First post

Ok, here goes

I have decided to start a blog dealing with ut2004 and more specifically, in how to become a better ut2004 player, especially in deathmatch gametypes. I do not claim to be the best ut2004 player out there, but there are lots of things I now know about the game that I would have benefited greatly from being told about previously. First I suppose I should tell you a little about me and ut2004. I first played ut2004 at a lan cafe late 2006. The game began to grow on me as my friends and I began to frequent that lan cafe, and I became more experienced with the game. In mid 2007, after traveling to that lan cafe many times just to play ut2004 I decided it would be more economical to simply buy the game, so I bought the unreal anthology, which for those that don't know, consists of four games, unreal, unreal 2, unreal tournament and unreal tournament 2004, and I recommend it to any others who do not yet have the game and are interested in getting it.

After defeating the single player mode in experienced difficulty at the lan cafe, I was quite disappointed with my first attempts at playing online. Any good player will tell you that people are completly different to bots, and some even go so far to say that playing with bots offline will hurt you more then it will help you. At the moment I could beat a godlike bot 30 to 0, without the bot killing me once in 15 minutes, and most good players could, however there are players better then me online who could do the same to me (if I wasn't trying too hard of course :P)

I often hear people complaining about the difficulty of the bots in ut2004, saying that in the higher difficulty levels, the bots become aimbots and can dodge your fire with ease. Trying to hit a godlike bot with a projectile weapon is the best way to demonstrate this, they will bounce off the walls and the floor in ways that players simply physically cannot. The bots however, are fundementally stupid, compared to players at least, and if something works on them once, it will again, and again, and again, they have no medium or long term stratergy, if they see a player they simply fire at them, they don't try to guess the players next moves, corner them with no weapons, spawn camp, ambush or outsmart them. Also despite their inhuman ability to dodge projectiles, godlike bots do very little to prevent being hit by hitscan weapons. This is the key difference between good players and bots, and with a little bit of practice it becomes easy to kill any bot.

This guide will start with an overview of ut2004 and how it differs from other shooters, for those of you who have played ut2004 little, then it will go into more detail about the game mechanics, skip this section if you want. I will then discuss aiming in detail, with an in depth discussion on the world of computer mice, sensitivity, acceleration and dpi will be discussed. I will try to add as much as possible about game skills such as movement, as well as suggested tweaks to the settings. Then, advanced techniques, including timing, using sounds to pinpoint the position of your enemy, avoiding pickups to fool your enemy.

I will also post links to other references that I have found helpful. I will leave you now with a thought, on first appearances ut2004 seems quite an easy game, the weapons don't suffer from recoil, reloading is unneccesary, hitscan shots do not need to be led ect... This is all true, ut2004 is a simple game to play, but it is a very difficult game to fully master.