I screamed that at the screen but he wouldn't listen xD

Same with Quake 2. You can play as a Woman or even a Cyborg.

I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be female protagonist only for parts of its development, but I guess they decided there's no reason to limit players in that regard.

@@StonemeisterPP Not really... you just pick your player model in the options menu. It's the same as for bot matches.

Technically the closest thing we have to a canonical character is the female model in the tank top, with the name of Gina, supposedly

Not joking. Devs should hire him to sell their games.

I guess bethesda already did that with doom eternal

Seriously, I’ve bought so many games off Steam and GOG because of Gman’s recommendations. Still waiting for Sin: Reloaded though.

gman is a punk.. Dr. Freeman FOREVER BITCHES!!!! ;)

I missed out on some titles on steam during the sale next year ill be ready

The man himself!

@@donizettilorenzo our hero

I'm playing Unreal for the first time since yesterday, and the soundtrack immediately reminded me a lot of Deus Ex... I'm no longer wondering why!

I love you! I still listen to Unreal soundtrack to this day, you 90s and 2000s composers were built different ❤

Mister Brandon, in the flesh.

Played it back then on my Voodoo2, when my Buddy comes around. 30min. open mouth, but no word. ^^

Best comment I've read on YT this year. You brought back memories I had forgotten, and described exactly the way it was for me also.

I was pretty obsessed playing it online. My nic was SuperUnknown and people hating me for using the Asmo because once you mastered it (A lot of patience) you ruled the room lol

Trepang2 has that

Still exist, but in certain genres, because that's not really viable in realistic shooters. "Boomer shooters" as they are called (doom, ultrakill, serious sam) have that

@@connorsucksatgames2263 actually many realistic shooters have projectiles, Arma, Insurgency 2, even battlefield games and Apex legends, tho thats scifi arcadey style. Projectiles aren't dead, not even close.

@@krustin I'm aware, he said "that players could avoid". If you are able to dodge a bullet in those games regularly when you hear the gun fire, please let me know

@@connorsucksatgames2263 you literally cannot dodge bullets, pretty much all ammo is supersonic so the bullet will hit you before you hear anything.

Amazing to think about it but at times too much tech is bad, limited hardware truly forces you to be creative and innovative, if you are talented obviously

Necessity is the mother of invention

Yeah, maybe level designers in modern times get distracted by the assets and tools at their disposal and they forget to start with a simple blockout and polish this before going further.

Yes Zero, I was stress out every time I played it. Not knowing where the enemy was coming from and getting vertigo every time I crossed a narrow bridge over a cliff.

@@tureytayno3154 well, try it now.

Played it since I was about 13 I think myself.

Glad I’m not the only one:)

"Prisoner 849... escaping."

Are there people playing multiplayer on the servers to this day?

@@atomicpunch1990 Sort of. Like ten people.

That Pc Gamer cover that's like "yes that's a real in-game screenshot" :D. SO silly now, but when I got that issue my jaw hit the floor.

Ooops, Next Generation, not PC gamer.

@@AquaShibby3000 I remember that!!! Ah the 90’s were so in your face and gloriously awesome

I was surprised at how well my P1 166mhz MMX PC could run it, seemed silky smooth with some settings turned down but it still looked good for the time. I still remember the issue of PC Gamer you're referring to, it came with a demo for Castrol GTX Bike racing, the mag stated it could run in Software mode, I swear that demo run at 1fps and took at least 10 minutes to boot up!

@@Grandmastergav86 Good memory! And they’re not wrong. It DID run…sort of lol

this isn't anything knew. column/pillar-using cultures have been doing this for thousands of years. see the Greeks

Basically the old mirror effect was a portal, like a camera that looks exactly in the opposite direction of the plane. With directx 9 things are changed but yes, is rare see a good mirror, a good example is Doom 3.

You meant, the shotgun from F.E.A.R. is basically a flak cannon

These reflections were done by literally taking the entire scene, mirroring it, and rendering it again "beneath" the reflective surface. This means that a single surface that reflects the scene would double all geometry on the screen, two surfaces would triple it, and so forth. There's a reason no one uses this technique any more.

@@Keldor314 And they were done using SOFTWARE rendering.

@@jebbi2570 There's absolutely no reason you couldn't do planar reflections with hardware, including back in those days. Indeed, many games did! Still, there's a good reason that cubemap reflections took over pretty much as soon as hardware supported them.

