Urban Terror gameI discovered a new game (at least to me) I've been playing at night recently at home. It's called Urban Terror (which is commonly abbreviated as UrT)  and it is a complete total conversion mod (short for modification) of id Software's popular first person shooter game Quake III Arena. Urt introduces a number of elements in the tactical shooter genre featuring team driven game play with realistic weapons and environments. You play a terrorist or a counter-terrorist SWAT team member. You can only carry so much, you have limited ammo and stamina, you have to reload, you are less accurate when running, if you get hit  and you are not fatally wounded you will slow down and eventually bleed to death if you don't see a medic. You can still do some super human jumps, but if you jump too far you will either cause damage or kill yourself.

Yes, I know violent first person games are usually a guy thing, but I know there are a growing number of female gamers who appreciate a good first person shooter. For those that are squeamish, there are settings to reduce the amount of blood or gore that is displayed.

By computer gaming years, the game is old. A beta version of the game was first introduced in 2000. However the latest release, version 4.0, was published April 2007. I was not aware of the game in the past, because it required that you had Quake III Arena which I did not because the demo was enough for me. The latest version however is completely stand alone, because id open-sourced the Quake III game engine. It is called ioquake3 and there are versions for Macintosh, Linux and Windows.

While the game may not have today's level of graphic realism, it is still a very fun game to play. There are numerous game options to configure. Plus, it is completely free and you do not need the latest hardware to play the game - a five or seven year old computer may work fine. There are a wide variety of extensive maps. You can still find many games online. There are many different game modes:

  • Free for All (FFA, DM)
  • Team Deathmatch (TDM)
  • Team Survivor (TS)
  • Capture the Flag (CTF)
  • Capture and Hold (CAH, C&H)
  • Follow the Leader (FTL)
  • Bomb Mode (BM)

For more details check out the article on the game in Wikipedia.