my brother's computer and it can be fun. To make it more challenging I'll try to beat each arena with increasing robot levels. Right now I've won all arenas with the easiest 2 robot levels (Novice and Average) and I'm working through the arenas on Experienced level.

I'm not a good player. I don't jump around or move and fire very well, and I'm not that great of a shot. Mostly I just move up to the bad guy, stop, and start shooting and hope to kill him before he kills me. So what I have to do is learn the levels. Once you find out where the cool weapons are, where the first aid kits are, where the bad guys regenerate, then you have quite an advantage.

Each level is different. I tend to do better on arenas that are basically level (not too many up and down firing angles) without too many obstacles to maneuver around. Small arenas are fun as it's just chaos as you kill and die quickly. But that scenario tends to even out the skills and reward persistence. There are also a few arenas where all the action is concentrated on in a key room and those are fun too.

The robots have different attributes. There is a basic style (commando or warrior, with a couple of weird ones but no robot has them out of the box), then there are degrees of accuracy, camping, bravery, and vision (not exactly the right names). Accurate shooters really suck. Loque tends to win a lot because he has maximum accuracy. Campers also suck because they just sit and ambush people. There are 32 different robots, of which you can have a max of 16 in a game (I set it to be chosen randomly).

The graphics are good, although as with many PC 3d games, everything is too freaking dark. Some arenas are well lit, but most have their dark and murky areas. I have to keep the screen small (512 x 384) with lo res graphics and everything turned off (and AppleTalk off too, always remember to turn that off) and then I get pretty smooth graphics. As with these kinds of games, if the graphics skip you're dead.

Weapons. You start with some sort of pistol and can pick up another one from a dead body. Two pistol action is actually quite effective. There's a blue pulse laser that can kill with two shots, but it's hard to aim and fires slowly. There's a green pulse laser that fires bursts. Another green gun that fires some sort of acid blobs that don't go far and litter the floor. A machine gun that's pretty effective. A sniper rifle that's pretty fun. Shoots slowly but if you hit the head the guy is dead instantly. A flying razor disk gun. The disks bounce around until the hit someone and can also decapitate. A grenade launcer which can kill with one well placed shot or a couple of close shots. A shotgun that can kill with one short-ranged shot but does very little at medium ranges. Then there's the redeemer, which fires a missile that explodes and anyone caught in the blast radius is dead. And quite a blast radius that you can see coming at you and many a time it'll hit me too because it's a big blast radius. Only one shot though. My favorite weapons are two pistols or the grenade launcher or the shotgun. Just about every weapon has a special ability with the second fire button, but I've never used them so for the most part I don't know what the special abilities are.