So what happened after that?

@@yaboydolphin I turned into a depressed 45 year old who just finished Spiritfarer. It was good.

Wow, thanks for sharing that. All power to you. God bless.

Dont do drugs for escape, do gaming.

Unreal is so wonderful that it seems made by aliens. I'm glad it eased your depression. It is a true masterpiece.

@@jonbaxter2254 Really damn good! Gems and metals had an awesome look back then! Energy blasts were also great! Nothing super fancy, just bright flashes of light and explosions! Its one of the reasons I love retro type games. I want to play a game and know I'm in a game, I don't want a game that completely mimics the real world. Well, unless the genre calls for it, I guess.

It also has lots of colors unlike other fps from the same era

It looks so sharp because the meshes are simple and don't use much polygons. Also love this style :3

That heavy post-processing done with games today isn't going to age half as well as the classics. Assets used to be bespoke and share a visual language, whereas now it seems like a plugin is used to smear everything together in the uncanny valley.

@@Diablokiller999 Yeah. I just played through FFXV Pocket Edition on my Switch and I LOVED the visual style over the actual game. Would love to see more FF games done in that style. Fewer polygons, more exaggerated character models and colors. Timeless, simple and effective.

Ysss

I agree 100%. Unreal is Unreal.

Right. Even Unreal Tournament (between UT99 - UT2k4), just a spinoff series, was IMO easily one of the best FPS series ever. I spent years playing them lol. I even got into making maps and stuff. I loved it. Looking back its crazy how much the "arena shooter" genre seems to have downgraded since UT2004. EG most AAA arena shooters having less maps, less characters, less game modes, less everything (EG Overwatch).

UT2004 and 3 had some amazing AI. I remember when young I used to form imaginary rivarlries with certain bots and even friendships with others.

Quite playable?

Indeed :D

Played Unreal tournament like there was no tomorrow. I have NEVER seen this game.

2022

@@goofyfoot2001 UT was the multiplayer component they decided to release as a standalone game a year later.

Completely agree🤌🏻

Now we need a Gman movie too lol

I mean, there's a free to play Unreal Tournament game on the Epic Game's Store but.. From what I've heard, it's been put on halt as Fortnite is their main focus now.

Late 90s and 2000s boomer shooter clones > early 90s boomer shooter clones

I hear you. I'm still waiting on Quake 5, Prey 2 (With Tommy and the bounty hunter), Darkness 3, Even just a remaster of Starlancer. That wasn't an FPS mind you but damn that game was good.

I miss games like AVP2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Halo CE, Red Faction, and FEAR. Getting tired of early 90s styled indie FPS games. Games like Unreal and Half Life really shooked up the FPS genre. Today, mostly online only focused, arena shooters, or giant boring open world time wasters with RPG elements and crafting. Ugh.

there's one indie I stumbled upon on itch.io the other day which seems to be heavily inspired by Unreal, I think it's called Dead Gaem

I still got converts from .utx to .MP3 on my HDD together with UT99 soundtrack... they are EPIC 😂

All Hallows' Sunset, all the time

Oh boy, I carry this soundtrack with me everywhere, ever since I exported the tracks myself way back in the day... Alexander Brandon's tracks are just marvelous, and when I play Jazz Jackrabbit 2 I can definitely tell his fingerprints are all over those tracks as well.

"Surfacing" is king. I have an Unreal box signed by Alexander Brandon, met him at Magfest once, super cool guy

I just gave you 100 likes, lolz

And now it's just an engine, I sure do miss this Era of gaming

Well, it all went to shit after Unreal 2 lol

@@valentinom.4292 Actually, starting with Unreal 2. It was a such slooooooow game only somewhat related to original game it was disappointing. Engine was great, though.

@@APopov I don't know, Unreal 2 looks pretty shit.

@@valentinom.4292 in 2003? It was the best thing since Morrowind.

Money. Money is going on in their heads. UT 4 is an Empty unfinished alpha Demo that they abandoned to milk the cash cow of fortnight. I doubt they will make an UT game in UE5. They will probably roll out a Fortnight 2 in UE 5 instead.

Actually, considering how Epic has treated this series and its fans, they better not show their sorry ass face next to another Unreal series release ever again. They don't deserve the IP anymore. And besides. They'd probably butcher a new release with microtransactions and chain it to their abomination they call a store. No thanks.

