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Unreal Tournament 3 for the Xbox 360 just recently came out, but Midway wanted to show off a new trailer just for E3. Check it out below.

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User content has been finally released for the Playstation 3 version of Unreal Tournament 3. The first release was a deathmatch map named Spire made by hobbyist designer Thomas "Setheran" Browett. Epic took the map and exported it to the Playstation 3 console. Since the first release, there has been much more user-created content also released by Epic. You can head over to FileShack's directory to download the releases for both the PC and Playstation 3 version of Unreal Tournament 3.

Unfortunately the company has NOT released the tools needed for people to edit content for the game on the Playstation 3. They are still currently working on an editor which they can release to the public. You can still enjoy the previous releases and it is a good sign with a promise for much more content that will be available for download in the future.

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Midway and Epic Games has announced today that Unreal Tournament 3 for the PS3 has shipped to North American retailers. The game is rated Mature and carries an MSRP of $59.95 and is also currently available on the PC with price tag of $49.95.

"We are thrilled to put Unreal Tournament 3 in gamers' hands before the holidays," said Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic Games. "The game plays so amazingly, and I think this is the pick-up-and-play shooter people have been waiting for on Playstation 3."

There is still no word regarding the Xbox 360 version as the release date is unconfirmed.

 

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Every year, I attend one of the largest LAN Parties on the East Coast. Titled, East Coast LAN, will feature games such as Counter-Strike Source, Unreal Tournament 2003, Team Fortress 2, and other hot titles right now on the market. The biggest selling point this year is the money that is on the line for the Counter-Strike tournament--$1000!

Dates:

• December 14
• December 15
• December 16
  

Games to Include:

• CounterStrike Source 5v5
• CounterStrike 1.6 5v5
• Unreal Tournament 3 1v1
• TeamFortress 2
• ETQW
• Company Of Heroes
• 50/50 Nintendo Wii Sports Tournament
• 50/50 HALO 3 1v1
• RED LIGHT SPECIALS!

GameBump will be providing coverage of this years East Coast LAN beginning December 14th till the 16th.

Continue reading...

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Though Midway has recently said that they've totally figured out the PS3 and that they'll stop making poor, late games, Unreal Tournament III has always been a bit of a wildcard.

Initially shown off at E3 2005 to demonstrate how uber-ultra-powerful the PS3's hardware was, UTIII was always supposed to be the system's graphical flag runner. Then it got pushed back, and pushed back. The latest word was that we'd see if in early 2008, but now Midway says that the game will be releasing "in limited quantities" on December 11th in the US.

Limited quantities? What does that mean? If they stamp too many copies of the game will the code lose its fidelity? Or maybe Sony is pressuring them for a Holiday 07 release so they're going to put out a small number of a pre-final version knowing they'll be buggy as hell but fixable with a patch once the game is actually finished in early 2008?

Taking all bets.

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Epic has announced that Unreal Tournament III for the PS3 is golden and will ship to North American retailers sometime this year.

Epic Games Vice President, Mark Rein, has issued a comment on the official forums:

"We got news last night that Unreal Tournament 3 has been approved by SCEA and has been released to North American manufacturing. My guess is that Midway will start shipping the title to North American retailers on Monday December 10th and it could show up in stores as early as December 11th but more likely toward the middle of that week."

Regarding the European release, Mark Rein has stated that his best guess is "early next year (January or February) for the game to ship over there." Those who wish to visit the Epic forums can do so here.

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Midway has announced that Unreal Tournament III for the PC is golden and will ship to retail stores on November 19. The game was originally scheduled for earlier release but was delayed indefinitely before receiving a solid date and change of name. According to Epic, UT3 will be coming to the PS3 shortly afterwards with the Xbox 360 version holding an unconfirmed release date.

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Certain formatting, imaged, and embedded content may have been lost in the transition process.The original author is Evan Lahti.

