It was with much reluctance that I downloaded the Unreal Tournament 3 demo after being urged by a friend. I have played UT in the past and own 2004. It was fun but just a little too knock-off-y of the Quake franchise, nothing special, yet another first person shooter. Although I have to give UT credit for being there to compete with it from the start.

So it downloads and I install it, which takes freak'n forever, and then it starts up. I won't speak to the graphics, suffice it to say it's a modern game and looks good.

Let me begin with the one unpleasant item in the game. Like a lot of new online multi-player games, you log in to an account to play which allows the game manufacturer to track you playing for the online stats. I'll leave the debate about privacy out of the picture, but what can ya do… My issue with the account concept is, apparently, UT3 uses your gamespy account which is fine, until you realize you made a gamespy account years ago and never use it anyway. So you must EXIT the game to fill out a form on gamespy web-site so it will email you your account information so you can start the game again and use it. I realize this is a (hopefully) 1 time thing but, if you're going to go the distance and allow account creation from the game, DON'T MAKE ME LEAVE THE GAME TO GET MY ACCOUNT STARTED. That's just lame, and as a matter of fact caused me to not even bother for about a week and a half…

If I had any kind of integrity I'd have left it at that, but my boredom brought me back. I have not played the multi-player, just the single player with bots. Why? Well I forgot I had to look my gamespy account information up and I realized I could start a single player game with out it. What can I say, a bad idea once, is a bad idea the second go round. Having said that, I will try the multiplayer and look-up my account info due to my enjoyment of the single player game. I wonder how many customers this will lose.

Single Player give you 4 game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Dual, and Vehicle CTF. It additionally has Campaign style paly, but that is not available in the demo. I immediately went to Vechicle CTF being a HUGE Capture The Flag fan!

So, its exactly what the name says, CTF with vehicles. Riding a vehicle is not mandatory, the periodically spawn in your territory and you can hop in and drive or hop on and use the turrets for multiple players. The maps are pretty large so the vechicles come in handy or you're walking for a while to get to the action. The maps could easily handle 32 v. 32 players maybe more. Giving it a sort of Battlefield 1942 feel. BUT it's CTF .

The Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Dual are what you would expect: A free for all most kills wins, Red Vs. Blue most kills wins, and of course the boring 1-on-1 dual.

I'm not going to talk about the weapons, they seem to have kept it in the UT franchise, I assume they are updated looks and graphics, etc. Suffice it to say, they have cool guns to kill people with. What I can say is, it's a TON OF FUN to play! Feels like a game in all aspects (if you've read some of my other gaming rants, you know what I mean.)

In my eyes, Unreal Tournament 3 picks up the legacy of fun competitive gaming where Id dropped it 8 years ago after Quake3. My only real gripe is that I will have to learn a new set of console commands. I suppose there are worse problems to be had

Regards!