Hi. Back home after 2 weeks vacation without internet.

You're a real Unreal fan! Is there a lot of custom maps for Unreal ? Solo or MP?

And, what about Unreal 2 ?

Check out www.unrealsp.org for Unreal / UT singleplayer maps, reviews etc.

Don't know much about Unreal 2. It offers some fun, but I wasn't very impressed by it. I expected it to be more like the first game.

Yeah, this game kind of suckers you into thinking you get to 'control' gangs and build up your power, when in actual fact it's just a 1st person shooter with some basic interaction with other characters. I don't think you even need to get people on your side most of the time, and in the end you just blast your way to the top anyway. It's got some great fights, some of the scenes remind me of Max Payne 1 in the Steel mill, but it gets pretty samey. If you can get past the blocky level design than it's an okay shoot 'em up.

Thanks for the link. Many nice maps, with creativity and inspiration. Allowing players to make custom maps was really a good idea. And for these old games, it was possible without actual professional skills.

At this time, competition between Id and Epic helped FPS to improve quickly. I would say that Unreal somehow sits between Q2 and Q3...

Maybe Unreal 2 arrived too lately. It has just the name in common with Unreal...

Marketing as usual...For the rest, you've made a quite good description of the game. View from 2012. But, in 1998, when it came out, it was awesome. Graphics, interactions, storyline, original theme...
Did you discover KP recently?

Or Unreal Tournament, perhaps. What really makes up id Software for me personally are the singleplayer campaigns, from Wolfenstein 3D to Quake 4.

Perhaps. I think some of the maps/environments in Unreal 2 are nice. The graphics were OK at the time of release, but it might not compare well with the progress represented by the first Unreal game when it came out in 1998. That was just great. One of my first gaming experiences with a 3D card. A very good start, I must say! :)

The only link I can think of between Unreal and Unreal 2 are the Skaarj.

No, got it a few years after it came out; from what I remember, it had a tough ride getting past the censors because it was so violent. But that was the main focus of the game and even that was a little OTT (and the swearing). Storyline wasn't that great, boiled down to pretty much just a group of gangsters with tommy guns saying "motherfucker" after every other word.

I was very impressed by Quake 3. Then, I could hardly imagine that games can become any better... :)

I agree entirely. It's probably the first game where I used to stop running and take the time for admiring the level design.

For Id Software, from Quake 1 to Quake 3, the evolution has been more constant. The transition between each more natural...
Until the revolution of Doom3

I had the same feeling with Quake 2 and Kingpin.
I would enjoy to know for the kids who begin today in video games, if they can have the same kind of emotion...

And , as an Unreal fan, what about Deux Ex?

It comes to my first question : what makes a FPS interesting? This kind of game has its own limits: linerarity, predominance of action...
For a richer storyline, i.e. branchs or differents approachs for the player, we lean to RPG like Deus Ex or Boiling Point.

For a FPS, I think Kingpin offers more than just shooting. Where many FPS are just "a monster behind the corner" per minute and very approximate level design. Here you have an original atmosphere, inspired by real places, urban, industrial, trains, harbour, art deco skyscrapper...Most of the time, the level design is well inspired despite the limits of the Quake2 engine. Textures, lighting, ambiant sounds create a feeling of reality without equivalent in 1998. Scenarized cutscenes with crunchy dialogs ( not just simple camera travelling ) help to follow the story. By now the big deal for games studios is "convergence of games industry with movies". There was already a little of this in Kingpin. The missions the player get in the bars, the interactions with NPC, the hiring of guys,...It's more than just shooting all the time or finding the red pass card...
Also, when I compare the voices in English and French version, I would say the English one is a lot more repetitive, with an overuse of "motherfucker". The French one is more varied, with many trashy rubbish and swearing, very sex-oriented...I wonder what about other versions, German, Spanish, Italian...

Jumping from Prehistory to History can't happen twice!
By now, game engines are still improving. If you look at UDK ( Unreal, again...) or the CryEngine for example, they clearly focus on photorealism. After it also depends on the level design and the budget ! In the 90's level design and graphics were limited by the engine. And now, it's rather the opposite, engines require a lot of work in modeling, texturing ( multi-), lighting... to reveal their potential.
Maybe, in some few years it won't be possible to see the difference with movies...

Sometimes, I regret the simplicity of old games where a little effort of imagination was necessary from the player to figure out the environment. It was also possible to appreciate when mappers had well manage to render a nice effect with limited means...:)


Deux Ex...All the qualities of the Unreal Engine and a strong story. But it's no longer a FPS...