With Epic Games hard at work cranking out Gears of War for the Xbox 360, many of us have forgotten about the developer's upcoming update to the franchise that made it famous, Unreal Tournament 2007. Set to release early in 2007, below are two brand new images released today from the game, which will feature some unique (and War of the Worlds-inspired, seemingly) vehicles for players to take into battle.

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This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content.

In July of last year, Midway yanked the carpet from under Atari’s feet by striking a publishing deal with Epic Games and taking over the Unreal franchise. Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict is the first product we’re seeing from this changeover, and it’s got a lot to live up to. Unreal Championship was a mild success but beyond that, it’s difficult for an Xbox-only mostly-online shooter to come out the door without being measured against Halo 2. Unreal Championship 2 can be as basic or in-depth as you care to go with it, but the conflict insinuating itself into the game’s title is the beef of the single-player story.



Most people come home with a game like this, throw on their Xbox Live headset and get ready to jump into the seething and untamed sierra of Xbox online multiplayer; not so fast, slick. This game has a system in place that I wish all online-capable games had, in that you need to play through the game a little before you’ll be much good at multiplayer. As you progress through the solo missions, you’re rewarded with unlocked characters, modes, and “mutators” (gameplay modifications) usable in multiplayer that you wouldn’t have right off the bat. This way, people who’ve taken the time to play through the whole game will have access to more powerful characters to use online, and will thereby have a slight advantage over the kid who just couldn’t bother to actually learn how the game works.

The solo mode is actually useful too, as it guides you through the various battle types (deathmatch, capture the flag, and some interesting variations that we’ll get to later), introduces you to many of the arenas, walks you through gameplay elements and maneuvers, and forces you to become better than the bots before you can continue on to the next level.

Probably the biggest addition to gameplay in this sequel is melee combat. While games past throw in a melee attack as a last bastion of defense against attacking hordes (Duke Nukem’s “Mighty Boot” comes to mind), melee attack actually stands on its own as a formidable offensive in this game. Each character has his own special melee weapon, the strength of which is much higher in harder-to-earn characters down the road. Should you choose to pocket your pistols and wield your melee weapon you are newly capable of both deflecting shots and attacks with a little regenerating shield and, more interestingly, bouncing shots back at your attackers with some careful timing. With these self-defense tools, you can parry your way close enough to even the most armed-to-the-teeth foes and issue them some unrelenting lashes of fury.

Another addition to the game that draws from melee combat is finishing moves. If an enemy is sufficiently stunned, you can target onto him and perform a lengthy button combo (it is Midway, after all) to, as they say, “Finish him!”

Like you’re probably used to if you’ve played any of the Unreal games since Unreal Tournament 2003, this game gives you the option of playing in standard first-person perspective or the trendy new third-person perspective while toting guns (gameplay is locked in 3rd person when using melee weapons). Purists may prefer to stay in first person, but if we’ve learned anything from Splinter Cell 2 & 3’s multiplayer modes, first person view sucks when everyone else has third. Not only does third person give you a better sense of your surroundings, it’s much easier to perform tactful wall-jumps and missile-dodges when you can see your legs.

One more improvement to this game over previous Unreal titles is the amped up adrenaline system. In older games, it seemed to take forever to earn enough adrenaline to pull off any special moves, but in UC2 there is a seemingly steady flow of it as you kill opponents, deflect gunshots, and pick up adrenaline modules scattered around the playfield. Stored adrenaline can be used for a number of temporary upgrades like a speed boost and “nimble”, which makes you light as a bird, a significant health boost, or some battle upgrades that are specific to each character. Some character’s battle upgrades are like a quick pulse that harms those around them, and others are ranged attacks like spinning saw blades or automatic turrets that will blast anybody in range until the effect wears off.

Online play is what makes this game so good. By offering up some new play times like “Naili Slaughter”, where the arena is flooded with helpless Naili monks (who can sometimes turn invisible) and you’re supposed to kill more of them (with your melee weapon only) than your opponent, and the “Overdose” mode, where glowing orbs appear at random pedestals and you have to find them and take them back to their corresponding checkpoints; it’s like an Easter egg hunt, but with killing. Xbox Live play is smooth, of course, and gives you all the options you’ve ever seen before, stat tracking, optimatch game finding, custom game hosting, and friend-tracking.

