Remember how at the beginning of this latest season of South Park, Kenny returns with no explanation?

Here’s something I see a lot of people getting screwed up and/or confused on, so I’ll shed some attentive light on the subject.

id Software’s 1992 shareware smash Wolfenstein 3-D spawned a lot of sales, and a lot of imitation. Suddenly everyone wanted to clone the first person shooter. Some created their own engines and others licensed the Wolfenstein Engine for the tune of $50K. Most of the games were bad, and the ones that did come out based off of the Wolfenstein Engine (like Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold) took on the order of two years or more to make, whereas Wolfenstein 3-D took between six and eight months to write, including engine coding. By the time Blake Stone came out, DOOM had been released.

And the process more or less repeated itself with a vengance, even giving rise to the term “DOOM Clone”. And again, none of them came close, even the ones that had licensed the DOOM Engine. Pretty much the coda to this period is the title Duke Nukem 3D, which pretty much bested DOOM, but Quake was right around the corner.

About this same time game developers/publishers realized that their games would not have to best the current game on the market, but rather be competitive with the next game on the market, since that was the timeframe most were thinking of. Also they realized the potential was with the “game with single word name and groundbreaking graphics”. To this end many started work on their next game with their sights set on id. The two big ones were 3D Realms’ Prey and Epic’s Unreal.

Unreal‘s big claim to fame was to be its use of MMX, a set of added instructions Intel had added to the Pentium chip, but this idea was ditched in favor of the rapidly-progressing 3D graphics card market. Unreal came out some time after Quake II and blew everyone away with its 3D accelerated graphics and visual style. Despite the fact that it had been delayed numerous times, it delivered when it finally was released. So impressive was it that 3D Realms, who had since killed off their Prey switched their Duke Nukem Forever project from the Quake Engine to the Unreal Engine.

Which is another lucrative practice id Sofware begat. They licensed out their engines to those who were adept and could afford it. id Software has always re-written their engines more or less from scratch for each game. Wolfenstein 3-D and Wolfenstein: Spear of Destiny shared the same engine, as did DOOM and DOOM II (both of these were shareware games with retail sequels). Quake was a new engine, and Quake II was a revamped Quake Engine game. Quake III was a new engine, and DOOM III will be a new engine as well. Ergo, when you license an engine from id Software, you license “the Quake Engine” or “the Quake III Engine” – a particular version of a particular engine named after a particular game.

Epic, however, went a different route with the Unreal technology. Instead of starting over, they added to it and expanded it. However, since id Software set the trend of the engine being different with each game, people figured that the same thing happned with Unreal, i.e. – Unreal Tournament uses the “Unreal Tournament Engine” and while this was harmless enough for a while, it’s not true. It’s all the Unreal Engine. Whatever game comes out with it doesn’t use the “Unreal ____” engine, they just use the latest code drop of the Unreal Engine. Tim Sweeney admitted in an interview that it might have been a mistake to call the first game simply Unreal.

So here’s a recap:

Unreal (1998) – The first Unreal Engine game, it had single and multiplayer components.

Unreal: Return to Na Pali (1999) – single player expansion to Unreal, developed by Legend.

Unreal Tournament (1999) – The follow-up to Unreal, it was a multiplayer-only affair. Coincidentally it came out around the same time as the also-multiplayer-only Quake III Arena. Also on the Sega Dreamcast and the Sony PlayStation 2.

Unreal Tournament 2003 (2002) – Sequel to Unreal Tournament, stirred controversy due to its faster pace and naming scheme implying a yearly series. Also available on the Macintosh.

Unreal Championship (2002) – Xbox-only Unreal Engine game, multiplayer-only and capabale of playing over Xbox Live.

Unreal II: The Awakening (2003) – Single player only sequel to Unreal developed by Legend, regarded as marriage of specacular graphics and unremarkable gameplay.

Each one of the above games used a more advanced version of the Unreal Engine (except for the expansion pack and to some degree the console versions). A version of the original Unreal was planned for the PlayStation but never completed (it likely would have been horrible had it been completed), and early in the pre-life of the Dreamcast, Sega boasted how Unreal compiled and ran with no difficulty on their console, but never released.

The Unreal Engine has powered too many games to fully list here, but amongst them are Splinter Cell, The Wheel of Time, the free America’s Armygame, the two PC Harry Potter games, a TNN deer hunting game, a Nerf game, and a horrible Klingon game. To say nothing of games like Duke Nukem Forever which have yet to be released. Ironically Epic’s eagerness to license the engine has resulted in a larger number of bad games using it as opposed to the Quake Engine.

Up next is Unreal Tournament 2004, the realization of the fear of gamers once Unreal Tournament 2003 was named. It is known that it will incorporate everything from Unreal Tournament 2003 and at least 100% more content and reverse compatibility, but whether gamers will have an “upgrade path” or have to fork over from scratch remains to be seen.

Also known is the title Unreal Warfare, but it remains to be seen what this title means – it may be another Unreal game, it may be the abandoned name of Unreal Tournament, it may be some new concept (like a PlanetSide-esque MMORPG).

So that’s the Unreal Engine in a nutshell.

Our good friends Metallica are releasing their new album, St. Anger, on Thursday. St. Anger will be the band’s first all-new studio album since 1996’s Load.

