Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Epic Games
Publisher: Infogrames, Inc.

This reviewer was an elite "Quake" player circa 1996, bought "Unreal" the day it came out, was knee-deep in the 3D accelerator wars, and made levels for plus played hundreds of hours of Unreal Tournament from 1999 to 2001 on PC at LAN parties. Seeing this game run at all on the PlayStation 2 hardware is almost unbelievable: it's in that famous class of "miracle ports". But there are trade-offs: for starters the framerate is all over the place, dropping all the way down to single digits in situations with lots of alpha explosion effects. Further, the texture resolution is substantially reduced from the PC original. At the same time though, it's the same game that millions of people enjoyed on PC, and it's more or less intact and playable here.

When you played an Epic Megagames release in the 90s, from "Jill of the Jungle" to "Tyrian" to "Jazz Jackrabbit" to "One Must Fall: 2097", you always knew it would have phenomenal mod-style audio tracks-- and Unreal Tournament was no exception. A veritable stable of composers with names such as Alexander Brandon contributed here, and the blood-pumping techno beats all make their way into this PlayStation 2 rendition. The audio may be a little compressed as compared to the PC version of the game, perhaps to save on memory or memory bandwidth, but it still sounds great. The game's trademark sound effects are all here too, and functionally convey things happened to the various players.

It took this reviewer four attempts with four different mice, but in the end: yes, this PlayStation 2 port surrealistically has full mouse and keyboard support! The number buttons can't be assigned to the weapons, weirdly, but mousewheel switching works. One can tell the controller support didn't get quite as much specialized love and focus as it did in "TimeSplitters", but it's still surprisingly usable with "control scheme B", and with the sensitivity cranked up on both axes. Issuing commands to the bots is done via the "Select" button. The map selection doesn't seem to have the larger PC levels, but there are still many classics here. They can be enjoyed via four player split-screen, or "LAN party"-style with the hardware's "iLink" port.

If a friend were buying one first-person shooter at PlayStation 2 launch, which is the better recommendation: this, or "TimeSplitters"? Unreal Tournament on PC is one of the best computer games of all time, so isn't the choice obvious? Not so fast: the framerate is really an issue in this port, to the point of being regularly distracting. Besides that, "TimeSplitters" has much more customization, its totally awesome map editor, plus the engine was written for the hardware from the ground-up, and is butter smooth. It's a really tough choice, with no wrong answer. All-in-all, it's hard to comprehend how they crammed Unreal Tournament onto the PlayStation 2 hardware at all, and it's surreal to be able to experience it this way.