GT Interactive and Epic Games have announced that their highly anticipated Unreal Tournament has gone gold and been sent to manufacturing. Gamers can expect the title to hit shelves on Monday, November 22, for US$54.95.

　　The game's demo has been out since September 29, and gamers have been enjoying killing numerous AI bots in single-player mode and fragging opponents in the multiplayer modes. Gamers can expect even more fun in the full version of the game, which has new modes of play, including assault and domination, as well as the classic capture-the-flag mode.

　　Assault splits players into two teams - defenders and attackers. The attackers must invade the defenders' base and destroy one or more targets while the defenders try to make sure the attackers never get close to winning. To make matters worse, players have a certain time limit within which to complete their goals - when the time runs out, the teams switch roles, and the game starts over again.

　　Domination divides players into two or more teams, each of which must take control of several strategic locations, called control points. Players take control of points by remaining on the point for four seconds if point hasn't been taken by an opponent and eight seconds for already-occupied control points.

　　For newbies, the full game also includes a complete tutorial to teach new players the finer points of battle in multiplayer modes.

　　"We worked long and hard to make Unreal Tournament a worthy successor to Unreal," said Epic's VP Mark Rein. "By incorporating outlandish weapons, brilliant AI, and spectacular visuals, we feel that we've more than accomplished our goal. We hope that the public has as much fun playing Unreal Tournament as we here at Epic do."

　　Unreal Tournament is also the first game to ship with more than one gigabyte of textures using S3's Texture Compression technology. Currently, users with Savage4-based cards can use the special compression technology, but newer cards, including 3dfx's Voodoo4/Voodoo5 and Nvidia's GeForce 256, will use the special DirectX extension of the technology called DirectX Texture Compression or DXTC.