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Unreal Championship
by Hector Cortez
Saturday, October 19 2002
The PC Shooter comes to the Xbox, and more importantly, Xbox Live!
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Title:
Unreal Championship
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Platform:
Xbox
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Publisher:
Infogrames |
Developer:
Digital Extremes |
#
of Players: 1 - 2 + Online Play |
Genre:
First Person Shooter
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Origin:
United States
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Expected
Release:
November 2002 |
Grapevine:
Now with all this variety in death and characters the developers still managed to make enough levels to keep you interested for quite some time. |
XBOX Live is just around and alot of gamers are expecting alot from this venture into console online gaming, and most any one who is excited about Live is excited about the premeire launch title Unreal Championship. This title has been in development for nearly two years now, and is pretty much finished with the coding, and those two years have been well spent.
First off, if you seen any screenshots of the game, you will notice that the graphics are superb featuring great character models, and wonderfuly detalied enviroments. The character animations are also looking quite good, they are using a ragdoll system which will prevent the death animations from looking the same no matter how they die. With this new system the deaths will look as they would in real-life, meaning if you snipe someone in the face while they are running down the steps you will see there upper-body fling back as there legs sweep forward, then the limp carcus will relisticly tumble down the steps. With such a variety of death sequences, you may never get bored of watching your best friend fall 50ft. off a mountian hitting every rock on the way down.
The character size and race also effects this ragdoll system, meaning a small character will be blown further then a huge monster of a character. This also means each character will have there own set of attributes, meaning a bigger character will be slow but alot of defense, while a smaller character will be fast but less defense. This means you will need to find a character that suits you just right, and with around 50 to chose from this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Now with all this variety in death and characters the developers still managed to make enough levels to keep you interested for quite some time. The levels range from jungles to futuristic space stations, and much more in between. The game contains more levels then any other game I have seen to date, boasting more then 40 very detailed arenas.
Even more variety was added to this game, a feature that most XBOXer's feel is VERY underused. To add an exciting atmosphere to this frag fest you can add any atmosphere you want. Well music-wise anyway, Unreal Championship will allow users to play there own music while running around on a killing spree, so I suspect many of you will be fragging to the lovely sounds of N'SYNC's "Bye Bye Bye", or mabey not.
All of this attention to detail is very nice but like all games, if the gameplay isnt good, the game is pretty worthless, and by the looks of this title, it will not dissapoint in this very important category. Weapons in the game include many from Unreal Tornament and many new ones, including a link-up type of gun that enables you to, well link-up, to your partner and fire double the damage to your opponet, of course this comes with a downside of your ammo will deplete twice as fast. This and many other new guns will make thier apperance in UC, meaning many differnt ways to try and frag that annoying little girl who keeps blowing you away with the rocket launcher. Though guns are not the only addition to the game, it MAY also include land, air, and sea vehicles. These would be great to add an extra element to the game, but as of right now the developers are saying "wait and see" to vehicles. As of right now rumors are flying around about ! vehicles and the most popular rumor is that they will be able to download them off Live, but nothing is confirmed.
So if your looking for a game that may take the place of the beloved Halo, or just want revenge on the old man down the street, Unreal Championship is a must buy for any XBOXer that is looking forward to Live this November
--- Hector Cortez
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