On Tuesday, it was reported that ex-NCsoft employees were found guilty of leaking Lineage 3 information and coding to a rival and were sentenced to jail time. It was reported generally by media outlets as a win for NCsoft and implied by some that Bluehole Studio, the makers of TERA, were guilty because of the verdict.

On april 18 Bluehole Studio’s fought back stating they are “NOT guilty“, calling NCsoft a “corporate bully“.

NCsoft is a billion-plus dollar corporation, so they can afford to have a team of high-priced lawyers spin out reasonable-sounding documents. These baseless accusations have led to unfounded rumors, which is disappointing and unfair. But that doesn’t mean the rumors are true.

It is no surprise that the latest spin on the story has it that “TERA is guilty.” That is wr

This weekend I was firmly happy with the latest Silent Hill Downpour that came in late March  for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. I was so looking forward to this game and the beginning had a good start.

You are Murphy Pendleton, the main character, and you're in prison. A guard leads you to the showers and tells you where you can find the weapon. First you turn all the showers on so that steam is released. The steam will block the cameras * wink wink *. You walk to the bench, grab the weapon and wait for the other prisoner. The prisoner is scared when he sees you, and worse, when he sees what is in your hand.

Murphy: "You don’t recognize me huh?"Prisoner: "No ... uh ... guard? Jailer? Someone? "Murphy: "We were neighbors."Oops ...

Then there follows a charming scene in which you

Iruna Online is an online RPG from developer Asobimo. The game was quite a while on Google Play, but it was unplayable for people who didn't speak Japanese. The game is terms of graphics, much like the Final Fantasy III and IV remakes on the NintendoDS.

In Iruna Online you can actually do everything you would normally do in a MMORPG on your PC. You can chat, go on adventures together, exchange items and invite each other for a fight.

Best of all, it doesn't costs you anything, because the game is free to download from Google Play.

The snow this year was fun to watch, but cycling trough -14 degrees is a completely different story. I quickly became stressed and slept badly. That night was not to sleep, but I was too tired to do something useful. What I sometimes do at such moments is getting out of bed and sitting in front of my 2 cabinets of games.

I love to look at the beautifully drawn artwork on the boxes. Sometimes I pick a game and I open it just to see the inside view. When I really can't sleep, I leaf through the booklet and I smell it on. I'm always happy when I smell the newness of the book. It is at these moments that I'm always a little hesitant when I think about the digitization of video games. Unintentionally, there was a kind of anxiety in me when I realized that the survival horror game '

Which games have given me the creeps you ask me? Not many. Resident Evil, Fear and Silent Hill were in my top 5. Echo Night Beyond was also very scary, but since then

For the first gameplay trailer to Angry Birds: Space, Rovio decided it wanted to do something a bit special. With the company flush with Angry Birds clout, it set its sights high: the developer says this is the first-ever videogame trailer to be shot in space. We certainly can't think of another one, and our job involves watching quite a few videogame trailers. Just like Don Pettit's job involves flying into space and... playing Angry Birds.

Clearly providing no shortage of fun for the NASA astronaut, the clip manages to divide its time between gameplay footage, and real-life extraterrestrial physics demonstrations. Puts something of a damper on all those “we shot this in our studio, say hi to the animator!” clips, huh?

Angry Birds: Space releases on iOS, Android, Mac and PC come the 22nd

Mass Effect 3 has now launched so what better way to celebrate than with a little art made with...salt?!? Bashir Sultani, who's done some incredible work, to do a piece for Mass Effect 3 and he turned in this awesome video of Commander Shepard!

He also has done other games that you can find on his youtube page: Click

I have a smartphone that is pretty much filled to the brim with actual, functional, persistent MMORPGs. Some of them are three-dimensional romps through massive worlds filled with dungeons and dragons; others are representational browser-based games that work through the phone's native browser; and the rest are hardly nothing more than a few dots on the screen and impressionistic gameplay.

Still, they are MMOs. I love having access to them, and over the last year I have actually grown to love simple, clever design and basic artwork over almost anything else. Forget Guild Wars 2; we'll hear enough about that to make us choke. Sure, it might be a fun game, but I'm a tech guy from the Bizarro universe. I prefer to see how little tech I need to game with. I want to push the limits even lower

Are you eagerly awaiting Diablo III's eventual release? Well, perhaps you shouldn't be quite that eager. Community manager Bashiok recently made some comments in a thread on the official forums expressing some concern that players are getting too excited about the potential of the game and that players should instead lower their overall expectations of Diablo III. He closes by saying that fans should at the same time still purchase the game but perhaps lower the threshold of awesome it has to clear.

It's possible to read this as an attempt to control the game's hype before release, and it's possible to read this as a roundabout statement of overall quality. Either way, it's an odd statement coming from Blizzard's public relations team, since very few developers have historically to

I'm a sucker for a good, clever idea. You know the type: the ideas that make you slap yourself on the forehead and shout, "Why didn't I think of that first?" Or for the less humble of us out there, "Why, I did think of that first! But I got lost on the way to the patent office and I'm pretty sure that someone stole my dream journal to pilfer my genius notions!"

While critics point their fingers at the MMO industry and proclaim it a barren wasteland of innovation, there are quite a few awesome -- if small -- ideas that bubble up in MMO and move the genre forward. Maybe they're teeny-tiny baby steps; maybe they're giant hopscotch leaps over the six-spot with the rock in the middle. But these ideas can and have had the power to change how these games are made and played.

So this week