11. Unreal Tournament 2004
Epic | Atari | 2004
The ultimate online tournament shooter: over thirty maps split between a whopping eleven game modes, and an armament of some of the most enjoyable weapons ever fashioned
What made it so great?
Variety. UT2004 isn't a sport, it's more like the Olympic Games - a wide range of different competitions. Even within those, the weapon selection is far more expansive and exotic than traditional multiplayer shooters like Quake. The Flak Cannon alone is enough to make this the definitive multiplayer shooter: a brutal re-imagining of the shotgun that's so mercilessly potent that it remains the weapon of choice even when a player possesses every other gun.
Even genre mainstays like the rocket launcher have a little extra spice: holding second fire loads up a lateral-spread volley of missiles, combining it with primary fire launches them in a spiraling stream and simply tracking someone accurately with your crosshair initiates a target lock that all but guarantees a hit. Every weapon has this level of strategy to it and every one is useful in its way. And then, of course, there's the famous Redeemer. One of gaming's ultimate doomsday-devices, the biggest rocket-launcher in existence fired a warhead you could guide yourself with a handy missile-cam and which annihilated everything within a hundred meter radius.
Get ready to play
The latest patch is compulsory for online play and also profoundly worth having: it removes the game's CD check and adds the Vehicle Capture-The-Flag mode, which you'd otherwise have to wait for Unreal Tournament 3for.
Been there, done that?
A more streamlined, pared-down - and some say purer - experience can be had from id's first multiplayer-focused game: Quake III: Arena. The narrower weapon selection becomes narrower still when most maps boil down to three weapons: the Railgun, the Rocket Launcher and the Lightning Gun.
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