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A brand new patch for Unreal Tournament III on the PS3 has been released and while it has no new content it cleans up several bugs, tweaks the game in a variety of ways, including the AI (yay!), and also closes up some exploits. (I last grumbled about the teammate AI here, but I don't know yet if this patch fixes it.)

The first review has rolled in for Haze, the PS3 exclusive shooter from Free Radical, and it's IGN giving it a 4.5 out of 10.

It's not so surprising that the game has a mandatory 4GB install, and I doubt that affected the review. What is surprising is the litany of problems with the single player game that IGN found given how long the title was delayed. It's clear that Free Radical is no Epic Games, Incog, or Insomniac, but from the looks of this one they're not particularly Free Radical either. These are the folks best known for the TimeSplitters series. With Haze looking like a flop, will they have enough money to soldier on with a new chapter in either TimeSplitters or Haze to take a better crack at things?

That said, it's a shame that the game looks like it's pretty much dead on arrival because the multiplayer feature list looks rather good from a technical perspective. The online co-op mode seems to work as advertised, complete with full friends list integration, and the full details on the co-op game modes were posted on the PS Blog. That same post also detailed LAN game support, potentially making the game a mainstay of multi-PS3 environments. I immediately think of gaming centers and college dorms when I see LAN play, and if it will work when the servers are shut down could give the game something of a cult classic status if the multiplayer is good enough to shed the stigma of the single-player game's reviews.

Marc Rein, the VP of Epic Games, has stated in an interview that the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3 won't be retrofitted with the split screen multiplayer mode that will ship on the Xbox 360. He also stated that the 360 version won't have mod support, at least at launch.

Personally I think that slaps UT3 into a very crowded multiplayer shooter field on the Xbox 360, one dominated by the likes of Call of Duty 4 with Halo 3 hot on its heels. And really, if Epic can't convince Microsoft to let them put in mods before the game ships you can kiss that feature goodbye entirely on Microsoft's console.

Via PSU.

Grand Theft Auto IV is looking mighty fine with two new services revealed last week ahead of its April 29th launch, but beware of preorders. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 was supposed to be a shoo-in on the PS3 after its very strong predecessor but it has launched with online multiplayer problems, teaching early adopters a bit of a lesson in either crowd expectations or patience. Sony reveals that they've been toying with online services for about 11 years now, dating back to the PS1, and several high-profile games have been patched on the PS3 bringing them up to snuff.

In other news the PC is still going strong with Steam signing up Epic's slate of games and The Sims 3 announced for delivery next year. This and more in this week's Gaming News Roundup after the jump