You know, that was my thought exactly before I bought it. I was introduced to the series by UT2004 and played Unreal 2 afterwards, so I wasn't sure if I would adjust to the dated graphics of Unreal. I ended up buying it for nostalgia sake, but when I started playing it I found that the gameplay was incredibly satisfying and quickly forgot about the graphics. The weapons are great, the levels are great, and the AI is very good, making it a very challenging and satisfying game.

UT2004 is still my favorite of the series, but Unreal is one of the best FPS I’ve ever played.
Unreal is single-player by design, but also has multi-player and co-op. Unreal 2 is single-player, but there's a free add-on pack (eXtended MultiPlayer, or XMP) that adds a multi-player mode. Unreal Tournament titles are clearly geared up towards multiplayer, despite having single-player campaings.

So...

Unreal & Unreal 2 = Single Player
Unreal Tournament & Unreal Tournament 2004 = Some Single Player but intended for Multi-Player

Since the chances of my doing multi-player are next to nil, are the Tournament ones worth picking up for the Single Player aspects? Would I be missing out on any story elements if they are not?

What about Unreal & Unreal 2? Do they have stories or are they just mindless FPS's?

The story of Unreal and Unreal 2 are completely independent, and independent from the UT's. It's the same universe, but that's all.

Are the UT titles worth getting for single-player? Well, the single-player on both basically revolves around arena-type matches of different modes, like capture the flag or deathmatch. You hire and lead a team of bots against another team of bots. If you win you get funds to hire better team mates and climb an achievement ladder until you win the whole thing (AKA, the Tournament). The bots are actually pretty good and put up quite a fight, but I think most people (if anything) just use it for training for multi-player.

Unreal 1 and UT 2004 are great for single-player . The latter has a tournament/ladder style play, not exactly a campaign, but very fun .

Thanks guys! You have given me a few things to mull over. I may just give UT a whirl anyway - seems like a good game for just mindless shoot-em-up fun.

All owned... I should really go play some of them now... :P

I quite enjoyed Unreal 2. I guess it depends on how jaded you are on the FPS genre, for a casual player it seemed pretty fun to me, for a hardcore player maybe not. Certainly worth $3.

Depends on your particular demands to shooters. It's a decent and solid shooter but insanely generic, it feels more like a low budget Halo clone than an Unreal game, and has none of the original game's unique and mysterious atmosphere or setting.

If you're comparably easily entertained by shooters in general you will probably enjoy it, though. It's not a bad game, it's just not worthy of the Unreal name.

On a different note: "complete Unreal experience" in the announcement is kinda misleading since Unreal Tournament 3 isn't available here.

My thoughts exactly. If you replaced the few skarrj that appeared with different monsters and never mentioned the corporation names, you could have called this game anything you wanted as the above were the only references to Unreal canon.

Unreal 2 is still la fun game and it's fairly short which in this case I think is a good thing, no point in letting the game drag on.

Unreal is a great game to this day. The graphics have aged very well: they're clearly outdated, but don't actually look bad. But most of all, it's a great adventure as you make your lonely way across an alien world, trying to survive and escape. It's reminiscent of Half-Life in some ways, so if you liked that game, you should get this.

Unreal Tournament: GOTYE is also great, but is probably only worthwhile if you have a few buddies to play it with over LAN. I enjoy playing it from time to time, but I'm sure that's partially nostalgia, since it was the first proper game I ever had.

Unreal Tournament 2004, on the other hand, is great even in single-player, and is a master-piece of the FPS genre on PC. Totally worth it.

Unreal 2? Meh. I have it, but I only played a little bit and it hasn't drawn me in.

Will we ever see UT3 on here? That would have been such a good game to launch Galaxy with...