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A L S O__T O D A Y The 21st Challenge No. 11 By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Devise new high-tech mergers -- win a prize! - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Are you mad for consumer electronics? Discuss your favorite gadgets and brands in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Rags for Net richies By Janelle Brown A passel of new magazines tries to snag the tech-business elite -- but only the fittest will survive (07/09/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg "Groupthink-ware" lets you follow the crowds on the Web -- instead of going your own way (07/08/98) Consciousness dethroned By Matthew DeBord The mind's "I" only thinks it's in charge, argues "The User Illusion" (07/08/98) Hands off that data -- I'm European! By Karlin Lillington A transatlantic trade war brews over data privacy rules (07/07/98) Baring your soul to the Web By Simon Firth Online diarists have invented a new art form and gathered a devoted following. But now some pioneers are questioning what they've created (07/03/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST REVIEWS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

SHOOT TO THRILL | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - With character intelligence like this, I can only guess that somewhere within Unreal is a role-playing game dying to get out. In later levels, you actually meet the peaceful Nali, by which time you've killed so many baddies that they've hailed you as their much-prophesied savior. But interaction with them is minimal, and the plot keeps pushing the barrel of your gun onward. What if Epic had left some of the humans alive so you could plan strategy together on how to defeat the Skaarj? What if you could play the game's single-player levels over the Net, so instead of the usual death-matches, you could work in tandem to blow aliens away? To pitch it Hollywood style, think Quake meets Ultima Online. Epic probably could have done it -- but Unreal had already experienced literally years of delays, and in the end I bet its programmers were just too exhausted to attempt such an ambitious expansion. To be fair to Unreal's creators, this is a great game. But it is not, as the more enthusiastic fans have claimed, revolutionary. Unreal does not rebel against its genre so much as it gives it the raspberry. This may be the pinnacle of the form -- but is the form still worth following? There are already signs of storytelling stress, as if an actual plot were trying to escape. A "universal translator device" makes it possible to read snippets of dead prisoners' diaries, captain's logs and soldiers' journals, each containing little hints of what's happened to your ship's crew. Is this the first step toward Myst with guns? Is this where that game's Catherine ended up? Or would Unreal really rather be the Ultima of shoot 'em-ups? One of the true revolutionary features of the new game, which had some journalists drooling almost a year ago, is its ability to let players move from one Internet-based game to another via linked "teleport squares." You could hop from server to server, game to game, in a never-ending gun battle fought around the world -- if the delays from network latency didn't drive you insane. Networking problems have plagued Unreal since its debut, although a series of patches issued by Epic have allegedly fixed most of the problems we noticed -- such as the server deciding you're supposed to be 20 feet from where you are and forcibly moving you there. (If you think that's confusing, try to shoot at someone in the midst of that process. ) Another series of patches has been issued in response to hardware incompatibilities. Unreal demands all of the graphic acceleration capability you can throw at it -- and then it laughs at you. In our informal testing, we noted that Unreal is not a big fan of Windows NT, although it liked Win 95 and 98 just fine. Unfortunately, the buggiest piece of software that shipped with Unreal promised to be the most interesting -- UnrealEd, a graphical editing tool that lets players build their own levels easily and without having to write code. It ships undocumented and unsupported on the Unreal game CD, and on our machine, it refused to even launch. Epic has posted a patch on its site to fix some problems with UnrealEd, which is also scheduled to ship in a fully supported stand-alone version. A Macintosh version of Unreal has been announced, too, but according to the company there are no plans to make UnrealEd available for that platform. With a powerful graphical building tool like UnrealEd available, and with Epic licensing the Unreal game engine, the game's legacy will most likely model that of Doom and Quake, the dynasty it's replacing at the top of the heap. In other words, the game's future lies among the hordes of amateur designers likely to flourish in its wake. The next hyper-anticipated first-person shooter after Unreal is Daikatana from Ion Storm, the game company founded by one of the key forces behind Doom and Quake, ex-id superstar John Romero. Romero was id's artistic half, the fanatic level-builder who created the moods and gore to match Carmack's engine. To build Daikatana, Romero recruited the best amateur designers of Doom levels and made it their full-time job. The result, based on previews, is a more baroque version of Quake or Unreal, with a rumored 30 types of weapons and even more kinds of monsters. Daikatana isn't necessarily better than Quake, in terms of game play -- it's just an order of magnitude more complex. Still, if this is what's possible when you give users the relatively hard-to-learn do-it-yourself tools Doom and Quake provided, who knows what wonders will flow from the Unreal fan base, using the much easier to use UnrealEd? Epic certainly mustn't mind the ferment; after all, it needs to start amassing ideas for Unreal II. SALON | July 10, 1998 Greg Lindsay is the impassioned summer intern for Salon 21st, and is a contributing editor at Netly News.