Unreal Tournament 3 2.0 is here (Also, Titan Pack)

The Unreal Tournament 2.0 update has finally arrived, after having been announced on Steam over a month ago. The update comes with the most amount of fixes/new features I have ever seen in one  single patch. Even entire games have had less bug-fixes than this one patch - it's crazy. I'm not going to post all the new features, but you can read about them here (3fl.net) and here (shacknews.com).

Here are some of the features that I thought were the most significant:

Titan Pack

• Two new game types: Greed, a "tug of war" skull-toting team points battle, and Betrayal, a cutthroat style of play where alliances and teams can shift fluidly through a match.
• The Titan Mutator, where you can become a 30 foot tall behemoth in any game mode.
• Nineteen maps for Deathmatch, CTF, Vehicle CTF and Warfare modes, including 11 new maps plus eight popular maps from the first UT3 bonus pack and Xbox 360 version.
• New vehicles and pickups, including the X-Ray field deployable, the link station deployable for vehicle repair, the slow field powerup, the Stealthbender vehicle, the Eradicator artillery piece, and the Stinger rail turret.
• Client-side demo recording.
• Revamped User Interface, including an improved server browser, improved server filtering options, all new advanced options menu, streamlined and polished the whole system.
• Awards: Fifty-seven different awards mark your progress and mastery of UT3. Progress screen in the UI shows which awards you have earned, and your current progress on awards not yet completed.
• Maplists and voting: New maplist system and mid-game voting support for gametypes and mutators as well as maps.

2.0 Patch

• UI
• Major visual and menu flow overhaul for improved usability.
• Enabled gamepad stick sensitivity setting in UI.
• Improved gamepad support on PC.
• Added support for a whole mess of options on Advanced video settings page.
• Vehicles
• Increased radius/volume of Manta, Raptor, and Viper engines.
• Added sound effect and recharge bar to SPMA to indicate when the weapon is ready to fire
• Increased water damage taken by vehicles.
• Increased Goliath health.


• Weapons
• Added burn trail for link gun beam.
• Weapon pickups now disappear for the player who picked it up, until it can be picked up again (now works like weapon lockers).
• Miscellaneous
• You can activate a non-Steam purchased version with Steam (making it a full Steam version)

This looks set to make UT3 an even better game than what it is at the moment. To make things even sweeter, the games is !!!free!!! for this weekend on Steam. If you want to keep playing, you can purchase the game for $US12. Unfortunately the installation is 8GB, and with the patch on top is more likely to be closer to 10... unless you have a very fast Internet connection and craploads of quota, I suggest you be careful trying to download it. You might be better off buying it - it's at a very good price right now.

Tabula Rasa shuts down

The online Sci-Fi MMORPG Tabula Rasa, developed by NG-Soft, is about to close down. I dowloaded it when it became free back in January and gave it a whirl - I found it to be a pretty darn good game, even though I'm not that much of an MMO person, the Sci-fi elements appealed to me. Interestingly enough though, Apparently at 8:00PM (us time) last night, the Bane (the main enemy force in the game) launched an all out offensive on all the Allied forces, setting up for an epic battle that would presumably climax with some kind of apocalyptic 'splosion (see the source below). All game members were invited to join in the epic battle, but unfortunately, and perhps ironically, I un-installed the client a few days ago, and even if I were to install it again, I'd have to patch it again - and thanks to the wonderful magic of 256k, that wouldn't finish before the game ends...

Source: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/28/0246233