#Skaarj

[zachfett]

Unreal Tournament 2004 (Epic Games/Digital Extremes)

It's my birthday so I'm posting one of my favorite games of all time! 🥳

#Unreal Tournament 2004 #2004 #Epic Games #Digital Extremes #Psyonix #Streamline Studios #Atari #Jeff Morris #Cliff Bleszinski #Steve Polge #Kevin Riepl #Starsky Partridge #Will Nevins #Unreal #Unreal Engine 2 #Unreal series #Unreal Tournament #UT2K4 #Skaarj #Liandri Corporation #Thunder Crash #Unreal franchise #2004 games #UE2 #PC #PC gaming #PC games #Steam #gaming #pc games

[magpies-gold]

A little bit more from Unreal, my favorite childhood FPS, may its bones rest in peace. Couldn't have drawn a nali earlier without circling back to draw my rendition of a skaarj

#unreal #unreal gold #skaarj #art #my art #digital art

[alifetimeofgames]

Unreal Tournament

There are some weird poses if you do an image search for "army woman" out there.

I don't think I have that much to say about Unreal Tournament that hasn't been said already, except that it was fun as hell. I only played against bots since I lived in the woods and only had dial-up for the vast majority of my childhood, but it was probably more fun than playing actual multiplayer. I am, however, very bad at shooters and had quite a lot of trouble without cheats.

As for the image, I decided to draw the two factions that I always enjoyed playing against as a kid - the Necris and the Skaarj hybrid teams. I never figured out why I liked them so much, but it's so obvious now. In retrospect, I was such a little monster lover even back then. I liked the idea of drawing the Skaarj in a typical female soldier pose and the Necris in a typical male soldier pose, but it really just turned out a bit stiff for her. Ah, well, I kind of like how the shading turned out anyway.

#unreal tournament #fanart #skaarj #necris #I remember playing with the pressure chamber a bunch #but I think everyone who played this game did #I enjoyed playing god mode and just hovering around everywhere

[utaesthetics]

SCR-Skaarj

#unreal tournament #Soccer Tournament Maps #SCR-Skaarj

[krissiefox]

My Favorite Unreal Engine Games!

Unreal engine has a special place in my own history with game design, as it was one of the first game engines I learned to make custom maps with during my college classes. The game we used was Unreal Tournament 2004, which was also the game that got me more into PC gaming in general. It's an engine I've long enjoyed working with, so I wanted to have a showcase of some of my favorite games using this engine from over the years!

UNREAL GOLD

The one that started it all. A great single player FPS adventure across an alien world where you play as escaped prisoner who befriends the planets friendly Nali folk and help protect them from an army of not-so-nice Skaarj. This one runs on the OG unreal Engine 1, which is quite pretty and for a game engine from the 90s, probably blew plenty of folks' socks off!

UNREAL TOURNAMENT SERIES (UT1, UT2004, UT3, UT4)

Using the same universe as Unreal 1's story adventure, unreal Tournament centers around a blood sport tournament hosted by the Liandri Mining Corporation as a means of entertainment for bored miners. This simply backstory sets the stage for the Epic's long-lasting multiplayer-based Unreal games, with the usual classic game modes such as Deathmatch and Capture the flag. Lots of replay value is added thanks to the robust modding community for the franchise, and for folks who don't want to deal with the risk of meeting toxic assholes in online matches, the series thankfully provides bots enemies you can play against as well! The engines of the games range all the way from the original up to Unreal Engine 4, after which Epic sadly killed off the series.

Sadly, a few years ago Epic decided to be douche bags and pull these games from all digital storefronts, along with the single player ones as well. If you can't find a physical copy, don't feel bad about yo-ho-ho-ing that shit (especially UT4 as it never got a physical release at all)!

UNREAL 2 THE AWAKENING

While I prefer the original, the sequel the Unreal 1/Gold is still another solid single player FPS adventure. There's a lot more complex story-line and character interaction going on in this one, as you get to relax between missions on your own ship and talk with your crew mates. Only big flaws I found in this one is that it did rear an uncomfortable habit that Epic had for a while with the Unreal games - dressing their female characters in ridiculously sexist attire. This one runs on the Unreal 2.0 Engine, a nice looking upgrade to the original engine that still ran smoothly on every computer I've ever tried it on.

BORDERLANDS SERIES

Okay, some of these feel like a bit of cheating - I've never actually beaten a Borderlands game. However, I have briefly played Borderlands 1 and 2, and watched my family play the crap out of all the games. They're great games, from all I've seen, So I'm still going to give them my approval. Colorful, funny, violent, queer-positive, They've have it all!

