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 today’s installment of the series I’m going to provide you with the basic backgrounder and game info plus an interview with the mod author of the first in the series of my three favorite Unreal Tournament mods, SlaveMaster.
SlaveMaster is an alternate game type to the normal DeathMatch Unreal Tournament game. The idea is that when you kill somebody, you own that person and once fragged, they become your slave. The goal of the game is to own a certain number of slaves. Slaves can become free by earning favor from their master. Favor is earned by collecting weapons and other goodies for the master from around the level, or for marking the master’s enemies with ‘soul flares,’ which allow the master to see them through walls. Slaves are also set free if the master is killed, so the master has to be careful with his own life in order to win. One of the reasons I enjoy SlaveMaster so much is because it adds more than just a 'get the most frag objective.' You need to fight to not get fragged yourself to win. Since I first downloaded and tried SlaveMaster, it has become my favorite game choice for those nightly UT gaming sessions.