Off-topic? We were just getting back to Kingpin with theses cultural reflections about languages :)
Is there anybody who's still stuck in the game and desperately looking for the battery to the motorbike? Or the oilcan ? Or the Lenny's watch? The ticket for the skytram?

Meh, I disagree... check out Blade Runner, MDK, Ascendancy, or anything made by Shiny, and you have much more environment. Kingpin has some atmosphere, but with no soundtrack and everything a mixture of grey and brown, it isn't exactly a feast for the eyes. The level design is way too small and cramped to make it much fun but still it's still a roughly decent shooter. What really made it stand out was the violence attitude it had.

What do you disagree with exactly?

Is it really meaningful to compare games so different?
Blade Runner is a sci-fi point'n click game based on a movie from Ridley Scott inspired by a novel from Philip K Dick. It must be nice! It's a suite of 2D still pictures with sprites. The graphic card doesn't have to rebuild a textured geometry 30 times per second.
MDK is an arcade-like sci-fi shoot'm up. It can be shiny and colorful.
Ascendancy is a sci-fi 2D strategy game

Soundtrack...Do you mean "music"? If you play with the CD and you activate "CD music" in the options, you have the songs from Cypress Hill.

It's about the theme of the games. Action takes place mostly in grim places such like slums, squatts, sewers, industrial facilities,...It can't really be shiny and colorful.

If you watch a zombies movie, do you complain it's gore?

It's because of the game engine technology. The computer has to work a lot with a FPS. Old game engine from the 90's had a lot of limitations : the size of the map ( a cube of 682,66 feet for KP ), the number of polygons, the size of the textures, the number of monsters,...

It's true it was one of the first FPS where the player is not shooting at monsters, aliens or robots but human beings

In Kingpin's case, sure. If you want to argue the FPS games that were around at the time, then Kingpin is up against Unreal, AVP, Requiem Avenging Angel, etc. I'm just saying, many more games at the time were more immersive and atmospheric, Kingpin did a decent job though.

Oh right, didn't know that. But it's just a few tracks I read. That's not really much of a game OST, if you're saying it's not important, then I disagree; a soundtrack really carries a game, just the sound of the occasional wind or fire effect isn't really convincing. It's not like developers are in the dark about it, they hauled out Trent Reznor to score Quake FFS. Without a good score, it makes a game more forgettable.

Yeah, but Kingpin doesn't even try. Lighting is flat and boring, characters are dull and textures are grimey and uninspiring. It's a damn ugly game to play. Don't get me wrong, I usually love setups like this, especially stuff like Chasm: the Rift, Tenka life force, etc... I'm forgiving with that. The architecture is well designed, and usually I appreciate games which focus on industry and machinery... but in Kingpin it's just so grainy and two dimensional, and the lighting is so off. And you can't take much seriously because the animation is so sped up. The weapons are very nicely designed though.

Yeah, it tried to squeeze way too much in imo, I felt majorly claustrophobic playing it

Wolfenstein springs to mind straight away, so I disagree... maybe the first to shoot gangsters, but there are a few RPGs out there where you be on the wrong side of the law, like Legends of Valor (although hardly anything like kingpin). As far as originality goes, mmm I don't think there's anything that makes it stand out apart from getting to use a tommygun.

OK, I surrender. All the qualities I've seen in Kingpin do exist only in my imagination. I've been wandering for 13 years in the darkness of ignorance and self-deception. But today, Truth is revealed to me..

No, I'm kidding :)

Honestly, I'm not interested in knowing which game is to be better...Is there an universal reference that defines indisputably what is good and what is bad? Personal feeling of each player is the key point.

Music. For me, it's depends on the game style. On sci-fi or fantasy games, like Gothic, Morrowind...music adds a lot. But on realistic games like KP or warfare, I prefer without, or just a little in special moments.

Discrepancy at 100%. I especially enjoyed the level design, the textures, the lighting, the dynamic lights on the characters, the modeling, the texturing and the animation of the characters.
But, I don't want to convince you. You say : flat, boring, dull, grimey, uninspiring, ugly, grainy, 2 dimensional...OK. For you. Not for me.

At least, on this point, we agree.

Not a problem for me. It's a bit like in theatre. The mappers have to deal with limited space. But I don't like when the camera field of vision is to narrow, like in First to Fight.

Wolfenstein 3D . Ach! Tut mir leid Herr Professor. I didn't say KP was the FIRST one. And I didn't want to play the expert...

Maybe you've missed something in this game... ;)