Livestream 7/15/2021 – Unreal II

There was a lot of talk about XP gaming machines on discord so that made me want to stream something for that OS. That fell on Unreal II which was played on a circa 2006 level machine. Now Unreal II came out in 2003 so that gave us a lot of headroom to crank up our settings without any hiccups. I’ve long been a proponent of playing games on an “overpowered” Windows XP machine.

What I mean with that statement is that it’s fairly easy to get hold of say a Core 2 Duo machine, put a decent PCI-express video card in and presto you have a machine that can rock anything from the early 2000s with ease. The barrier of entry for this sort of retro experience is much lower than say an early 90s or late 80s retro machine. Driver support for XP is very good and it’s generally very stable. There is a reason Microsoft supported XP for as long as they did and many people didn’t want to move on from it because it worked so well.

As for Unreal II itself it sadly doesn’t exactly live up to the high expectations coming off Unreal. The first game was trend setting in many ways and defined a lot of things we expect or take for granted now in first person shooters as far as environment storytelling and atmosphere. Unreal II is a very straight forward sci-fi shooter both good and bad. It’s a fun ride if you don’t think too much but considering it being a supposed sequel to one of the greatest shooters of all time it’s a bit of a let down. The things that tie it to the Unreal world are sadly pretty forgettable. Still it’s not a bad experience by any means just doesn’t stand out in the very crowded FPS field of the early 2000s. Anyway the stream itself was a blast honestly so feel free to check out the replay below.