Star Trek Online is the worst MMO I have ever played. Period. Whilst other bad MMOs like Tabula Rasa, Fury and Age of Conan have or had something to them somewhere, Star Trek Online is an abhorrent, vacuous husk. I am not going to say - at any point in this write up - that it is a good game that does the franchise any justice so if you are hoping for the first of the positive reviews, I'd advise you stop reading now.

It's safe to say that the first outing into the MMO world for Star Trek is more than likely going to go the same way as another sci-fi franchise' premier outing into the same genre (and I'm not going to name names). There's a hell of a lot wrong with it.

A lot more could be done to make Star Trek's first MMO outing somewhat more enjoyable. The PvE content is lacklustre, combat is dull and uninteresting and the episodic format of quest lines only serve to combine several, "go here, kill this and come back," quests into a super-duper-go-here-kill-this-come-back

The sale of virtual currency is an issue that has been debated since it became commonplace in Everquest and Diablo. Over the last 5 years, the practice - known as RMT - has become a boom industry, going from the act of the few to the product of big corporations worth almost as much as some of the larger game studios, largely due to the success of World of Warcraft. Love it or hate it, RMT is an industry that will continue to grow but is the practice wrong, or is there room for it in an ever evolving MMO market? Is RMT Wrong?

We’ve all seen them – trial characters that stand in cities adn player hubs, spamming chat channels and whispering you, imploring you to buy currency and items by decribing how much of an advantage you will have and why you won’t get banned for doing so. One of the most innovative attempts at advertising a gold selling company I have seen took place on World of Warcraft. A friend of mine was there at the time, taking screen shots of it as it happened. When I saw these screenshots and heard his recollection of events, I was quite astonished. An army of Gnomes walked into the centre of Ironforge and moved into formation spelling out the web addre

Games haven't had much luck when they make the seemingly-painful transistion to the big screen. Most - if not all - seem to fail miserably, either disenfranchising the established fans of the titles or not appealing to a wider audience. Doom was a really poor outing indeed, Max Payne was a mindless mess of violence and Hitman... well... let's not go there. Then of course, there are the brilliant works of rubbish that Uwe Boll insists on giving us. However, there is one game franchise which is making the transition to the big screen that may well be able to break this trend...

At BlizzCon 2007, Legendary Pictures (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Superman Returns) and Blizzard Entertainment (Diablo, StarCraft, Warcraft) announced that they were teaming up to take the universe of Warcraft to the big screen. The details were a little slim - no director, no cast, no crew, no script. All that we were told was that the movie would be set 1 year before the events portrayed at the start of World of Warcraft, would be told from the perspective of the Alliance and would feature a brand new hero, built from the ground up just for the movie. The only hint we got as to where the movie would be

Contrary to popular belief, there are more people in Europe and North America playing Free-2-play titles than there are playing so called, "Triple-A," P2P titles. Baffling, I know! This may have something to do with the fact that F2P titles are far more easy to access than P2P titles and there are a lot more of them. There are a lot more of them of course because the big names we associate with F2P games tend to make more of them, mainly to increase the size of their bank balances.

There is a tendency to look at F2P games and label them as money grabbing scams. In some cases, this is quite true. You can usually tell the difference between an F2P title that wants to be a game and an F2P title that simply wants to make lots of money by what they make you pay for. A lot of them now favour the idea that players buy a currency and then spend the virtual currency they have brought on a wide variety of different in-game items - from houses, to mounts, to extra bag and character slots and renames and server transfers.

Most F2P games we play in the West come directly from the East. A few years ago, this consisted of nothing more than some loose translation work (that left a lot to