Unreal Tournament 3 lives! If you don’t believe it, just look at this week’s Steam charts -- it got to number 3. The recent free UT3 weekend was such a success that for some, it was a failure; the Steam servers were hammered and many didn’t get to finish downloading the game in the first place.

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”.