Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition

A brilliant game. A hallmark of PC gaming's golden age. The best of the best of the best of the Arena shooters combining raw attitude with brilliant design and a genre-expanding featureset, like a last furious shout from a different era when things were free to be wild and edgy and insane if they wanted and if anyone didn't like it, too bad. The Epic Games that made this gem of a time gone by doesn't exist and it wishes this relic reminding you of the time when it could would just cease to exist entirely. They never built anything better, in my opinion. This was the last stop before early 2000s shooter syndrome ruined Unreal 2, then Unreal Tournament 2003, and after the brief interlude of UT2004 came the shift to console, and the end of PC gaming's golden age.

how can a game more than 25 years old still kick all the modern shooters? no servers needed. setup your own game and be the server. no internet needed. fast. and if you want, it can be ludicrously fast. only downside is the resolution limitation. in detail: while with direct3d the resolutions are limited, with opengl you can use resolutions of even 32:9 1440p (5120x1440), but then it essentially zooms in extremely and cuts the upper and lower third... so i hope you get what i mean. tbh, who could have guessed back then what weird formats once would be, when 4:3 monitors with 480x640 were standard and 800x600 were top notch. the graphics themselves do not need to be better. since overwatch's runied this is the best there is, the best there was, and when stop killing games fails, it will become the best there ever will be.

This game was a favorite from my childhood. Got it to work as some point and played it for a while. It was nice to relive a game i loved and missed.