PlanetJailbreak

Inspired by the fantastic sucess that was last year's Jailbreak III tournament, we're looking to do the same thing all over again, for Jailbreak 2004.

Think you can take on the challenge? Read the rules and general info and then sign up.

You might want to get some practice in on the Lockdown before the tournament starts. Here's one of my favourite screenshots from recent Sunday evenings: Birelli driving, CoolDude in the rear turret, Rob in the side turret, and Trueblood catching a ride on top.

ZedMaestro continues his series of remakes of classic Jailbreak maps for JB2004 with Furia. The basic layout of this semi-gothic castle remains the same, but there's some funky new UT2004 eye candy: snow in the outdoor areas, and light from stained glass windows that projects onto the floor and passing players in real-time. And naturally, the outdoor areas now come with smooth terrain.

A public beta, as well as Zed's commentary and more screenshots, is available in this forum thread.

There's still a lot of people out there who prefer 'oldskool' UT to UT200x, and that means that their Jailbreak version of choice is Jailbreak III rather than Jailbreak 200x. Klan256 are one such team of people, and one of their mappers, Pomperi has just released a new Egyptian-themed map, JB-Solsting.

Grab it direct from Nali City or read his comments and see more shots in his post on our forum. It's a great map, and the screen map makes it worthwhile getting jailed! (And hey, if you post a review or reply to the thread, encourage Pomperi and his friends to join us in the 21st century make a few maps for Jailbreak2004 too...)

ZedMaestro sent me this screenshot a few weeks ago; it's the installation screen from an edition of the UK PC Gamer magazine. I just love what they say about Jailbreak: 'the mod is as near-perfect as makes no odds'. They make us sound pretty chilled out!

They also make it sound like we were entered for Phase IV and the final of the Make Something Unreal contest, so when I saw the results yesterday I was a little disappointed to see Jailbreak wasn't even in the runners-up. The reason, though, is that unfortunately, gametypes didn't fit into the categories, neither in Phase 4 nor in the Grand Finals.

Whatever PC Gamer says, we're not completely resting on our laurels. There are a few bugs we need to fix, so we're planning on making another service pack at some point in the future. With this in mind, we'd like to hear any ideas you have for new Jailbreak features.