Hey everyone! Most of you will remember the outage we had back in January caused by the simultaneous failure of multiple drives in a RAID array. It set us back a good amount, but over the last 5 months, the community has responded overwhelmingly and BeyondUnreal continues to be the best Unreal and Unreal Engine related fan site on the internet. We really appreciate all of your support!

Also since January, we have been running the entirety of the site off of our main server with everything else that we run. This has put a considerable strain on this box and may have resulted in the site seeming somewhat unstable over the past few months. Finally, we have secured new drives for our separate database server and set up our RAID again. We are scheduling the migration of our current database back to the database server for May 18, 2008 at 1:00am Eastern Time (GMT-5). Yes, this is essentially tomorrow night. We anticipate being down for no longer than two hours while we get the database back up and running.

We certainly want to reinforce to everyone that we have had two levels of backup security on Ginger since January, and we will be moving to a three level backup system when we move to the new box. A catastrophe like what happened in January has been reduced to the most miniscule chance, and I will continue to do whatever I can to prevent it from happening again as long as I am adminning the site.

If you have any questions, concerns, comments about the scheduled downtime or our backup system, feel free to post in the comment thread or send me an email directly. We take the opinions of our users very seriously, and try to reduce the amount of downtime we have as much as possible. Thank you for your continued support of BeyondUnreal!!

Mass Effect for the PC has officially gone gold. (thanks Blue's).

Fully optimized for the PC through a collaboration between BioWare and Demiurge Studios, Mass Effect includes a new Tactical Heads-Up Display, higher resolution visuals, an enhanced inventory system, fully optimized controls designed specifically for the PC, individual squad control and a new decryption mini-game. The “Bring Down the Sky” downloadable content for Mass Effect on PC, featuring 90 minutes of new gameplay, will also be available free3 for registered BioWare Community members at the launch of Mass Effect PC.

Revelation's map DM-Ferra was recently reviewed over at NaliCity:

GNOME: The visuals in the map are wonderful. Excellent texture use throughout and a varied design that allows players to easily know where they are and where they want to go at all times. Lighting seemed appropriate and consistent throughout and was exactly what you'd expect it to be if this place were real.

You can read the entire review here.

A bunch of new The Chronicles of Spellborn screenshots have arrived this morning. These showcase different areas of the game, including zones within the Shard of Parliament and Quarterstone. This UE2.5 powered MMORPG is currently in beta testing.

Apparently, in China, mobile phones are considerably more powerful than my pitiful Blackberry. TechFaith has announced that is has licensed Unreal Engine 3 technology for use in a mobile MMOG title. The press release has all the details.

Mr. Defu Dong, CEO of TechFaith, said, "We are excited about our collaboration with EPIC, as this license agreement will enable us to produce high-quality games to meet the demands and requirements of Chinese gaming consumers. TechFaith is rolling out its plan to get into the gaming market and is off to a great start with such a strong partner as EPIC. As we commence with our gaming strategy, we continue to believe this sector has strong growth potential. Mobile phone games should serve as an excellent springboard to begin penetrating the broader mobile content sector. EPIC's Unreal Engine 3 is one of the most highly acclaimed engines in the market, broadly used by the top game developers. Our progress in this space will help us to capture the potential for our future in the mobile phone gaming space."

"Epic Games China is honored to be providing TechFaith with the core development infrastructure, tools, and technology for its upcoming projects," said Paul Meegan, CEO of Epic Games China. "We're excited that TechFaith has chosen Unreal Engine 3 and look forward to seeing the great games they'll produce with it."

GoGamer's back at it with their awesome 48 hour sale and this time they are featuring Unreal Anthology for an incredible $9.90. This pack includes Unreal, Unreal Mission Pack 1: Return to Na Pali, Unreal Tournament, Unreal 2, and Unreal Tournament 2004 - that's two bucks per game! I realize a lot of you probably have one or more of those games, but you can always pick one up for a friend at that price.

Another U-Engine games on sale this time is Brothers In Arms: Road to Hill 30 - DVD Edition ($3.90), a game that received an average review score of 88% at GameRankings. That one seems like a no-brainer if you enjoy the genre even a little bit. Also listed is Hour of Victory (PC) at a price that is still probably too high for consideration - $19.90. There are several other nice non-U-Engine pickups listed as well.

