What A Novel Concept

It's been a quite while since I mentioned a UT2004 mod on the site. Hell, it's been quite a while since I've even played a UT2004 mod. Tactical Operations: Crossfire was the only interesting looking thing on the Happypenguin front page this morning, so the choice of topic was fairly obvious.

TO: Crossfire is another mod in the "extremely influenced by Counter Strike" vein, what with the buying weapons and what not, but it's far more of a straight up action game. One stray bullet is not going to kill you, unless it's a headshot or a grenade, and this alone makes it a bit more interesting than the countless Counter Strike ripoffs out there (not that they can't be entertaining).

Weapons sound convincing, voice work is well done, and the music is more than serviceable. The highlight of TO: Crossfire, however, is the map design, at least for me. Each map has certainly had a lot of time and effort put in, not to mention that by this point in UT2004's lifespan, mappers have gotten to know the limitations of the engine very well.

I hopped on a few public servers and had a good enough time. Nearly everybody I played with was far better than me, but what the hell, I've only been playing since this morning. It's good to see that there is a community built around the game, as playing with bots is certainly not as fun as it could be. To be fair, the bots are lackluster in pretty much every UT2004 mod out there.

Next week is the 3rd anniversary of Avert Your Eyes, so a year's recap is in order although, with as many posts as I've missed this year, I could probably just cut and paste every post from this year and it wouldn't be too long of a read. See you next week folks.