Most of the games are first-person shooters, but there's also a couple adventure games in the form of the Tales from the Borderlands titles. The first is using a different engine, but New Tales from the Borderlands uses Unreal Engine. All of the FPS titles use either Unreal 3.0 or 4.0.

There's no DRM free versions on PC, sadly, but all of the games have received physical releases on consoles, at-least.

KILLING FLOOR SERIES

Killing Floor started as mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, and later evolved into several standalone games! Most of the games are arena-based, you pick a map to play in and get to see how long you can survive fighting off waves of freaky monster people until the big boss arrives. You can play solo or online to team up with other players to fight the monsters. A couple of the games also have a story mode, namely the original mod version and the VR game Killing Floor incursion. These games are great fun and long-time favorite of mine, the only downer being that after the initial mod all other games are developed by tripwire, a gross company I stopped giving money to years ago. Thankfully, Killing Floor 2 is available as physical console games, so you can pick those up without giving tripwire money. The Killing Floor games have also show up in humble bundles several times, so keep an eye on those for a chance to get the games while giving all the money to charity instead of tripwire. Killing Floor 3 is currently in development, and hopefully these workarounds will exist for that game as well so I can try it out one day.

The original mod uses Unreal 2.0, while Killing Floor uses a special "midpoint" 2.5, which adds some nice features to the original 2.0 engine such as light bloom effects. KF2 uses Unreal engine 3, and KF3 is planned to run on Unreal 5.0.

HOLLOW MOON (UT2004 MOD)

Hollow Moon is a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. It's basically the Backrooms in space! A great and creepy experience where you wander and explore an abandoned moon base, presented in an artsy black and white silent film style, accompanied by a haunting soundtrack.

NAISANCEE

Continuing with the theme of Unreal Engine liminal space games, NaissanceE has you exploring a massive, strange world trying to find your way out. It's a little spooky, and very mysterious. The art and sound design are fantastic. It's also both free AND DRM free, so you can back up your own copy of the game! My only complaints are that there a couple sections of the game where the lighting and platforming gets hard to understand through poor lighting or awkward physics.

The game runs on Unreal Engine 3, and it's almost always a visual treat.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 isn't actually out yet, but it's a very rare example of an upcoming AAA game I'm actually excited for, so I wanted to mention it here. It will be the first title in the series to use Unreal engine, as all of the previous titles were made in GSC Gameworld's own X-Ray Engine. Hopefully the game will be just as fun, cool and spooky as the original trilogy when it comes out! And I hope the dev team is all keeping safe from putin's little homophobic warmongering clown show.

UNLUCKY (shameless self-plug!)

Yup, our very own project "Unlucky" is also an Unreal Engine game! We're using Unreal Engine 5, which I haven't had as much experience with as 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0, but I'm learning my way around it as I test out my 3d models in-engine. :)

#unreal #epic games #unreal engine #Unlucky #dark ark studios #S.T.A.L.K.E.R. #S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 #GSC Gameworld #X-Ray Engine #NaissanceE #backrooms #liminal space #liminal #game recommendations #HOLLOW MOON #horror #first-person shooter #fps #platformers #adventure games #Killing Floor #Killing Floor 2 #tripwire interactive #kf1 #kf2 #kf3 #killing floor 3 #borderlands #unreal tournament #unreal gold

[maklodes]

I don’t buy the Unreal lore that the Nali were a benign and peaceful race brutally oppressed by the occupying Skaarj. Okay, I buy the part about them being brutally oppressed by the occupying Skaarj, but not the part about being peaceful and enlightened primitives before. Their architecture – essentially all presumably predating the Skaarj invasion – has too many hints of a world already accustomed to violence: castles dotted with turrets, crenellations, traps, and portcullises.

Maybe they really do follow a religion whose scripture talks a lot about how great peace is and shit like that, but like, that’s true of Christian Medieval Europe (blessed are the peacemakers!), or the Buddhist Khmer Empire (ahimsa!), etc. 

Once the Skaarj showed up with interstellar-age technology and started massacring everyone who resisted, the Nali gave up on military resistance, but that’s like, yeah, sure, of course they did.

#unreal #video games #hot pop culture references from 1998

[pinklocksoflove]

Unreal Tournament 2004 intro

The Liandri Tournament enters its 12th year, Malcolm is back with his old team Thunder Crash and trying to reclaim his title as champion, Brock is back with the Iron Guard and trying for the glory of his own and Gorge and the Juggernauts are there to defend their title. Additionally, the Skaarj Empire has sent a team of their own to the tournament in search of honor and glory and ex-champion Xan Kriegor has had some modifications and is back to return the title where it belongs. 

