Sound and Interface?

Audio pleasures

The audio cues in Unreal Tournament do a great job of matching the graphics in terms of style. What do we mean? Well as far as the weapons go, their sounds are as "high energy" as the effects are flashy. There's nothing dull or subdued about any of the weapon sounds, particularly the minigun. Sometimes you'll be in a room with a couple of other minigunners and their high speed whine. Another guy will pop in with his plasma gun going full bore while razor blades from the ripper bounce off the walls, floor and ceiling with a metallic crash. The sounds are enough to induce an adrenaline rush in and of themselves.

4 Rockets rain down

She's had it

Also, in an attempt to appeal to the more rowdy players, UT includes a ton of audio taunts that are rude and in your face. The game even includes the option to auto-taunt when you get a kill, so expect a lot of gratuitous and automatic smack talking while you play online. Whether or not you find this to be a good or a bad thing is up to you. It's not all that annoying to us, but some in the industry have felt strongly enough about this issue to express concern about it. Hey at least you can turn it all off so you don't have to hear it.

He's getting away

Got her in my sights!

Give me GUI or give me death

One of Unreal Tournament's main attractions is its GUI interface. Just about all previous shooters have forced players to learn and remember cryptic codes for a command line interface in order to tweak the game. Not so with Unreal Tournament. Entering the game puts you into a menu based system that anyone familiar with windows should be able to navigate. The more obscure commands will still have to be accessed via command line but just about all the common switches and settings can be accessed easily using the in game menus. Having such a finely polished interface makes a lot of sense - we look forward to other developers mimicking Epic's effort.

Better do what he says

This map reminds me of Soldier of Fortune

Who needs Gamespy?

The best part of Unreal Tournament's GUI interface is the integrated server browser. It's by far the best integrated server browser we've seen in a game. What makes it so useful is that it includes tabs for sorting the servers by game type. Highlighting any of the servers reveals pertinent information about the game, including player lists, which map is running, any mutators, and other important info. You can set favorites and save them to a separate tab as well. Overall it's a very well designed interface and should stand as a model for others to emulate, just like the GUI as a whole.

Update 12/11
The Gamespy people were quick to point out that UT's integrated server browser actually uses Gamespy technology. So in a round about way, you DO need Gamespy. You just don't know it!