More UT Rocket Arena

OT:

Where's FreshView? Boogieman and I are in the two lead posting spots in today's shack stats. What's up with that?

Well since you need the patch to run RAUT I'm guessing all the warez monkeys have to go out and buy the game now. Sucks for them!

this mod has taken everything i hate about q3 and dm in general and put it all into ut. deathmatch has lost it's appeal for me. i like ut for the team based games like domination, assault, and ctf. i must admit the maps and the presentation in utra are cool, but they're wasted on dm. i just wish epic would sink their dough into some additional team based mods, or at least put out a few more assault maps. but hey, to each his own. i may give it another chance at my next lan party, but i sure hope they work out some of the bugs/tweaks/irritations before then.

I've actually only played UTRA offline (my connection is really cranky), but I like what I see. There are some important enhancements to the experience that weren't there before (like constantly updated health stats for your team), as well as just a general amount of polish that wasn't really there before either. Plus, it's really satisfying to win a round with "Double Kill!" announced to everyone in the arena. :)

The maps are good, of course. While I haven't played much, my favourite arena set so far is RA-Warren. It helps that this guy built maps for Wheel of Time (which has some beautiful level design); he's used to putting in unique architectural touches. The temple and castle arenas in his UTRA design are probably some of the most visually-appealing maps I've seen, and they play well to boot.

I only have two gripes with UTRA right now: first is that there's no way to set up bot play in the initial GUI preparation (although it's nice that they have a console command which fills the ranks automatically). The other beef is more serious; namely that the bots' behaviour in UTRA is, well, cowardly! I'm certain that half the challenge for me was just trying to track down the enemy AI, not actually fighting it. Thankfully, the combat is pretty decent once the bots turn to face you.

All in all... pretty enjoyable. It's not really just a deathmatch mod; after all, in RA it's more important to save your hide than anything - which rarely happens in deathmatches. :)

I'm still not sure I understand what's so special about one-on-one matches. I'm not trying to flame here, I'm curious.

Having played UTRA for a couple of hours now I might as well tell you what I think about it. The feeling doesn't come close to what it was like when I played the RA2 beta for the first time - but that is hard to top by anything.

The maps I have played so far seem pretty nice and play good. Iron Bunker in RA-Ebolt is my favourite at the moment (but just because I won a couple of matches on it which is something special). Having the status of the current match at the center of the screen at 640x480 is a bit annoying and ping times are not displayed at this resolution. I don't know if they are displayed at higher resolutions.

The voicework sounds professional allright but the comments lack a certain fiercness to them. RA2 sounds were better.

All in all UTRA is good clean family fun and I can see me playing this a lot but this release shouldn't have been marketed as v1.0/v1.1 - still a distinct beta feeling to it.

After playng it for a few hours, I've detarmine that I have no interest in playing Rocket Arena anything. Its just deathmatch with a que.

I love RA, but I dunno about playing it on UT... I guess maybe this will be the 1st valid reason I've had on months to actually play UT.

-Quag

...3rd post.

first post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!