So that it can be an Epic-Store exclusive, full of gambling mechanics and Chicom spyware? Nah, the Epic Games we knew is dead, and the thing wearing Epic like a grotesque skinsuit today.. i don't want to see how they would butcher Unreal. I really don't.

@@Grobut81 "I'd rather see her at the bottom of the ocean than in the hands of Epic Games." - Commodore Norrington

Unfortunately, there was supposed to be a new Unreal Tournament, then you know what that turned out later on. Rest is history.

Dude, my first game was king's quest : eternity mask : it would take 20 to 30 minutes to load a level ! A few years later, i wanted to play it again, damn thing started before I could even grab a drink !

@@pierre-mariecaulliez6285 Mask Of Eternity is such an underrated gem.

95 should've still been able to run it. It was definitely the PC itself that was the issue. Lol

@@ninjabiatch101 Oh it was the pc for sure. Could hardly run the Windows itself .

Oozes atmosphere huh

@@mintysurfer14 Yea I think that makes sense. Sure, it was a hectic "balls to the wall" FPS (oldskool style) but at the same time it had a strong atmosphere (what with the 'at the time' advanced graphics, sound & lighting).

That emptiness is the greatest of signs that you had the absolute best greatest amazing and epic experience! I wish more games gave me this feeling now days...

I can't get over that penultimate level, when you navigate the ship in darkness and those strange mutated, glowing Skarj come out of the shadows - it all feels truly alien. To put another way: I traverse corridors like a lonely human, faraway from anything familiar, and I don't belong there...

I found all that very boring in Unreal series and preferred HL and Q2. My opinion has not changed in 2021 :)

I had only 2 of such experiences - completing Unreal+RTNP and completing Iain M Banks Culture series. You have to wait 10 years to partially forget it and then touch it, feel it, dive into it again.

I cracked out on the editor it came with - I guess that was the model all along, seeing where the engine stands today.

True! I'd even say that the fanpatch isn't really needed, but the more convenient menu options and raw mouse input support are a huge bonus.

@@deus_nsf without the patch the game runs way too fast, but the fact that it runs without fuss otherwise is impressive

TBH I haven't played the game in probably 15 years but IIRC, the game ran smooth AF on lower budget hardware back then too, EG Voodoo 2-3, which we had. I feel like Unreal Engine was the opposite of CryEngine (yea I know I'm comparing 1997 with 2004 but... but), performance wise, atleast. I don't know if UE (now with UE4) can still claim to squeeze the most horsepower out of the weakest systems but I think it used to.

@@ncshuriken new engines are crafted for consoles which are inferiors to PC MASTER RACE so you usually can expect playable PC game below what is listed as minimum system requirements (my 3rd gen i5 with GTX1050Ti is sufficient for everything released today, before I had older 2nd gen i3 and it was bottleneck for that GFX card)

Not really. The input latency issue is a disaster in this version of Unreal and UnrealTournament, compared to Quake 2 (whether the old version or Yamagi or RTX or whatever). I wish someone would create a new engine for this game just like Yamagi did for Quake 2.

Crystalpunk? First time I hear that. Does Dune refers as crystalpunk as well?

This ^^ Those grenades are a godsend against enemies that dodge :)

I've always considered the U1 / UT99 rocket launcher to be the pinnacle of "alternate fire mode" design. With just two buttons, you have an intuitive way to fire single rockets, spread-pattern rockets, cluster rockets, homing rockets, single grenades, or cluster grenades. The grenade launcher in Unreal 2 is the opposite, if you have more than one or two types of grenade. Just keep mashing the "swap" button until it lands on the one you want to use, and hope you haven't mixed up the ones that sound like they have similar functions but don't.

@@Eiterra The UT99 Rocket Launcher is probably my favourite.

I remember reading that they initially wanted to do eight rockets (hence Eightball), but it was just way too powerful - and dangerous to the player, too.

Yeah I forgot how many alt fire modes that thing had. Great utility in DM matches too. I remember just spamming those fully loaded grenade rockets and they would bounce all over the place and around corners.

I will never forget that exit from the prison ship. It's something that stays in your mind forever. That feeling of panic and loneliness. Masterpiece of all time.

From the early 90's (the advent of VGA 256 colour graphics, SVGA, plug and play hardware for sound) right up until the eary 2000's - all the golden era of PC gaming. Hardware companies being pushed by software companies and each other to compete for our money. Reasonable prices. Amazing improvements year on year and 90% of the software developers governed themselves and were led by creative people with vision. Then consoles happened, and the industry was largely bought out by just a handful of media conglomerates with no interest in anything other than profit and they put money men at the helm. GG.

