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One of the most annoying parts of EVE Online isn't so much the learning curve or brutal dog-eat-dog world. It's the nonstop gold (ISK) farmers and other ads hitting the chat channels in the game. CCP makes it extremely easy to get a 14-day trial account, so easy that you don't even have to do something like click a link in the email they send you to activate it before logging in. Just submit the web form, scoop up the email, and then log right in.

EA has buckled again to the firestorm of protest (some creatively using the creatures themselves) over their DRM. This time it's about being allowed to only have one Spore Online Account per copy of the game. Families everywhere were upset about this, and once again EA has come out with a new statement promising to address this.

Flagship's collapse has been shrouded in some mystery and it looks like my favorite Flagship product -- ok they only had two -- but anyway it looks like Mythos is in Hanbitsoft's hands and might come back someday. Jeff Green has a rather sizable interview with Bill Roper at 1Up. Roper left Blizzard and is the founder of Flagship. He gives lots of detail on what's happened to the studio.

Xfire dropped us a line today to fill us in on a brand new feature available now to their 10-million-plus user base. Video capture is now just a scroll-lock-V button press away, offering up to ten minutes of video storage online at xfire.com. And how much would they charge for this feature? That would be nothing, the same price of the service itself.

Wait, that looks like...

The Spore Creature Creator is out now for PC, and there's a demo version you can get for free. I've downloaded it but while I haven't had the time to take it for a spin yet, others have, letting their creativity and hormones run free. Hormones? Yes, hormones. They're making really lewd creatures that look like they have extremely large, um, equipment, doing highly rated-M things with it.

Over the weekend I took a few minutes to take NCSoft up on their invitation to jump in and play City of Heroes again on my computer. These free-play weekends show up every so often as an excellent incentive to get back in and bust some heads with your super-powered characters and try and get you hooked on the game again. I did have to download the game into my laptop, not having played it on this computer before, and thankfully the download and install process was pretty painless. The game itself, though, hasn't changed much, at least in the looks department.

While I imagine their salvage-based crafting system might have addressed my old lack of interest with the game not having the "loot factor" of other games, not having the visuals get much better is something of a downer. One thing I noticed recently in the news, however, was the upcoming feature of letting end users write their own missions for the game, submit them online for others to download and play, and have player votes determine the best ones to earn fame and fortune. I've noticed more than a little similarity to the level sharing system that LittleBigPlanet should sport at launch. While I used to be a frustrated creative writer in my distant past, this isn't enough to get my creative juices flowing by itself, but it's still something I'll be watching with great interest. A publishing platform, regardless of what the medium is, could be something that becomes a vehicle for discovering good writing talent.

Seen on Kotaku.