Alden Bates' Weblog

This is one beautiful map. The author took inspiration from the first Unreal to create a world which reimplements the Nali home world. There's plenty of stunning scenery, showing the level of detail you can get with the engine. Of course, it was designed primarily with scenery first, and game play second, so it's not perfect, but still pretty nice.

The author has modified the health packs and health vials with Nali fruit and bandages. I wasn't that impressed with the look of the bandages, but the wee Nali fruit trees were cool!

There are two paths between the flags. The shorter path is open ground - through a sizable valley with natural rock bridges from one flag to the other. There are plenty of weapons along the way, and some Nali fruit and adrenaline - this is pretty much the preferred route, so most of your team should be hanging around up here.

The lower route has a central lava cavern with metal walkways around it. Down below is a double damage power-up if you're brave enough to try and get it, and there's also a wee shield pack and flak cannon. There are two ways into this area from each base - a natural cave and more technological route.

There are two ways up and down from the lower area on each side of the map: the large tower behind the flag has two lifts, and there's a natural opening nearer the centre, with vines you can climb up. I noticed while playing that some of the bots seemed to get stuck at the bottom of the vines for some reason. Unfortunately it's still pretty difficult to get from the lower levels to the top, especially when the opposing team has your flag!

UT2k4 crashed twice running it - once while trying to record a demo and the second time while trying to play it back. I suspect this is most likely because my computer doesn't have enough memory to run it well! The images are therefore from the match I tried with my test bots (the final score was 8 - 2 to the Alpha team of uberbots.