The Metallica releases since 1996 have been mostly of the “right before Christmas” variety, annoying otherwise dedicated fans who really wanted new studio material. 1997’s Reload was really the leftovers from the Load sessions, a distinction muddied by the fact that the CD had videos and a tour supporting it. 1998 saw the release of a 2-CD set, Garage, Inc.. The first disc was a series of cover songs recorded over the previous year. The second disc contained the limited edtion and widely bootlegged The $5.98 E.P.: Garage days re-revisited from 1987, as well as cover songs recorded in the 1980’s which never saw the light of day. In my opinion this is an underrated release. Then in 1999 we saw S&M (Symphony & Metallica) which was Metallica performing live with Michael Kamen’s orchestra. In my opinion this is a terrible album and concept. They contributed a new song, “I Disappear”, to the 2001 Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack, but that’s the last we’ve seen of Metallica material until now.

“I Disappear” was also the first Metallica material to be released after the departure of Jason Newsted, their bassist of fourteen years. Newsted left for “personal and physical reasons”, but shortly after formed a new band. Newsted himself had replaced original bassist Cliff Burton who was killed in a tour bus accident. In light of recent revelations (see below) it’s likely that Newsted left due to differences with the band.

Also in the years since a new studio release Metallica became caught in the MP3 crossfire. They were one of the few artists to speak up against MP3 piracy and the rise of P2P networks, most notably Napster. With drummer Lars Ulrich as their moutpiece, they obtained a court order ousting some 30,000 Napster users with Metallica songs for download. While other artists were silent, indifferent or even supportive of MP3 downloads (viewing them as publicity), Metallica was adamantly against them – many believe it was due to their better-than-average record contract, meaning that lost sales affected them more. In many ways the move backfired, since it led to the viewpoint that Metallica was “suing their fans” and “greedy”.

Which leads into the other thing angering Metallica fans. Metallica’s sound has changed and evolved over the years as most groups’ will. However, many view Metallica’s earlier material as their best, labelling anything after 1991 as substandard. Metallica was one of the few artists to be able to thrive in the 1980’s despite not releasing music videos. In 1989 they released their first video for the lengthy song “One” off of their fourth album …And Justice For All. The song was from the viewpoint of a man whose limbs were claimed by a land mine in a war, which also claimed his face. He discovers himself in a hospital unable to do anything. The video laced images of the band performing the song with those of a movie named Johnny Got His Gun whose plot was the same (and likely the source for the song’s inspiration).

Their 1991 album was named simply Metallica and was recorded at a cost of a million dollars (mostly due to the triple-digital recording process). It’s usually referred to as “The Black Album”, due to it’s nearly pitch dark cover and the fact that it was confusing to some newer fans since artists usually self-title their first album, not their fifth (it also tied nicely into a joke in the movie This is Spinal Tap). As part of subsidizing the costs, the group gave up their self-imposed ban on music videos (since videos help sell more copies). It’s the most successful album the band has done yet.

But then 1996’s Load came, weighted down by some ballads and more experimental material. Older fans didn’t go for it, and newer fans didn’t go for in en mass either (especially those who had since discovered their skateboard-fan-era earlier material). Then with 1997’s Reload came the aforementioned confusion that it was a followup album – while the CD had some gold on it, it had more chaff then the typical Metallica release. Couple all of this with the declining place of hard rock and Metallica’s attitude and you get today’s situation – a lot of former Metallica fans who would prefer it if they sounded a lot like their former selves.

And apparently internally Metallica wasn’t faring much better either. James Hetfield went into rehab and Lars let it slip that his problems might spell the end of the group. But in recent weeks it came out that the band actually went to therapy together to try and sort things out. The result was a hug between James and Lars and a resolve to record an album that returned to Metallica’s roots. Early word is that, while it’s not the second coming of …And Justice, St. Anger is easily the hardest album Metallica’s ever attempted and the best since The Black Album.

Its release date was originally June 10th, but it was bumped up to Thursday (the 5th) to “thwart piracy”. I’ve never understood the logic behind this – my best guess is that there’s a subsection of people who would only pirate it if they could do so prior to its release. This is following similar moves by Eminem and Beyonce Knowles. Some analysts say it’s really to make first week numbers look better.

The CD will come with a DVD with the band performing the entire album in the studio. This, too, is a recent trend. It gives the consumer “value added content” and extra incentive to purchase what you could otherwise download. While there’s nothing stopping anyone from ripping the contents of the DVD into a DivX file, most people don’t have the ability to burn this onto a DVD and recreate the experience, so it makes sense to incluide it.

Of course I can smell what’s coming. If the album sells less than they anticipate then it will be blamed on piracy (the piracy they think they’re avoiding). If it breaks records it will be “blamed” on the DVD (saying they have to now bribe consumers to buy what they used to buy ordinarily). I can’t help but wonder if it chaps the ass of the recording industry that now they have to include freebies from a (currently) more successful industry to entice people to come back to their product.

So I can’t decide if I want to buy this album or not. On the one hand I want to since I’m not really opposed at all to compensating artists. On the other hand, reinforcement of the physical-product industry is not something I’m sure I want to do. Plus if I do buy it, it means I went for their DVD bait hook line and sinker. However, a vote for Metallica is a vote for hard rock, especially this album.

Couple that with the recent reintroduction of Headbanger’s Ball on MTV2 (which I get now) and things are looking better for hard rock. I’m listening to 97.1 The Eagle in Dallas, which is the station KTSR used to be, and better to boot. Plus apparently there’s a lot of rock acts touring this summer (Ozzfest, Metallica, etc), and of course Dallas is one of the stops on every tour. Perhaps there’s hope for music after all. I guess the ultimate irony would be for music history to repeat itself and this wave of hard rock lead into a new alternative wave of the second coming of Grunge. And that would be just peachy, too.

Now all that needs to happen is for St. Anger not to suck. One way or another I’ll know soon enough.