I love Unreal Tournament and every aspect of the game. I’ve played all the different game types and finally settled down with a nice little Assault addiction for a couple months. Most of the time it would be a friend and I, on a LAN with bots. One day a friend passed along the info for an FTP site, which seemed to be hosting every single fan made mod, mutator, skin, and map created for Unreal Tournament. I have about an additional 250 maps alone for UT. The game has so much junk to load when I set a server that I can literally click on the ‘multiplayer’ menu and go grab a cup of coffee before my entire user created add-ons load up. I guess one could say I’m just an Unreal Tournament junkie.

No matter how much you love a game, there is no denying that user-made modifications add a little spice and life to your favorite shooter. Since my favorite shooter at present is Unreal Tournament, I took the time to play all the mods I could get my hands on. With the various mods, mutators and such, I think I’ve probably played around 25 (at least) variations on Unreal Tournament.

When you take a look at how much effort goes in to making something like an extra map, let along the work required to create a full mod, it’s mind-boggling! These mod authors don’t get paid for their work. Unreal Tournament fans freely create and distribute their work. I have wracked up more hours playing a mod called SlaveMaster than I have playing with just what came on the Unreal Tournament CD-ROM.

The Mod authoring community certainly deserves praise and notice, after all they are providing us with hours upon hours of fun gaming, at no cost except your time to download and install. In this series I’m going to provide you with the basic backgrounder and game info on three of my favorite Unreal Tournament mods (Infiltration, Rabbit Hunt, and Slavemaster) plus interviews with the mod authors. Be sure to check back in the next few days to catch the rest of the series….

One of the first Unreal Tournament modifications (mods) I tried was Infiltration. Infiltration is a military modification, which adds a bit more realism to the game. It has nine new and realistic weapons, which cause equally realistic damage. For me it really is the new weapons and the mod authors’ goal to make the game a little more realistic that make this mod stand out. The focus of Infiltration seems to be on ‘team-oriented tactical game play.’ If all goes according to plan, future versions of Infiltration will continuously transform the game away from UT to a more stand-alone game. I recently had the privilege of chatting with Warren who is the Project Coordinator and Lead Artist for Infiltration. We talked about the team behind the mod and what future plans for Infiltration are.