Our old friend RaptoR at Planet Gears of War puts forth a handful of zany predictions about Gears of War 2. Here's number 4:

4. There will be a PC release within twelve months.

PC gaming isn’t dead yet, despite the army of angry Internet people who might claim otherwise. The PC version of Gears didn’t sell huge numbers, probably due to the horribleness of Games for Windows Live and the fact that everyone has already played it on the 360. Gears PC also suffered from immense competition when it was released in November 2007, not least of which was Epic’s own Unreal Tournament 3.

Nevertheless, we predict a Holiday 2009 release for Gears of War 2 on the PC. It takes relatively little effort to port an Unreal Engine 3 game back to Windows, and Epic has the time and manpower to pull it off. The only question is whether it’ll be received any better than the Windows version of the first Gears of War.

The Escapist has a great interview that details some of the history and underpinnings of Epic Games' successful business models - from Tim Sweeney's modest shareware business to the current environment of dominating the engine middleware market.

Here Mike Capps explains how they avoid turning their games into merely "tech demos":

"The last thing I'm gonna do is ship crappy foliage," Capps says, "because then one of our other competitors has a hallmark of, 'Look, ours is better than theirs.' ... So we think of that sometimes. We should make sure this feature is better than what id Tech just showed, or what Valve just showed. I feel like we do pretty well for that. But that's the engine team trying to make features better, not the game team being told, 'OK, guys, there's not enough ragdoll physics in this level. We need more in order to be competitive with Crytek.' That's not how we do it.

"We are probably more competitive with games than we are with engines. I'm more worried about Brothers in Arms coming out with a cool feature that looks great and makes our game look crappy. That's more concerning to me than what id Tech or what Crytek does. We're game developers first."

3D Buzz has an all new look as well as a new series for 3ds Max to give those Make Something Unreal Contest entrants a hand. Check out the UT3 tutorial pictured to the right!

This new series covers the creation of a quadrupedal vehicle similar to the AT-AT Walkers seen in “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back!” The videos are recorded completely on the fly with no preparation, so you get to see the entire modeling process from start to finish, with nothing done off camera! Each of these videos are completely free, and they are all currently available from our front page, underneath the 3ds Max category!

The best part about the series is that once the modeling portion is complete, we are going to begin the process of getting the walker into Unreal Tournament 3 as a playable vehicle! Imagine being able to stomp across the battlefield with a powerful vehicle that you created yourself!

Gamasutra talks with Wideload Games founder and former Bungie founder/president, Alex Seropian, about the upcoming UE3 title Hail to the Chimp. Topics include publishing challenges that developers experience today as well as an explanation on how they are using Unreal Engine 3 tech for their decidedly cartoonish title:

When we started, we licensed the Unreal Engine, looked around and said, “Gee, look at all these people licensing this engine, we want to stand out.” Everyone was doing this hyper-realistic, photo-real stuff, and we wanted to go the opposite direction.

There’s a lot of graphical power there, so we didn’t want to just make a toon-shaded, cel-shaded game. Instead we came up with this idea that’s kind of like paper cut-out stop-motion, but it’s still 3D. We’re projecting our textures onto the models in a way that makes them look flat, because they have outlines around them, and the texture’s not actually wrapped around the model -- it’s projected in a 2D plane, basically.

The shading’s all done as though it was drawn with a pencil in real-time, that’s how the lighting and the shading works. The difference that you see now as opposed to six months ago or nine months ago is a refinement and polishing of that look.

GameTrailers interviews CliffyB about Gears of War 2 in the manner they do best... on video! Check it out below:

Meanwhile, Microsoft's Shane Kim chats up Gamespot.

VE3D, once again, has a wealth of Mass Effect PC screenshots (28 in all), and a twelve minute video showcasing the many improvements that can be found in the PC version.

GoGamer, well-known for their rock-bottom pricing during their 48 hour Madness Sales, is advertising Unreal Tournament 3 for an incredible $21.90. As always, quantities are limited and the sale does end in 48 hours (tomorrow night).

Shacknews reports that, during Microsoft's Spring Showcase, Gears creator CliffyB hinted towards the possibility that Gears of War 2 might include 4-player co-op gameplay. However...

When asked directly if Gears of War 2 will feature four-player co-op, Bleszinski responded: "We're not announcing anything about co-op at this time, we'll probably get around to it around E3 time, but rest assured, it will be bigger and better."

Promising, perhaps? Guess we'll find out when E3 comes around.

Gears of War 2 is expected to be released November, 2008 for the Xbox 360.