What is Unreal?

Ported by Westlake Interactive.

Your senses expanded. Your fears unleashed. Your reality altered... forever.

You've been arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment on a penal colony. But the prison ship has crash landed on an unknown planet. Look around: crystal clear water shimmers. Shadows shift. Alien architecture fades into the horizon. Godless temples beckon. Darkness falls. You are an uninvited guest in the fastest, sleekest, most dangerous 3D world ever created.

• The most advanced 3D engine ever created: Spectacular colored lighting and hyper-realistic environmental effects in software and hardware.
• Ruthless artificial intelligence: Unreal enemies are intelligent, cunning masters of their domain. They will track you down anywhere, communicate with each other, call in reinforcements if necessary, and relentlessly pursue you.
• Designed to be the ultimate multiplayer experience.
  • Hotlink between user-created levels (like website links).
  • Portals, destinctive skins, identifiable weapons, and more.
  • Multiplayer levels are included.
• Special features in the Macintosh version:
  • Customize advanced user options easily through familiar Mac dialog boxes.
  • More screen sizes, and more video options for larger screens.
  • Easy LAN game setup through familiar Mac dialog boxes.
  • Built-in speech support reads game and chat messages to you audibly.
  • Play against PCs or Macs over a network.

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Unreal may be the best action game ever to flash across a computer screen. Better than Quake and Quake II? Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Visually, the game is breathtaking. Even without graphics acceleration, Unreal looks awesome on a superfast Mac. It’s like walking through a museum where each room brings some new treasure to dazzle you. But be careful, this is a different kind of museum. It’s late at night, after hours; the doors are locked; and alien museum guards, slobbering attack dogs, and a SWAT team from hell are scouring the corridors looking for you. Tarry to admire a painting, and they’ll swoop down and rip you to shreds.

Spectacular graphics come at a price, however. Unreal has unreal memory requirements. Loading the complex texture maps in high detail requires you to give 80MB of RAM to the application, so get virtual memory revved up or get that extra DIMM or two. And take our recommendation of a G3 with 3D graphics acceleration seriously. To play Unreal on a G3 with 64MB of RAM, we had to use virtual memory, and thank goodness we had a 3Dfx card, which took over polygon processing, alpha blending, and bilinear filtering. At 640 by 480, frame rates went as high as 50 fps, but 20 to 40 fps was average — accelerated Unreal is sublime.

Although Unreal pushes the limits of hardware, it’s ready for tomorrow’s technology. For the ultimate in visuals, the power of a Voodoo2 card almost doubles frame rates. Also, with Voodoo2 you can run the game smoothly at 800 by 600 for added detail — all without patching the original application. In fact. Unreal supports three different types of acceleration: software only, RAVE, and 3Dfx Glide. Unreal on a Voodoo2 card has no equal.

Enough about the awesome graphics. The game is filled with audio subtleties, too. Footsteps pad. Tortured humans cry out in the distance. Overhead fluorescent lights spit and hum. Exhaust fans whir. Electronic panels buzz. Monsters grunt and snuffle a warning if you’re near. And when you fire a burst from your MiniGun, you’ll hear the tinkle of spent cartridges hitting the ground.

The story begins when you wake up in a cell on the Vortex Rikers, a prison spaceship bound for some distant penal colony. But the Vortex Rikers has crashed. Not only is your cell door open, but everyone seems to be dead or dying — prisoners, guards, crew. Bloody bodies litter the decks. You begin to explore, looking for a way out, A drone PA system sputters to life, announcing that a prisoner is escaping, but no one responds.

Play is gentle enough at first. You have no weapons to defend yourself, but no one comes after you. As you make your way through the early levels, you find health units, weapons, and ammunition. Grab them all! You’ll also find a translator device that helps you understand messages, flares and flashlights for seeing in the dark, various suits of body armor, and a few special items for combat. None of these last forever, so use them wisely.

Once you leave the wreckage of the penal ship, you walk into a dangerous alien world of towering mountains, underground Tarydium mines, waterfalls, ceremonial ruins, abandoned villages, glowing crystals, lava flows, bluffs and canyons, a medieval Nali castle, and even another spaceship. Each new level is as impressive as the last, gorgeous to look at but extremely hazardous. Unreal contains 40 intricately designed locations to keep you on your toes, plus an array of flora and fauna unlike any you’ve ever seen. Most of the fauna is eager to rip you apart or blow you into tiny pieces.

As beautiful as the world of Unreal may be, you’re looking for a way to escape it. You meet the cunning Skaarj, conquerors of this wayward planet. You battle the slow but aggressive Brutes, Skaarj-engineered killer grunts. You encounter the acid-spitting Slith and dangling Tentacles, dangerous on both land and water. Mercenaries and Kralls, whom the Skaajq use as hunters, pummel you. And if you hve long enough, you’ll eventually come up against the Titans, huge boulder-tossing creatures that tower 30 feet above you and weigh as much as 15 tons.

You can play the game as a male or female prisoner. You also have a choice of four skill levels, ranging from Tourist to Death Wish. Don’t be embarrassed if you try the easiest to start. This game is tough, and the artificial inteligence is keen — all the creatures dodge, hide, and sidestep, making it difficult to draw their blood. If you need practice, try the death matches. In addition to the 40 game levels, 11 death match maps throw you up against a frenzy of killer hots. The death matches, reminiscent of Marathon, are exceedingly difficult but pure fun. Just don’t spend too much time admiring the scenery.

Lee, John, Ho, Jennifer. (October 1998). Unreal. MacAddict. (pgs. 44-45).

Download Unreal for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.6 up to Mac OS 10.5

Compatibility notes

Minimum requirements

OS: 7.6
CPU: 603e 180 MHz or 604e 132 MHz
RAM: 32 MB
HDD: 120 MB

Recommended requirements

OS: 8.0
RAM: 64 MB