Unholy War competition review by Woody

Unholy War: Rincewind’s review, TheMI3’s review, Woody’s review
Glowing Ninja: Rincewind’s review, TheMI3’s review, Woody’s review
Killer Ninja: Rincewind’s review, TheMI3’s review, Woody’s review


Oh my, look at this.

I was pretty skeptical going into DTM’s Unholy War. “A network game? In Fenix?!” I bleated. Judging from forays into other “advanced” techniques adapted to Fenix’s use like 3D graphics and sound, I expected something either totally botched and nonfuctional or a fiddly beast that required a doctorate in computer science and a copy of Mandriva just to get working. But lo and behold, DTM’s game delivers on that old Apple promise: it just works. With absolutely no fucking around, I found myself playing against Rincewind himself using my bizarrely configured and firewalled university network, just by joining The Rage From The Hague’s game. Such generous design philosophy warms my bitter heart, so it does.

As do DTM’s graphics. His style here is minimal (some would say rushed), but still amusing, with some pleasingly distinctive characters. Reverend looks smug, Bubbles the rabbit unhinged, and Wild Snake cool and heartless, while it’s Frog Mozzid that scores most with his subtle mixture of paranoia, dread, and perhaps deep sadness :(. One can’t help but wonder what horror in his past printed that seemingly permanent morbid look on his face.

Anyway the game’s about jumping around on platforms and shooting your enemy before he shoots you, and it’s damn fun, especially against humans. A threesome of techno oggs gets the player pumped for violence, while its collection of homebrewed sound effects gives cheap yet effective feedback from the guns. Two weapons are available, a shotgun and a rocket launcher, both of which are available and loaded with infinite ammunition from the start. The shotgun kind of sucks, so I generally use the wide-radius rocket launcher most. Of the three levels, DTM’s art really shines in the Kitty Suicide level, what with its disembodied archipelago of strange flat creatures serving as platforms.Purple Madness is also a pretty good stage, especially with human players who can come flying out of nowhere.

Unfortunately, much of Unholy War seems very unfinished, and only hints at the greatness that it could have achieved. Outside the spectacularly done network functions, nothing seems fleshed out – the weapons are simplistic, and the levels are few in number and some, especially Simply Green, are just boring. Putting some strategy into the game, such as weapons that must be collected to be used, would have gone a long way toward favoring skill rather than luck. And several facets of the game suffer from underdeveloped programming – guns aimed at the floor shoot through instead of blowing up on impact, moving forward quickly while firing the rocket launcher will blow up the player instead of shooting forward, AI acting like a computer with perfect aim, etc. Rincewind and I also encountered a few bugs, such as jumpers disappearing permanently for one player but not the other. It’s frustrating to think that if an equal effort had been made on polishing the entire game as that made to making the network functionality and the extensive options, DTM could have had a masterpiec e on his hands.

Yet despite these issues, DTM’s eloquent meditation on the nature of conflict in Unholy War gives us new insight into the world and into ourselves. Without war, are we really nothing more than “antic clay,” as McCarthy proposes in his Blood Meridian? DTM poses this question as well, and perhaps there is an answer in Unholy War for each of us.