If you were waiting for the second coming of Free Realms, Palia ain’t it. But, if you hate adventuring and love gathering and crafting in your MMO of choice, you might just find a new home in Palia, the new social MMO from Singularity 6.
There’s a Rift Beta event this weekend, and that’s about all you’ll ever hear of the beta from this site at least. To call their license agreement secretive would be an understatement. In Rift, you start out dead, and then are sent into the past to, I guess, prevent the events that led to your death from occurring, or something. Best let them explain it: Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the survivors from the desolate future of Telara have resurrected champions and sent them into the past to prevent the dystopia caused by the Bloodstorm and the blindly faithful Guardians. Join the techno-magical Defiant in their fight to change the course of history! ...
MMO devs fire broadside press releases at my inbox, and I inflict them on others. We’ll suffer together or not at all. Actually, let’s start off with a non-MMO offer. The Humble Indie Bundle from Wolfire Games collects five acclaimed Indie games (including the addictive building game World of Goo, underwater fantasy Aquaria, innovative platformer Gish, rabbit beat’m’up Lugaru, and horror adventure game Penumbra Overture. Until Monday, you can get all of these games AND donate to Electronic Freedom Foundation AND Child’s Play … at any price you want, divided between charities and the developers any way you want. This is a can’t lose deal – I was up till 2AM last night playing World of Goo… on my Linux box. ...
The “Amaryllis” edition stuff? Well, here it is, a warm Spring night, just started writing, and “ ” comes up on the playlist, and it just seemed to fit the mood so well… And re: the banner, well, Atlus’ newly revamped MMO import NeoSteam closed its Open Beta today to relaunch soon as a real live game. Rumor has it that characters from both the closed and open betas will carry through to the live game, so if you’ve a yen to play a fairly standard fantasy grinder with PvP and a light industrial flair, give it a shot. ...
I’ve been staying away from talking about Darkfall and Free Realms lately because, what’s more to say about it? Well, Darkfall is about to launch in the US, and we can only hope that makes more waves than Spellborn’s rather uneventful splash when it did the same a couple months back. Keen thinks Darkfall’s NA launch will give the game a chance to launch in the shape it should have been from the start. It’s kind of odd, really. Is Europe becoming a kind of live beta for US players? Spellborn, Runes of Magic, now Darkfall – the Europeans pay to make the game better for us. ...
See, this is exactly why you can’t do “first impressions” on an MMO. What does my couple hours of time in Atlus’ newly relaunched MMO NeoSteam tell me about the rest of the game? Not a lot. On the face of it, it’s nothing more than a reskinned fantasy MMO with an anime style similar to Dream of Mirror Online and other games of that ilk (though without, thus far, DOMO’s strong story). You have two nations at war, one with a technology bent and the other magical, though at first glance, this doesn’t lead to much difference in game. Six races (four human or human-like, two monster), four professions, and not much avatar customization. ...
Atlus, maker of the Persona series and with a pretty long line of fun Japanese-style RPGs, is bringing their Steampunk MMO, Neo Steam, to our gear-strewn shores. Apparently Neo Steam has been available in Asia for quite some time, but the version we’re going to be getting has new content, more localization, and just better all around. Which can only be a good thing, because the game as it stands now doesn’t look that interesting. ...