Epic's unhappy move to seemingly erase its seminal '90s/'00s Unreal games has me reminiscing over Unreal Tournament. UT '99 was a GoAT, and I moderately enjoyed 2004.
A few years ago... ok uh, looks like five years ago... I put together a fresh, tricked-out UT2004 setup. After noticing how many super high-quality character models fans had created for it, many based on other properties, I decided to add as many video game, anime, and tv/movie characters as possible.
The best-made of these have actual voice clips from their original properties, which are often quite funny, or just dead-on fucking perfect in the case of Metroid's cheeps and chitters. I'm not usually one for inserting Mario or whatever into Fallout, but in the context of Unreal Tournament I find the crossover really enjoyable. It's much more fun to form bitter rivalries with Amy Rose and Michelangelo than the edgy tryhards of UT's stock retinue. And some of these cameos are so well done, just delightful.
Above is a stream VOD of me playing bot matches with all these weirdos (I played as Ellen Ripley). Skip to 39:07 if you wanna get an idea of just how many familiar faces I managed to cram in there.
Sadly due to linkrot it's possible some of these characters may be harder or impossible to find now. I know I ran into that five years ago when I'd like, know Waluigi or whomever existed at one point, maybe via YouTube footage, but then could never find a working link.
In any case, Unreal Tournament is great and I hope the community can carry it forward despite this latest abandonment from its rights holder.
