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Epic's hotly anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 was up and running at MWSF as promised, much to the delight of attending gamers. Running on several dual processor G4s, the current build looks quite promising, with amazing graphics, killer sounds, and the same basic gameplay that made its predecessor so popular.

IMG managed to tag about 10 minutes of gameplay with UT2003 on a LAN with two other players. The fragging action is definitely furious, with the dominant player mutating into some form that doubled the health as well as movement speed, making for some incredibly fast play.

We also managed to log some time with Ryan Gordon, the individual responsible for porting UT2003 to the Mac, who was kind enough to divluge some more information on the title. The build showing at MWSF features not only the single-player mode, but full LAN and network compatibilty with Windows and Linux. They've also had it up and running on the Xserve and plan on hosting LAN parties during the show.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to get a solid release date as of yet, but Ryan assures us that it's "really close." He also notes that it will only run under Jaguar, and that successive iterations of the OS will actually improve performance, citing the recently released 10.2.3 as an example.

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