Unreal Tournament

*****

PC

GT Interactive

$99.95 US rating: Mature (17+)

Review: Peter Eley

The original Unreal was like the stereotype blond - beautiful to look at but without any real substance.

It left arch-rival Quake for dead visually but wasn't as satisfying to play, especially in multiplayer mode.

Enter Unreal Tournament, an out-and-out online fray fest that fully deserves its over-17 rating by United States censors.

It's one of the new generation of games designed specifically to be played against real people rather than a computer's artificial intelligence. There's something darkly thrilling about stepping into a virtual world and trying to fray characters you will only ever know as cyber-identities.

Online gaming still has a way to go as a mainstream source of entertainment and Unreal Tournament's box has "does not require Internet access" printed in big type.

But it does really, or at least a local-area network. You can play against the computer's AI, but there's no real plot or mission structure and it soon becomes boring.

Setting up multiplay is a breeze. The "find Internet game" option brings up a list of host servers.

A search at 9.50 am on a Wednesday pinged 560 servers worldwide of which 324 were active with 1800 players. We joined one in the United States and happily fragged away without any speed or connection problems.

Oddly, the only problem was when we tried to join a New Zealand-hosted game, which crashed the computer. You need a grunty machine to run Unreal Tournament, preferably with a 3D card - it just isn't the same in software mode.

Required: Pentium 200, 32Mb Ram. Recommended: Pentium 11 233, 64Mb Ram and a 3D card.