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Tonight I decided to check into Free Realms, and after doing the normal login via Firefox I waited for the game to load up. I closed up some old tabs to tidy up but when I heard no crunching of the hard drive I clicked back over to the site to see what was up. Read more »

Valve's Steam keeps up its reputation as the all singing, all dancing digital distribution system of the world with today's kickoff of a free weekend of play for Unreal Tournament III Black. It may be Thursday but to Epic and Valve at 4pm EDT (that would be before your eyeballs see this), your weekend of beautiful slaughter has just started. At least on the PC. Read more »

CCP announced this week that they'll no longer develop or support the native Linux client for the dog-eat-dog MMO and followed up with an announcement that they'll be getting rid of the "classic" client in favor of the souped-up graphics version that appeared with the Trinity expansion. These tidbits were dropped along with yet another record peak concurrent user record to the tune of 48,065 users. Perhaps all those folks were looking to jump into the breach opened by the destruction of one of the largest and most powerful alliances this week. Destroyed from within by a turncoat, of course.

I'm sure CCP crunched the numbers for the former, probably noting a low percentage of Linux client logins compared to development funds to keep it running, and really I can't blame them if the hardcore Linux players have found ways to run the Windows version as well as it seems to run using unsupported instructions outlined on a FAQ page on CCP's site. But getting rid of the Classic, lighter-weight graphics engine game sounds like a bad idea to me. Yes, computers are getting faster and GPUs are stronger all the time, but don't they realize that part of WOW's appeal is that it can run on almost anything?

Last time I ran a trial of EVE Online it didn't go so well with the Premium graphics client, so I switched off the premium graphics and chugged along with Classic graphics. And frankly I didn't find the Classic graphics to be poor at all. Maybe they'll compensate by giving more options to turn special features of the Premium graphics setup off or scale them back, maybe not. Time will tell.

One bright spot in recent EVE news is that they've decided to add in a skill queueing feature. You'll be able to queue up skills as long as all of them will begin within the next 24 hours. This will keep the hardcore players from having to log in at 3am when training finishes up to avoid losing time while sleeping, and it will allow new players to set up a chain of low-level skills with a minimum of fuss. Not a bad feature if you ask me.

From Aeropause.

The year of free updates to Burnout Paradise isn't over, it seems. Read more »

EVE Online has been rocked by a scandal of late, but thankfully it's one that the developers and player-run governing body of the game aren't involved in. A long-standing exploit first reported four years ago was finally examined and closed by CCP and a full investigation has resulted in the immediate destruction of 178 player-owned starbases associated with the exploit. It had to do with some kind of resource exploit that over its lifetime netted some multi-trillions of ISK for the perpetrators. Many accounts have been banned for doing this as this kind of thing always violates a MMO's EULA -- even EVE's EULA -- and any sane person can guess that this kind of thing must have imbalanced the economy in significant ways. This kind of systemic exploit, CCP ignoring ISK-selling bots, and an ongoing problem with macro mining are to me potentially game-killing problems. What will CCP do about them? Read more »