Apparently the Red Orchestra mod has won the Make Something Unreal Contest. Their prize is $50,000 cash and an Unreal Engine license (worth $350,000) that allows them to sell their mod as a standalone game. To be honest I was hoping that it would go to someone more deserving. Sure, RO has all the hype surrounding it, but it is essentially nothing more than a weapon pack. Aside from movement speeds it doesn’t actually alter the Unreal gameplay at all- you have slow-firing, long-range weapons for sniping, high-power but inaccurate weapons for close combat etc. etc. Why couldn’t this prize have gone to a developer that did something that a 10Mb modpack can’t? The likes of Deathball, FragOps, Alien Swarm or Air Buccaneers. They actually came up with a new way of playing UT2004- turning it into a sports game, RTS, top-down adventure game and flight simulator respectively- which after all is supposed to be what modifications do. Sticking a few new 3d models onto the existing unreal gameplay is nothing special.
Well this is my oldest surviving post. Although there were older posts than this, they were lost in the Wordpress 1.2 –> Drupal –> MT –> Wordpress 1.2 –> MT whirlwind I found myself in when first setting up this blog.