[shandyykh]

If you have a functioning printer have these

and this too if you like UG

dont forget to download pepakura! it doesn't take a while dw ;)

also!! I recommend using any strong paper, sketchbook paper could do

#unreal tournament #unreal gold

[tsdo]

my gender right now is whatever the hell ut99's skaarj hybrids had going on

#unreal tournament

[djchorlocontrolection]

Rafven3 - Pump (Skaarj Breakz Remix) 2016

#youtube

[my-apologees]

Honestly, the nali water god temple is one of my favorite parts of Unreal Gold It is just such a memorable moment to me, not sure why but maybe it's cause it marks when I ACTUALLY continued UG XD

Since I always believed that I won't ever finish it cause I lost interest or something, but hey I'm pretty close to finishin' UG! ISV-Kran is also my favorite but also a little tedious in a way.. lotsa skaarj in there

The track for the water god temple is just extremely calming in a way and super atmospheric, top tier

#unreal gold #retro ramblin' #Youtube

[dosgamer000]

"Vortex Rikers" by Cliff Bleszinski / Unreal (1998) 

#Unreal #Unreal Gold #Epic MegaGames #Computer Games #1998 #Na Pali #Nali #Skaarj #Sci Fi #Action Games

[magpies-gold]

Waxing nostalgic about my ancient beloved shooty mcshooter game of yore, good ole Unreal. Ended up drawing a nali in a fugue state. Behold!

I still have to draw a good skaarj someday.

#unreal #unrealgold #nali #fanart #digital art #procreate art #ipad art #my art

[techturd]

#Skaarj trooper #Skaarj #Unreal #epic megagames #Pc games #Pc gaming #Computer games #Computer gaming #Epic games

[utaesthetics]

ExtremeGen Skaarj Generator

#unreal #campaign maps #ExtremeGen

[krissiefox]

Unreal Gold (Steam Version) Review

Continuing on my backlog of old-school First-Person Shooter games I never got to play until recently, Unreal Gold is the very first game in Epic Game's Unreal franchise, and it was a great start to the series!

In this title you play as prisoner who wakes up after the ship you were being transported on has crash-landed somewhere. The prisoner has no name, and in the game's settings, you can choose different character models, and skins as well - including female ones, which is quite progressive for an FPS game from 1998, and made me happy (and also amusingly reminds me of a certain gamer douche-bag who tried with argue to me that games in 1998 didn't have the technology to be gender-inclusive). It's also pretty cool that you even have the option of using "gibbed" skins, which make your character look all bloody and fucked-up, like they've just been through a nasty fight.

~

(Plot details ahead, spoiler warning!)

Once you escape the ship, you find yourself on a beautiful alien world called Na Pali, and must find a way to get off-planet.  As you explore the planet, you meet multiple races and species, including a variety of  wildlife both adorable and deadly, the peaceful humanoid Nali folk, and whole bunch of nasty mean motherfuckers, the Skaarj army. The Skaarj you fight are a tyrannical people who believe themselves genetically superior to all other life-forms and desire to conquer them all. This is seen on Na Pali where they frequently attack and torture the Nali race. At the end of the main story-line (there are two campaigns included in Unreal Gold), you kill the Skaarj queen on their mother-ship and use  a ship to flee, only to run of fuel in orbit around the planet.

When the second campaign begins, you are picked up by some bastard space cops who force you do a mission for them and retrieve  the data cores from another ship that crashed on Na Pali. The storytelling is more fleshed out in this campaign, as in addition to finding readable lore books, you also get a mission log between level that let you see hear more about your character’s personality (though you need a patch to fix this, as sadly this game has some pretty bad bugs...more on that later).  It's a rough task for the protagonist, as they still have to deal with Skaarj and even more deadly critters. The military is dropping supply crates for you, which seems helpful at first, but later in the game we sadly see that they do it with no regard for the native inhabitants of the planet, something hurting and killing Nali folk with the crates when they crash right into their homes! As if that wasn't bad enough, when you finally complete your mission, it is revealed that they were planning to kill you all along, and were just waiting for you to clear the Skaarj out of the crashed ship for them so they could get the data cores from your corpse.  Their soldiers are some of the toughest enemies in the game with their insanely accurate weapon fire (though I was playing on the highest difficulty so that's probably my own fault!) but once you beat them, your character sets out to find a way off the planet on their own. Thankfully, after journeying further, they do so and as an extra bit of satisfaction, trick the space cops ship into firing a missile right into their own ship,  destroying it. Suck on that, bastard space cops! Our cop-killing hero then flies off into the distance, and hopefully arrives home safely.

(plot spoilers end here)

~

That might just be the longest I've got on about a game's story in a review yet!  I really enjoyed the story in this one, because it was much more detailed than a lot of other similar FPS games from the 90s. I also have a soft spot for the Unreal series, because it was my main introduction into PC games back in the mid/late-2000s when I learned to make maps for Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2004) in college. It was really neat getting to play this title as it retro-actively added a lot more context for all the things I saw in the Unreal Tournament games.