@@annematthews1837 I agree with almost everything you said except for the idea of consoles starting around that time. Consoles, handheld, arcade, VR, all of these things are part of the industry, and none of them started in the 90s. But, yeah, I agree, late 90s to early 2000s was relatively golden compared to today.

@@Daryl42 No what I meant by that was that previously to this, consoles were consoles and PC's were PC's. They didn't exist for the same purpose or in the same space. Consoles back then were far more underpowered than an average gaming PC, were much less expensive and had a totally different style of game developed for them. Hardware on the PC was advancing at an insane rate at that time, the PC was in a totally different league in terms of quality of game and that provided a lot of ingenuity. The Playstation itself, while a capable machine, still stuck to "console" style games, mostly casual, with the odd PC conversion coming over. But then the Dreamcast released and was basically a PC - very capable hardware and had many more cross platform games converted from the PC. After this, at the end of the 90's / beginning of the 2000's, the change happened. Consoles became increasingly popular and, despite being far behind what PC's could do technically, they were heavily marketed and sold exponentially and, as the Industry was rapidly being bought out by just a few powerful conglomerates, suddenly the industry catered almost entirely for consoles with an aim of mass profit, with many of the best developers, publishers AND TALENT being redirected over to consoles, as opposed to PC's and the "pushing the limits" style of developing the PC had brought. Most of the best PC franchises also went over to consoles, and the casualization of games happened. The games themselves, in terms of art, stagnated - and as consoles are always far being PC's, so did advancement in graphics / gameplay / everything else. Today even the big holdouts like Blizzard have succumbed. We live in COD / FIFA land. Remake and Remaster land. If you have shares in the Industry you win. If you're a gamer you lose. If you're a developer with your own amazing ideas - you lose. Even Indie developers coming up who have make some extraordinarilly original games or technical masterpieces on the PC are fucked - because they are offered a cheque to work for the mainstream industry and are assigned as chief model designers for COD 26 or TombRaider 57. It is what it is. Just a shame that, now multiple generations in, this is for 90% of gamers today - normal. As good as it gets. Sadly, it really is.

@@annematthews1837 I think that this is just the market itself creating the world that it collectively wants. In other words, it’s a vote with your wallet situation. FIFA is FIFA because people literally buy into the MTX world. (I’m actually not even sure how FIFA works today.)People don’t want to spend $1,000 on a budget PC when they can have a console for far less. And as for the people that do have PCs, many of them are playing free games. The problem is that the old system worked, but this works better, as far as profits goes. Personally, I have PC and console and I enjoy both equally. And another thing is that I think people figured out how to make complex games work on controller. For example: Halo, Halo Wars, FF11/14, Morrowind, etc.

Nah, that was the doom era, goldeneye was just nintento 64. I didnt enjoy it when i tried to play it with friends, i hated the controls.

Yea-eah~

is free on gog!!!

Jill awakened something in me as a young lad if ya know what I mean 😏

Except for that damn level with the demons in it. ;3;

@@Vexillifer Lol, I thought the sound for picking up a key sounded like some R&B singers singing "gi~rl" like they are in love with her and trying to impress her.

... If you can stay alive long enough to charge said secondary ;7

@@pierre-mariecaulliez6285 it was harder to hit the shot than to stay alive :P

It was way easier to do this in Unreal Tournament because there GES bio rifle was able to hold charge infinitely long.

Camping with biorifle behind teleporter in redeemer room on Deck-16 xD That's what made original UT great, there was so much possible cheese, weapons lacked balance and people considered it part of a gameplay, nobody was trying to fix anything until much later.

@@APopov I seem to remember playing Unreal and after firing the secondary shot, the shot would stay there until someone walked into it(and died), now the secondary shot disperses after a period of time.

it was a lovely trick to see back then, yet so simple. and for those who hadn't figured it out: it's basically done by doubling the level and symmetrically sticking the copied geometry on the bottom, with an opaquely transparant layer acting as a fake mirror.

@@buzzworddujour false. Unreal Engine 1 had true mirrors. You could literally noclip under the level and see you're wrong.

@@Leichenschrei Fair. I'll take that L. not sure what you want to call a "true mirror" though, since the "mirror image" geometry is still being rendered additionally.

