this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Which is saying something.
Unreal 1 games are consistently fugly in ways that are difficult to place. Their design can be great - but the rendering, bluh. There's just enough specularity and fake reflections to remind you most textures are chalk-flat. Detail noise improves big blurry texels, but your brain feels that band-gap between high and low frequency. Character animation, especially faces, feel very... Hanna-Barbara. There's just enough physics for you to understand why Half-Life 2 blew people's dicks off.
Basically, the engine has all the idiosyncrasies of a 1990s console. You know at a glance. And this PS2-ass parody of a mid-2000s HD remaster manages to feel more dated.
For the record I always thought the 3dfx glide render looked the best, d3d and open gl were kinda a bit blurry. I think these days it shows it up even more as not being a d3d first engine. I think Deus ex probably suffered from the same fortune.