Of course, There is a lot to be enjoyed in the game-play itself, too - The game features plenty of guns, some of which are very similar to ones I used in UT2004 such as the flak cannon, while many others were unique to this title. You could also collect a variety of items to keep in your inventory, similar to games like Shadow Warrior or Heretic. One of the more interesting items is the “Nali Seed” (no, not THAT kind of seed!) which could be planted in the ground to eventually grow fruit that you could then eat to restore your health. which I always had fun exploring the levels, and found them very immersive.The game uses a lot of darker and subdued color tones that are very easy on the eyes, and go well with the super-relaxing synthy/ambient soundtrack. In a way, I found myself enjoying this one in a somewhat similar way to how I enjoyed Half-Life 2 - I loved exploring and soaking in the relaxing atmosphere just as much as I loved the fun combat whenever a baddie would pop up. The variety of creatures on Na Pali make the planet very interesting - the little  Nali "rabbits" and Nali "cows" were adorable to me and I always tried to keep them safe along with the Nali themselves. The game is also technically impressive for a old 90s title - Some objects have physics and can be pushed around, there's a lot of massive outdoor enviroments, really nice looking skies, well-animated characters, surface reflections,  and while the water in the game has no physics, it does still look quite lovely . The Unreal Engine has gone through many upgrades over the years, but even the original was pretty solid!

Sadly, as I did mention bugs earlier...this great game does have some troubling issues that hold it back a bit. This might possibly be because I'm running a 1998 game on a modern Windows 10 computer, but with this version being hosted on steam, I don't see why it couldn't be patched and fixed up more. Here's a list of the bugs I encountered:

-Sometimes hit detection wouldn't work if you were too close to an ammo crate before firing at it.

- Sometimes the music would stop playing when you loaded a save file (which is a damn shame, this game has wonderful music).

- At one point the game locked my whole laptop up and I had to initiate a shut down just to get the game to close!

- Sometimes the animation of water surfaces would stop or become jittery.

- Sometimes if you save too many times in a single map the game won't be able to load your saves anymore. There's a fix for this bug here: https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/server-at-capacity-when-restoring-games-fixed.3408/

- possibly the most surprising bug - the audio logs in the second campaign don't play after the first level unless you install a fan-made patch! Thankfully you can get that patch here: https://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1506873085 just be aware you may lose your save progress, so it's best to have this installed from the get-go after you backup your original files.

There are some design choices in the game that I found troubling as well. Many bodies of water in the game would have a surface that was non-transparent from one side, meaning you could end up not being able to see something shooting at you from within or above a pool of water. I also ended up being confused for most of the game how to use my weapons alternate fire because it isn't listed anywhere in the game's control settings (I wish I had experimented with pushing random keys sooner, as I eventually found them on my own). Similarly, the "\" key is the one I use on steam for screenshots, and it took me a while to realize that it was moving my HUD around every-time I pressed it, because this was not listed in the controls. Early in playing the game, I tried finding a manual online since Steam didn't provide one, but the only download link I could find set off my antivirus software. The lack of a manual also kept me from knowing what Nali seeds were for through most of the game - which is again partially my fault for not experimenting more - but also another good example of why this game really ought to come with a digital manual when it is on something like steam.  Lastly, the game has a problem with being *excessively* dark on many occasions. I know a lot of people complained about Doom 3 being too dark, but in that game, your flashlight was not a finite resource and could be used almost any time - in Unreal your flares and light batteries are all consumable items, meaning you could end up wandering in pitch black areas at times if you didn’t conserve them.

Despite all those problems - I was still very impressed with this first outing in the Unreal series. I have to wonder if it's not mentioned  as much as games like Doom, Quake or Half-Life is because of the rough patches that Epic ought to have ironed out before releasing this. I'm really happy for the fan-made patches that help fix the games worst problems and I think it's a shame that the Unreal single player series only ever got two games. The Unreal Tournament series went on for much longer, possibly due to the (often toxic) competitive macho attitudes of many gamers making it more of a financial success, but even that too was eventually thrown to the curb by Epic Games in favor of their modern cash-cow, Fortnite. At this point it seems unlikely we'll ever get another single-player Unreal adventure from Epic, but from what I've seen, there's plenty of fan-made mods and campaigns you can get for this game to continue having more adventures. Another nice feature is that because this an old pc game from before shit like steam came around, you can get yourself  a physical copy! It can be acquired surprisingly cheap on ebay, even in brand new condition!

#Unreal Gold #Unreal #Return To Na Pali #Epic Games #Unreal Engine #Old-School FPS #First-Person Shooter #Game Review #Gaymer #Review #KrissieFox Game Reviews