On Tuesday, Monte Cristo announced that due to the fact that subscription adoptions were lower than hoped for, they would be suspending the online portion of the game and instead incorporating some, but not all, of the online features into the solo edition. Coming just three months after launch this conclusion is a bit surprising. After February 1st players will not be able to purchase new subscriptions, with online play ending March 8th.

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A thread was recently started at the GayGamer.net forums around the following rant about modern gay rights, implicitly blaming the fact that we don't have gay marriage and full equality on things like the overt sexuality demonstrated at pride parades or the effeminacy of some gay men. The latter I have complained about here a few times already, but I added a wall of text to the discussion thread after the majority of comments amounted to "I think this guy is completely right." Sadly the guy isn't completely right and most of his perspective is incredibly nasty and self-hating, but as I've lamented before, it's a perspective shared by most gay people my age and younger. As the GayGamer.net forums require a registered account to read, I was asked if I could post my "essay" someplace else so it could be linked to.

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Unless you're living under a rock, you should know that today Apple announced their newest piece of hardware, the iPad. Resembling an oversided, ten-inch iPhone with a modified UI, Apple was quick to tout the device's functionality as a gaming platform, bringing both EA and Gameloft on stage at their keynote to show off modified versions of their existing iPhone games.

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Ubisoft has stated with the release of upcoming title The Settlers 7, they will require online connectivity to activate and play their future games. Promising that the game won't have a set limit of activations (the direct quote from Brent Wilkinson, Director of Customer Service and Production Planning at Ubisoft, is, "If you own a hundred PCs, you can install your games on a hundred PCs.") and will allow gamers to sync their saved games onto the Ubisoft "cloud," letting them pick up from where they left off on any computer, the downside is that you will need constant connectivity to the internet to play your game.

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When the OnLive service was announced last year it basically promised implausible miracles– if you had a crappy computer or a netbook, you wouldn't have to worry about upgrading your computer to something more promising in order to play Crysis on its highest settings. While beta testers are under a strict NDA not to tell anyone about their experiences, Ryan Shrout from PC Perspective obtained access through slightly illicit means and wrote a rather scathing critique of the service last week.

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Given the organic, ever-evolving nature of MMOGs these days, the line between alpha, beta, open beta and release are blurring moreso than in usual titles. Even though Cryptic will be releasing its latest MMOG, Star Trek Online, in a bit over a week, the state it goes live in will likely not be representative of the game in a few months. As such it's difficult to give a really fair round-up of the game, or any MMOG in general, because they change so drastically in such a rapid space of time. Perhaps because I played the Champions Online beta, I am approaching Cryptic's latest offering with a bit of a raised eyebrow. In its current state, Star Trek Online is a rather buggy mess that shows great promise but feels rushed and unpolished.

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When Half Life 2: Episode One was announced, it was with the promise of things will be different this time. Fans, many of whom remembered all too well the bizarre turmoil of delay after delay for Half Life 2, were afraid of waiting another six years for the third segment of the series, and the phrase 'Episode One' conjured with it all manner of ethereal promises: chief among them being "faster releases and cheaper games." In practice, however, this hasn't been the case, and increasingly, it's looking as if Half Life 2: 'Episodes' will have taken the same amount of time to go to shelves as it took for Half Life 2 in the first place, but with a total game playtime a fraction of the length of Half Life 2.

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