@@8bitRAM It did have true mirrors. All geometry had to be rendered twice from different point of view so it was quite heavy and had to be turned off on most PC at the time. There were no 2nd and so on reflections as with ray tracing but reflections were 100% accurate. The same mirror surfaces were used in UT99.

@@APopov Unreal was the first game to use portals although they aren't perfect portals but they work just like that even if they are a sort of enhanced teleporter

How did you reply one day ago...

@@kazcav4973 Aye, not many though. There was a hard shift in this approach around 2007-ish.

So, how did you post the comment a day ago?

@@amnesia998 @Nungshimanen T Imchen Ask about this while GMan has the Patreon xD Probably one of the perks here.

I love games with alt fires , there's a few but yea not enough, and it's not like we don't have enough buttons or triggers XD

And you haven't even heard it with hardware accelerated 3D audio!

It's nice that a newcomer like you can appreciate this game as much as I did back in the days!

oof

skaarj exactly :)

Its so sad Unreal Championship 2 was in that awful era of 'PC games are dead.' That game would ahve done amazing on the PC, its so good.

"Apologies ! Was that your HEAD !?!"

@@pierre-mariecaulliez6285 Man, I remember modding the hell out of UT99 back in the day, running around crazy maps using bizzarre weapons like the shrinker and freeze gun from Duke Nukem while Batman style 'POW!' and 'THWAP!'s appear next to peoples heads, only for my enemy to explode into gibs and my character using a Darth Vader skin with a voice pack of Cartman from South Park to respond with 'Aye, kickass' I've still got some of those old mods.

@@Fatman311 hahaha Unreal 4 ever bat thwap and other fun skins and voices. Making heads fly was a hobby in those games, unreal UT blood And my favorite thing with those mods is that many had ultimate weapons who are crazier than the original redeemer. And the biggest nukes came from nali weapons

....Same shït i experienced first time playing quake moments before getting bombed on my face. And then those grenades bouncing around to add to the trauma.

You got it wrong, you should have typed: "I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favourite game of the 90s"

Having grown up with Unreal 1 its hard to disagree with that. Not that I had any intention of disagreeing with it lol. The game was massive at the time, it blew us away!

@@AM-hz3bi Fun fact: Mass Effect has been done on Unreal Engine 3.

I have the same issue with DVD/blue-rays : I have a version of The Matrix 3 with the movie, audio commentaries, behind the scene reports, and even a freaking minigame (if you play it through a computer) !! On a DVD !! Nowadays, you can barely find a movie DVD with audio commentary ! I don't want to cry conspiracy, but blue-ray really feel like they WANT you to buy it instead...

In the "golden age" you had to earn your place on the top sellers list by making a damn good game. Nowadays, you just have to market the shit out of it because there are a lot more less-experienced gamers that will buy something just because their favorite streamer said few nice words about the game. After that they will "market" the game to their friends (who want to play games with their friends) and you get to a position where quality isn't the measurement of success. Hype is. Thus the fall from grace, to a such level that even a mediocre game is glorified to be something special...

Lower budget, smaller teams, more passion. Nowadays it's big budget, huge corporations, crunch, money, quantity over quality

@@NoirTenshin and games MUST make their money back for the investors' sake, instead of focusing on being fun for the players'

Mostly the AAA market is this

Thank goodness I'm not the only one that noticed that mistake. I still prefer calling it what the Nali do, (The Stick of 6 Fires) It's a lot more fitting.

It's one of 2 games (SYSTEM SHOCK 2 is the other) which I have never uninstalled.

@@vincelang3779 SS2 is on my list since I saw 10/10 in video games magazine in 1999 and I still haven't played it. I really need to do this soon.

@@jonusiescu Then I wish I could trade places with you! I don't think I'll ever forget what a stunning revelation playing that game was the first time around. I later "guided" a friend through it in coop (which worked surprisingly well) and he too was blown away. Now, of course, many (many!) games have since copied its formulae, down to the very mission structure - from Irrational game's own BIOSHOCK to Visceral's DEAD SPACE; truly a case of "many times duplicated but never replicated." And fortunately for you, there are a number of mods to upgrade graphics and models, making what was already a *_design_* masterpiece into something eminently playable today. I wish you many happy hours being immersed in the corridors of the Von Braun, and then ... well, saying any more than that would be telling!

@@vincelang3779 Just like Deus Ex haha