

The Skaarj are really just another obstacle in the way of your escape. The Nali diaries you find often mention a messiah coming down from the heavens to rescue them, but that's not you. Rather than being a heroic space marine sent to save the Nali, the player is a mere intruder, an interloper. The Skaarj aren't a traditional shooter nemesis in the vein of the Strogg, Combine or Helghast: they're inarguably evil, but you're not actually there to thwart that evil. Na Pali is the home planet of the Nali, a placid and spiritual race of space farmers, who are being subjugated by the brutal Skaarj (it's pronounced 'scar', but the game never actually tells you that), who are basically the Predator's lizard cousins. Unreal's art direction is unusually good for its time. As you explore this strange place - haunted mines, temples, monasteries and increasingly convoluted alien installations - you start to question who the real alien is around here. Your only goal is survival.ġ6 years after Unreal's release, Prisoner 849's exit from the Rikers and into the wilderness of Na Pali is no less impressive: that juxtaposition of the ship's metallic carcass teetering on the edge of a waterfall evokes the feeling of a spoiled paradise, a world corrupted. Your objective isn't to defeat the forces of hell, the Nazis or any other antagonistic bogeymen. You emerge from your cell, the only prisoner left alive in a strange and hostile world. You are Prisoner 849, incarcerated on the space vessel Vortex Rikers when it crash-lands on the planet Na Pali. But before there was the Unreal Engine, there was simply Unreal, a humble first-person shooter released in 1998. You may know of Unreal from the Unreal Engine, which has fuelled a surprisingly diverse set of games over the years. Even today, with a judiciously installed HD texture pack, it's still a sight to behold.

For someone used to the cardboard characters of the Saturn, N64 and Playstation, Unreal wasn't just a graphical upgrade: it was a revelation, a game that looked impossibly beautiful even without a graphics card.

Clutching a game box, and trying not to get carsick as you flicked through the manual on the car ride home.
