Got plans for this weekend yet? No? How about spending it in front of the computer (again), checking out the Free Weekend for Unreal Tournament 3 Black, thanks to Epic and Steam!

Everybody with a Steam account can join in, download Unreal Tournament 3 and spend the weekend playing - free of charge and with no purchase obligation. Sounds good, huh? Pre-loading starts now, so hop to it and you'll be ready to go when it all kicks off on Thursday, US time.

(It's worth noticing that in the previous Free Weekend for Unreal Tournament 3 Black, the game hit the #1 best-seller spot, and simultaneous player numbers skyrocketed by more than 2000%!)


...so, what is this Unreal Tournament 3 Black, anyway? Simply put, it's the 2007 hit Unreal Tournament 3, combined with the free Titan Pack. That means you've got the original game plus a "massive bonus pack" which introduces a whole bunch of new content and gaming enhancements - environments, characters, deployables, weapons, the Greed and Betrayal gametypes, the Stealthbender vehicle, and of course the Titan mutator. The combination also brings with it some 50 Steamworks Achievements, too.

If you've picked up UT3 from a bricks-and-mortar retailer, by simply entering your retail key into the "Activate a product on Steam" feature in the Steam client, your game will be receive all the recent patches and be upgraded to Unreal Tournament 3 Black at the same time. Score!


Also, it's worth noting that Unreal Tournament 3 Black now includes the recently-released Patch 2.1, which brings with it even more fixes and upgrades. You'll now get more support for mods, award progress when using custom characters and maps, gameplay tweaks, bug fixes and updates and improvements to the user interface.

Pretty nifty, huh?
It kicks off this Thursday (so, Friday in Australia), and will run for the length of the weekend - once we get some more official times for that, we'll let you know!