Now, why is that? Of course, it has everything to do with the recently released patch 2.0, and the Titan Pack expansion, and that aforementioned free weekend, and the fact that the game is 40% off until the 15th still; there’s hope the game sales rise to Steam #1 for some time at least and show yet another time how important game updates are, particularly when they’re free.

While we’re on the subject of Steam, my own copy was bought back before UT3 even was on Steam, but there is a way of adding it to Steam meanwhile: This tutorial is really nice and explains how to activate your retail copy on Steam. I’m not sure why I did this, considering the game worked a treat without Steam, but I did it anyway, and it worked.

Anyway, what is in that patch, actually? Have a look here, trailer and screenies! There’s a full Titan Pack preview on BeyondUnreal. Or directly watch the trailer below:

When I first heard about the expansion, my reaction was “gee, I hope they do something against the Biohazard/Deck/Suspense spam”. Well, they did! The new maps are really nice, at least the half-dozen that I already played. There’s new game modes -- Greed is great and works particularly well with titans, Betrayal is fun and spices up instagib enough for me to like it. The titans are awesome, both when being one and when fighting one. And there’s a new voting system in place.

Plus the server browser is way better than before (some say, it now has basic functionality, but that’s what we wanted), with pasting IPs and adding IPs to favourites and better filtering and displaying players (and bots!) on a server.

Really, if you tried UT3 before but decided you just couldn’t overcome some of those shortcomings that stood in the way of great fun, there’s way less between you and the fun now. Epic did fix the game. Now go buy it, and add “haslo” to your ingame friends list

Get the patch through one of these mirrors, or download it via Steam.

In other news, I’ll post another shooter news thingy, probably in a mere few hours.

Update 2009-03-11 12:28: That free Steam weekend that left many players unable to play? Gee, there’s another one, starting this Friday! If you feel like participating, better start preloading now, so you have the game when it’s free Via BeyondUnreal, and visible on the game’s Steam page.

Update 2009-03-19 11:09: Rock Paper Shotgun just ran an article about the amazing turn UT3′s sales took with those free weekends and the discounted price and the big free update. Gulag’s comment sums it up nicely:

RARRGH! Internet Game Gods From The Future Ate My Pre-Historic Business Model!!!

Stomp stomp stomp.

So much for “PC gaming is dead”.

Our arrangement with Midway isn’t a license but rather a straight publishing agreement and Midway is still very much the publisher of Unreal Tournament 3. In fact, we’re working together on a major expansion to Unreal Tournament 3, that we expect will excite and grow our UT3 customer base which incidentally, now numbers over a million units sold-through world-wide.

The fun thing about this is that all of BeyondUnreal, Joystiq and Eurogamer claim that it was them who asked Mark Rein, and them who got this answer. Now either they all got exactly the same answer at the same time, or two of the three are full of bull. Certainly wouldn’t surprise me with Joystiq, and not all too much with Eurogamer either. Anyway.

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to the expansion. If it does anything (new voting systems, forced rotations, whatever) to remedy the problem that the sole played VCTF map is Suspense, and the only oft-played DM maps are Deck and Biohazard, I’m a happy fragger. As unlike so many others, I actually liked the gameplay, and got used to the UI…

The WordPress plugins collection is extensive and had tons of things I like – starting with the Widgets you see to the right, showing my latest stuff from del.icio.us and Twitter, continuing with changes under the hood like a better search engine and a spam filter, and not stopping with AJAX image popups and automatic code highlighting for future programming posts (or even your comments). Gee was I silly coding my last blog myself.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with these narcistic ramblings anymore – at least until I change something really big