Even if Xbox Live isn’t enough for you, you can also play in split-screen or in system link.

It’s getting to a point now where you don’t even need to mention graphics on a game like this anymore, but here we go regardless. The game itself looks beautiful, plays beautiful, and even sounds beautiful. It’s one of those rare gems that supports HDTV widescreen, and it really shows. Everything has a sort of warm, earthy-metallic feel to it.

Though there’s none yet, in the future there will be downloadable content for this game; perhaps new characters and maps.

Interesting aside: Mortal Kombat’s Rayden appears as an unlockable character, and the game’s announcer voice can be swapped out for the trademark echo-y (“Finish him!”) announcer from the MK series. It is Midway.



Just because a game is meant to be played as a multiplayer game, I can’t let it slide that the solo missions, while entirely useful in their bounty, are pretty bad. After a few too many seconds of loading, you’re basically put into a multiplayer game with bots and a very thinly-constructed plot that tries desperately to hold it all together. Your name is whatever, you’re a guy who used to be in the tournament but dropped out, and the Liandri corporation wants to take over the universe, or whatever. It’s all presented beautifully, with pre-rendered cutscenes in between each level, but it falls flat in its attempt to pretend to be an actual single-player game when it’s really just a fancy set of training wheels.

The game is not without its bugs too. On one occasion, the game stopped responding at a loading screen between levels, and another time I got stuck in a bit of a clipping “black hole” where I couldn’t move for the life of me.

The weapons in the game don’t seem as balanced as they should. There are only around six guns, and most of them seem utterly pointless compared to their alternatives. The sniper rifle seems to be massively unbalanced, as I was able to hit people with it in mid-air while jumping between platforms, without the scope. In that sense, it’s more like a rail-gun than an impossible to aim sniper rifle.

Another mild complaint I had is that when you’re in a game that ends after 5 kills, for example, the game just abruptly ends as soon as that fifth kill occurs. That is, you aim your weapon, you pull the trigger, then the game’s over. You’re never really sure if you landed the shot, if someone else killed someone, or even if you were killed by someone else. If they’d have added a 2 second delay to allow that last body to fall, there’d be a lot fewer scratched heads at the end of the day.

This game is easy to prescribe: if you’re looking for the latest and greatest multiplayer shooter, you’ve found it. However, if you’re looking for the type of game with a satisfying single-player mode that also features a multiplayer mode, keep looking. The multiplayer here is fast, fun, and damn good looking. Come for the slick graphics, stay for the melee combat.

Solid multiplayer game. The aiming is stiff, though, and you’ll fall into random black holes.

I was never really “blown away” by the graphics, but I was sucked into an unbelievable world.

The Dolby Digital sound is great, but the soundtrack all sounded the same after a while.

If destroying eight-year-olds on Xbox Live isn’t fun, you need to find a new hobby.

Multiplayer, unlockable characters, and downloadable content should keep you fixated for weeks.

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This preview was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Aaron Thomas.

For those of you that don’t know, the Unreal franchise was (back in the day) one of the more popular first-person-shooters on the PC, and a favorite at LAN parties. The franchise has been surpassed in popularity by Doom, Half-Life and Halo, but don’t tell anyone at Epic games that, because they’re determined to make Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict your favorite FPS on Xbox Live. Initially scheduled to be published by Microsoft, the game is now being published by Midway, and is set for an April 18th, release. I was recently able to spend some time with the game, both offline and online, and I walked away very impressed. Anyone who thinks Halo 2 is a bit too slow, or a bit too realistic, needs to go pre-order this game now.

