Weekend Fun Open Arena

The year is 1999. Two shooters are competing for the crown of the ultimate shooter. Their names: Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena. I have to admit that I fell in love with Unreal Tournament and did not play Quake III Arena that much which was still a good game but not that good, hehe.

The game for this weekend is called Open Arena which is a Open Source version of Quake III Arena released just a few weeks ago in a new version. The game does not try to rebuild every inch and corner of Quake III but is still a pretty solid remake of the original game with technical advancements such as higher texture resolution and polygons in the character models.

You can play single player against bots or multiplayer against human opponents. Various game modes such as Capture The Flag or Death Match can be selected, and there are even a couple of modes that I think were not in the original game like Harvester or Overload.

The game is fast, has some servers with good pings available and is in my opinion one of the better games that are available freely on the web.

The size is reasonable with about 160 Megabytes. There is no installation involved, just unpack and run it. Try it out, it is really a great game.

Update: The game is still under active development and size has grown since our initial review to more than 460 Megabyte. You get more player skins, models, maps and features though which is a good thing of course as it adds versatility to the game.

There are still more than 100 servers available to play the game on and it seems that all game modes are covered here, from team death match to CTF and modes that I never heard of before.

If you are new to the game I suggest you start a couple of matches against bots to get a feel for the fast paced action, weapons and maps before you play against human opponents as it can be extremely frustrating to play against a veteran player in your first match.

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