The third installment of the fantastic UT3 modification, The Ball, has been officially announced! Part 3: Teotl (Terrifying) is packed full of good stuff. I'd post the screenshots, but that part of BeyondUnreal is still offline, so instead I'll point you to the announcement thread where you can take them all in.

New Stuff:

• Two new levels with both indoor and "outdoor" sections. The two levels include two large golden cities, surrounded by huge underground rivers and waterfalls.
• New environment style, gold!
• Mummies wandering around, and more action orientated bits of gameplay.
• A new weapon to replace the last bit of UT3 content we were still using.
• At least 20 new puzzles.

They're also looking to expand the current team a bit and are searching for a programmer and an animator.

The Ball is also in the running for ModDB's Mod of the Year contest, so if you've enjoyed the first two installments, add your vote!

For those of you who've attempted to access BeyondUnreal or any of its hosted sites/services over the last two days, you've surely noticed that it has been offline. Let me jump straight to the bottom line - no crash, no data loss, and things should be fully functional in short order.

The long story involves a compromised password, resulting in a DOS attack stemming from our server and our (rightfully) being firewalled off by our gracious host, ServerCave. Well, we'd been intending to switch to a newer, better supported OS for some time now and we went ahead and took the time to make that move, leaving us with a fresh new install on a verifiably clean machine.

We've yet to move all of the hosted files and services back online, but that should be happening quite soon. As we promised last year, we've officially discontinued use of the long unsupported php4, so some hosted sites will experience difficulties in the transition. Ultimately, security took precedence over convenience there. If you've got more questions, you can check out Sir_Brizz's forum announcement or leave a comment.

We look forward to bringing you lots of good stuff this year. Thanks for being a part of BeyondUnreal!

Wow, just this past Wednesday it was 2008 and now it's 2009??? Happy new year to you all and welcome to a new beginning for FragBU. Play with or against BU staff members and your fellow BuF'ers for two nights of fast and heart pumping matches which take you from DM, TDM, CTF, vCTF, and even WAR. If you've never been to a FragBU event before, don't worry, it's open to anyone who wants to join us for some good old fashioned friendly fragging.

Before you start, don't forget to check out the FragBU thread in the UT3 forums for download links to all of the custom maps on the server. There are quite a few large map packs like the excellent and often played HOLP1 and HOLP2 plus many stand alone maps which all see their fair share of map play. All of the content is available through the servers fast redirect, but it is recommended to download the files before you jump on the server if you want to jump in on the action right away.

To check on the status of the server without opening the game, you can either check the FragBU thread or log on to the official FragBU IRC channel at #fragbu on EnterTheGame where there's always plenty of people to help you out if you need any assistance getting on the server.

If you are patiently waiting on the server and it's currently empty don't fret, It may take a while but people will eventually join. Most players do not start joining around until 10pm EST but people will join earlier if they see activity on the server. So just fire up the game and join up! If idling on the server isn't working and you do not want to wait any longer, you can always ask people to join in the IRC channel and many will eagerly hop on.

It's a new year and with a new year comes revewed interest in old past times. What do you say everyone? Let's get fragging!

Happy New Year! It's already well past midnight in Australia, New Zealand and Japan and Europe is about to start celebrating. So, before you start celebrating let us wish you all the best in the new year. Have a nice time!

A pair of holiday reviews of Unreal Tournament 3 custom levels from UT Unlimited.

• DM-Zetsuen - By Jay Barnett 65/100
• VCTF-SkytownSE - By Squiggles 77/100