UC 2: The Liandri Conflict does feature a story mode, which will flesh out the backgrounds of the game’s 15 characters, but in all honesty this game’s going to be all about the multi-player, where stories and backgrounds take a backseat to rocket launchers and one-hit kills. Many of the characters will be familiar to veterans of the series, and one character, Raiden, will bring a smile to the face of any Mortal Kombat fan playing the game. That’s right; the classic character from the long-running fighting franchise is a playable character in the final game (but not in the demo).

Each character has their own unique abilities and characteristics, from how fast they are, what kind of melee attacks they have, their starting weapons, and of course, their strength. The characters seem to be pretty well balanced, though there are some people online that have already got some cheesy tactics with the available female character. There are also tons of different weapons, including the sniper rifle, shock rifle, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, dual pistols, laser pistols, and several others.

While the game is a FPS at its heart, the developers have added third person melee attacks into the mix this year, and while that may sound like sacrilege to fans of the series, Epic has done a nice job incorporating the feature into the game. Essentially what you have now are three distinct types of styles: long-range shooting, mid-range attacks with heavier weapons, and up-close melee combat; and each one is effective in its own right. There are different weapons that the characters use for their melee attacks, including a sword, a staff, armored fists, and even poisoned blades. Melee moves are performed by hitting the B button, which moves you into a 3rd person perspective, and then attacks. Jumping and hitting B will give you an attack with longer range, but it’s less accurate. Locking on to characters can be done by simply pressing in the right analog stick, and it’s a must when fighting in close quarters.

In the final game, there will be forty levels to choose from, which makes Halo 2’s offering seem pretty pitiful. The levels are multi-tiered, and the themes come from a wide variety of futuristic locales. The levels vary in size, ranging from really small, to “it’s gonna take a while to learn this one,” and they feature plenty of hiding places, transporters, power-ups, and elevators.

There will be tons of different styles of play, but the demo only features deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. Each game will have certain “mutators” that you can activate, which allow you to customize exactly how the game will be played, by adding additional rules, like strapping a bomb to each character that blows up if they camp and don’t kill anyone. For those of you who don’t have online access, you can add bots into the mix, which isn’t as good as playing a real person, but it’s a heck of a lot better than nothing. You can even customize their skill levels, choosing from novice, experienced, adept, masterful, and godlike.

Online, the game will allow eight people to compete at once, and you’ll also be able to play your friends via the Xbox system link. Setting up an online game was easy, and the quick match feature had me in a game in just a matter of seconds. The online experience was quite fun, and the game was steady, with no lag. Whether this is because of the demo only allowing four people at a time, or the result of slick programming remains to be seen. Due to the lack of an “auto-aim” feature, aiming is difficult, so people tended to rush towards each other, firing like crazy, and then switching to melee mode to finish the job. The demo needed some balance as there are just too many ways to “cheese” your opponents, like one-hit kills, or finding the “double damage” power-up and using it over and over. When you’re playing a 4-player death match, and one person wins with 15 kills, and 0 deaths – something’s a bit fishy. Regardless of the balancing issues, the game was a lot of fun, and the prospect of adding four more people into the mix makes it even more promising.

The graphics are very colorful and the levels each have their own unique look and style. None of this seems to slow down the framerate, which is a speedy and pretty consistent 60fps. There are lots of effects for the weapons, and even more still for the melee attacks and adrenaline moves, which makes the framerate even more impressive. The characters come in all shapes and sizes, and their unique design allows you to see who’s coming and what kind of attack to expect before it happens; which adds a little bit more strategy to the proceedings.

The audio is just what you’d expect from a raucous shooter like this. There are lots of explosions, tons of different weapon sounds, trash talk, and of course, an announcer with a deep voice keeping tabs on the action.



Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict isn’t going get people to quit playing Halo 2, but it will be a great alternative for people who want more action and more maps. The game is already quite polished, which is rare for a demo, and all it needs now is a little more balance. The game’s melee attack feels right at home here, and the new dimension it adds to the gameplay will quickly erase any thoughts that it doesn’t belong. This demo can be picked up by pre-ordering the game or by purchasing this month’s “Official Xbox Magazine,” so if you’re curious – go check it out.

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