The original Unreal Tournament ran great on my Powerbook Pismo under MacOS. And Unreal Tournament 2004 ran great on my Athlon XP 2800 box with a GeForce 4 card. I liked the game so much that I bought the Mac version of 2004 just out of appreciation for the game and to encourage more Mac ports.

It's been said here before repeatedly, so I'll keep it short... the first versions of 2004 for the Mac were completely unplayable. This is on a PowerMac MDD 1.25GHz w/ 1GB RAM, not the greatest box out there but still pretty respectable and, more to the point, well beyond the advertised system requirements.

I deleted it from the HD, then sadly my Athlon box died, and so I've been without UT for a little over a year now.

So I have to say I'm very pleased with this latest update. Just by chance, I came across the UT2004 DVD when cleaning, and on a lark, I thought I'd try to install it again, hoping against hope that maybe all the problems were fixed.

All the problems haven't been fixed. Sound is much improved, but it's still not quite up to the level of where it is under Windows or Linux. For instance, on x86 you can hear the Leviathan accelerate or groan as it tries to climb up a hill, whereas on Mac it is always the same constant rumble, regardless of what the vehicle is doing. If you haven't played the PC version, I guess you wouldn't notice this, but I have, and I do, even a year later.

Nevertheless, this is a huge improvement, it is finally playable, and I am grateful to get my UT fix once again. Onslaught just totally rocks.. Torlan, Red Planet.... hell I will even run Dria just to listen to the music.

Hopefully now that Apple is moving to Intel these problems will go away? Or is that too simplistic? The Linux version was very close to the Windows version, which made the quality of the Mac version even more baffling to me. Mac uses OpenGL for graphics just like Linux, Mac uses OpenAL for sound just like Linux, so why in the beginning did the Linux version totally rock while the Mac version was so... inadequate?

And, you know, what everybody is saying about how confusing it is to update this thing on the Mac is so right. I can't believe the experience I just had trying to locate the needed updates. The Atari site is worthless, they will actually use JavaScript to put you in this tiny window that can't be resized to navigate their support site. And for what? If you actually managed to find the support page for UT2004 you'll find that the links are all out of date.

Everybody it seems has the 3369-1 update, and everybody talks about how it needs the 3369 update to be applied first, but nobody is linking to the 3369 update. Nobody except icculus.org that is.

For what it's worth:

This is the 3369 patch that has to be applied before...

...you apply this 3369-1 path.

And, oh right, if you find you can't install under Tiger, it's because they even managed to screw that up. Not because Tiger broke the installer, but because you need to spend an hour on the web trying to find out why it is broken and how to fix it.

Here is a link to the fixed installer that can be used instead of the one on the DVD.

It is so obvious that so much love goes into this game by the developers, especially the level designers, which makes it that much more tragic to see this good work ruined by the very miserable support experience Mac users are made to go through.

Speaking for myself only, if they're not going to give us decent Mac versions in the future, I'd rather they not even try.