FINAL FANTASY XI: Chocobos! Grinding! Forced Partying! Winged Goddesses! Check out the new trailer for Squeenix’s upcoming FINAL FANTASY XI add-on, ‘Wings of the Goddess’, arriving November 20th.

They should make a FINAL FANTASY breakfast cereal. They could have chocolate chocobos, blue mages, red mages…yummy!

Every time I see Age of Conan, it's looking better and better. This MMO is doing so many different, innovative things that it's hard to keep track of them all. Today there's this write-up previewing the game, interviewing the developers, and making all of us salivate until this sweet baby is released.

This happy pict is one of the friendly people you'll meet in Age of Conan.

The article discusses a feature we knew would be in the game: mounted combat. We'd actually seen that demoed at E3 2006 (you can see the demo here; just ignore the foreign language introduction), and it looked both fun and impressive even then (so did the blood-splattering and decapitations, but I digress...) I hadn't realized, until today, that mounted didn't necessarily mean horses. In the article, the devs openly discuss some of the more exotic mounts in the game, which includes both rhinos and my personal favorite, the wooly mammoth.

Horses? Those are for wussies.

Mounted combat means that you can swing your sword, jab your lance, and otherwise wreak havoc from your mount. Ranged combat and spellcasting while riding your beastie is also possible. The demo we saw -- over a year ago, mind you -- was impressive

Did you catch the episode of The Simpsons where Marge played/lived the MMO life? Looks like the ‘Earthland Realms’ persistent world now appears in ‘The Simpsons Game‘. Beer. Donuts. MMOs. The three basic building blocks of life. Awesome!

“…the most mind-blowingly marvelous video game ever to feature Homer Simpson as a big green lump of candy. When the Simpsons find themselves stuck in video game purgatory, it’ll take everything they have to get back to the safe haven of their living room couch in Springfield. Ah, who are we kidding-they’ll need a lot more than that. They’ll need a huge arsenal of power-ups and your guiding hand to boot.”

No, not that kind!!!  Get your mind out of the gutter!!!!

Blizzard will introduce a flying mount for Engineers only.  As if Engineering wasn't a costly enough profession, now they're making it even more expensive.  If you've never done engineering, then you wouldn't understand.  That being said, congratz to all those who will be able to have a new mount.

This is not the flying mount you're looking for.
*shakes hands wildly in front of readers' face* 

Though much hasn't been said as far of whether the plans are a world drop or vendor purchase, or if it will be specific to Goblin or Gnomish Engineers, either way I suspect that an Engineer will spend roughly the same amount of money in mat's and time as they would if they'd farmed for a regular mount. 

The new Engineering flying mount will be available in patch 2.3 and will include both a regular and epic versions. 

We've got a unusual story, from an unusual source (at least for MMO gaming news). The Sci-fi Channel has a story about an experimental game platform under development by HP. The console, which is a bit bigger than a PSP, serves as a kind of view screen through which players view the world. Buildings appear as castles when viewed through the console screen, empty streets contain friendly NPCs, or traps that need to be avoided. The handheld also gives users directions to their next goals/checkpoints. (You'll probably need to check out the promo video to get the idea.)

The best part of the whole thing is that it's looking like it's got at least some MMO features. You compete against other players, each of whom is playing the same game you are. We're not sure how to categorize this little gadget exactly -- it's part LARP, part ARG, part fantasy MMO -- aw heck, we don't know what it is yet. It's just cool.

It's a strange, and highly innovative concept, and it's related to this technology under development by HP for use in historical locations. It's still experimental, and very far from production (if it ever gets produced) but it's one very cool gaming application.

MPOGD chats with STO’s Captain, Daron Stinnett, who tells us that pre-production on the game is about finished and the team are headed for actual production of game assets in the near future.

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for an eventual release of an exceptional Star Trek MMO. I’ve been waiting for one for almost eight years (when I first fell in love with the massive genre). I want to command squads of “red shirts” and send them out to their deaths! Does that make me a bad person? Beam it up.

” ‘Everyone gets their own ship,’ said Daron, ‘Each player starts out with a small shuttle early on in the game, and then they graduate to successively larger ships as they gain in rank. They use that ship to get around the galaxy to fight against other enemy races, and to do missions for Starfleet on various planets. They will be able to group up with other players in space or on the ground.’ “

New World Notes is reporting on a rather large protest that's just taken place in Second Life. It appears to be a protest against IBM's cutting of the wages of some of it's Italian workers. Truth be told, because this event happened in SL, it's a bit difficult to tell what the hell it was actually about.

The t-shirt reads, "Please ignore the various flying people and objects behind me".

The union is claiming that 1850 people engaged in the protest. IBM is claiming...well, they're not claiming a whole lot, as the only employee watching the protest promptly disappeared and no one from the company wanted to comment. The Wandering Goblin's only insight on the protest concerns the term "people", as we're constantly uncertain if any humans actually play Second Life. (Our current theory is that transgender aliens from the planet Odious IV are piloting all the SL avatars...but it's just a theory).

I understand what the banana is protesting, but I don't get what the triangle is trying to say.

Of course, wierdness abounded, simply because wierdness is the fuel upon which Second Life runs.