Website: http://www.gthonline.net/

All I have to say is what the hell were they thinking? This game was nowhere near close to be tested on a large scale by anyone. The website isn't even fully up yet and they're already testing the game? The game itself does not have a patcher or patch server. You just download .exe files and manually patch the game.  If you pause too long you get disconnected from the server during character creation. If you disconnect from the game you will end up having to relog and your character might not be selectable until you restart the client and log in again. Character creation and select is loaded with problems. From the looks of it you might even have to pay for additional character slots for a free to register game. This creates some crap about a 1 character error on the character select screen. The game itself doesn't even have a window mode without editing the shortcut with /win at the end.  The server itself seems to disconnect every 3 to 5 minutes and you have to restart the client and reconnect each time it happens. The GMs spawning monsters in town also do nothing to help the situation. For some reason, I also keep getting the blue s

Twelve Sky 2 is the sequel to Twelve Sky released a few years back. Twelve Sky 2 was developed by MAYN Interactive and is an overhaul of the first game. The main improvement is the graphical overhaul of the game so that it looks like it was something actually released in 2009. There are many similarities and a few differences from the first game. There are a huge amount of beta keys out right now and not all of them are used yet. The main website also mails out keys sometimes so register an account and wait if you haven't got an account there yet.

Story:

War between some Asian style clans.

Graphics:

A huge visual improvement over the first Twelve Sky. The character and enemy models look great, but the skills could use some work. Many of the hairstyles of characters look too similar for their own good and lacks variety. There is a nice variety in the clothing of the different clans, but the high end preview equipment looks rather silly on most of the characters. Skills seem very bland and there isn't much of a difference between them. Some skill animations are recycled and not much is done to improve it even at higher levels. Enemy animations are fairly smooth.

Gameplay:

For character c

The Warlords is the latest game to be released by TQ Digital. If you know their other games such as Conquer Online or Eudemons Online you know what you're in for. If you don't, they release some old style 2.5D games that are heavily reliant on the item mall features. Unfortunately, The Warlords is no different. It plays like a combination of Conquer and Eudemons.

Story:

Some random stuff about China in the 1800s. I didn't pay attention since the game itself doesn't tell you anything about it and the website is where you get the story.

Graphics:

The graphics of The Warlords is poor. Its gone up in quality since Conquer Online, but if you compare it to other games out there nowadays its poor. Even Talesweaver has better graphics than this game. Character models are extremely limited and almost everyone looks the same. The graphics also prevent players from clearly making out the face of their characters. Everyone is almost a clone of everyone else so it gets annoying. The bodyguards are no different. They all look the same.

Gameplay:

Character creation is very limited. There are 4 character types to choose form. These are male and female soldier or thief. This is just how your charact

I will try to make time for Steps, 12Sky2 and The Warlords. There seems to be a large number of old games and a few new games being released for Western audiences this week and I'll try to make time for it during the next 2 weeks.

Titan Online is another MMO based on ancient China. Its been released in other countries under other names. The other name for Titan Online is usually Mo Siang Online. It was released quite a while back and there are numerous private servers out there for the game already. The main unique characteristic of Titan Online is that of a free skill system. There are no classes. Just pick up a weapon, train the skills you want at the NPC and go. Its something that you don't see very often in MMOs so it should interest those who prefer this type of system.

Story:

Ancient China and some evil spirits. In order to stop them you need something called a Titan. Read the website for more information.

Graphics:

The graphics of Titan Online are fairly dated. It was released a while back but the graphics are a bit below that of Hero Online. The effects aren't that impressive, but the attempts to integrate weather into the game itself is a nice addition. There is however, a l

Recently in the UK, the British Heart Foundation, Diabetes UK, and Cancer Research began an ad campaign that indirectly linked videogames to the causes of death. All of their advertisements link videogames as the source of death instead of varying it among other things.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/33453/Government-attacks-deadly-games

In response, Tiga filed a formal complaint about the advertising campaign to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)

http://www.developmag.com/news/31416/Tiga-submits-Change4Life-complaint-to-ASA

Unfortunately, the ASA being the hypocrites they are, sided AGAINST Tiga because the ad did not claim that videogames led to death despite the fact that a bored child is being shown holding a Playstation 2 controller heavily implying that videogames will lead to death. There are other activities that require less physical activity than playing videogames. How about reading a newspaper? Or perhaps playing with those new action figures on your desk? At least a videogame actually requires you to be thinking and reacting to a certain amount of activity.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/33590/ASA-rejects-gaming-health-risk-ad-complaints

The TV ad futher reinforces this by show

This is my first MMO review in a while and school has been keeping me busy as well. Three Kingdoms is an MMORPG based around the 3 kingdoms era made infamous by Koei, Omega Force, and the Dynasty Warriors series. The game is quite simple but hard to find your way around at first so it can take some getting use to. It has a pretty good idea, but it is characteristic of a certain other game with 3 different groups of people who hate each other so not really an original idea at this point. Some of the other games built off of this idea are Final Fantasy XI, Dynasty Warriors Online, Romance of the Three Kingdoms Online, and RF Online.

Story:

Wu, Wei, and Shu are at war and everyone wants to conquer China. If you want a complete story go read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novels because this game will tell you nothing and the website won't help you either.

Graphics:

The graphics of Three Kingdoms is fairly dated. The disappointment is that the game looks like it was something made back in 2003 or 2004 when it is a 2009 game. The game is an even greater disappointment if you compare it to Romance of the Three Kingdoms Online which is basically a better version of Three Kingdoms. All in

When online gaming first started, it was all Pay to Play because the constant stream of revenue through a monthly fee was required to maintain and upkeep the servers. This was considered normal until some people decided to use a Free to Play model. Free to Play model basically eliminates the idea of monthly fees by allowing anybody to sign up for an account and play free of charge. Instead, money to maintain the servers are obtained by players who spend money to buy and obtain certain benefits such as higher exp rates or special items normally inaccessible. Eventually even Pay to Play model games have had to offer free trials to their games in order to keep up. Other Pay to Play games have gotten greedy (Everquest and Phantasy Star Universe) by using both a Pay to Play AND an item mall system. However, there as time went on, the developers lost sight of the fact that both people who bought their items and people who did not buy their items played the game. Slowly the Free to Play model has gone downhill and this article is going to focus on a few key games which I will mention has lost sight of the essence of a Free to Play  game.

In my opinion, the most important thing in

Whenever something bad happens and videogames are a linked source of material, everyone always chases after it and wants them gone. If you think about it, the amount of damage that videogames cause compared to other things is insignificant. If videogames deserves to be banned so do cars and guns because they cause far more damage than videogames ever will. Books are greater sources of violent tendencies than video games by a factor of several times yet few people ever complain about books because they are considered to be protected by the first amendment in the United States.  The thing is, videogames hardly cause any damage to society.

This is a list of all deaths said to be caused by videogames (taken from Destructoid.com). According to this list, 26 people have died in relation to videogames. These are DIRECT causes of death by videogames NOT INDIRECT. That means that person who strangled the other person with a controller would not count unless it was because of the game they were playing. If you make comparisons, videogames average maybe 2 deaths a year or 3 if you're synical about it. Spread this out throughout the time that videogames have been around and you