These realms may not be completely free, but darn if the New York Times loves them anyhow. It's a little strange to see a major publication like the NY Times reviewing Free Realms, let alone any review for an MMO from any outlet. Still, the fact that SOE's little free-to-play game-that-could smacked down the one million accounts mark in record time probably has a little to do with this much attention.

As far as reviews go, this one is highly positive and praising of both Free Realms and SOE, and its not very surprising at this point. Just about everyone has had nothing but good things to say about the title -- not that any game is without its faults, especially at launch.

The message the NY Times' review ends with is one we agree upon. Free Realms is definitely a triumph for the company that lost much of its EverQuest thunder to Blizzard's World of Warcraft. And really, there's no greater proof than having everyone talking about the game. Well that one million account record is also good proof, we suppose.

Tasos Flambouras, Lead Developer for Darkfall, is not a happy bunny after seeing how low Eurogamer scored Aventurine SA's latest game. They gave it 2 out of 10, which according to their scoring policy, rates the game as 'less entertaining than burning a ten pound note'. Nice.

Quick to respond, Tasos posted a lengthy forum post. It's fascinating not for the ire and vitriol, of which there's quite a bit, but for the breakdown of how the process works. Basically he alleges that EG's reviewer Ed Zitron (formally a staffer on the UK edition of PC Zone magazine), played the game for a total of 2 hours spread across 13 sessions.

Prophecy, valor, campaign, and item augmentation, oh my! This latest version update was packed with goodies for the Final Fantasy XI player base, making sure that something for everyone was included in the game. I recently got the chance to sit down with the Final Fantasy XI team and play through some of the content, experiencing what their newest mini-expansion, A Crystalline Prophecy, had to add to the game.

Past that, I also had the chance to see the new Fields of Valor areas in action, aid the Mithras in defending Windurst from the beastmen during the Crystal War, and experience some of the hard tasks in the campaign missions first hand.

So does the April update get a thumbs up? Is Crystalline Prophecy worth the ten bucks? Those questions and more will be answered within.

The Crystal War Missions of Campaign

The new missions in the Campaign area of the game offer some tough challenges and nice rewards for players looking to further the storyline of Wings of the Goddess. Of special note are the cutscenes, which were very emotional and also very beautiful. Compared to some of the original cutscenes that the game shipped with, these new scenes are very active and dramatic. Funny characters, camaderie, and full blown combat were abound in the seven minute cutscene I watched -- all which included my character fighting back to back with some of Windurst's most talented military heroes.

The boss battle I got to participate in was tied directly into the events of the prior cutscene, as players need to use clues from the cutscenes to locate where to go and what to do. In our battle, one of the Mithras was injured as she fended off hordes of beastmen with a slew of grenades, forcing our party to find her and help defend her. Unfortunately, once we located her door, we were attacked by a group of beastmen that included a very powerful boss. Even with five well geared level 75 players, including me as the white mage with my brand new white mage abilities, the boss took a considerable amount of time (and a little cheating) to defeat. As to the fate of the injured Mithra... let me just say that I was a little heartbroken by the end of the cutscene, and I only knew the character for ten minutes.

Our overall impressions of the version update and mini-expansion are...

For a game that's close to seven years old to feature challenging, engaging content, well-written story, and beautiful graphics is in itself amazing. The version update even seems to be slowly upending the former hardcore playstyle of FFXI, creating a more welcoming game for newbies and veteran players alike. If you have Final Fantasy XI and have let your account lapse, my suggestion is to certainly come back and give the new version update a try -- especially regarding additions like the Fields of Valor.

FFXI has evolved from a game of ruthless intentions into a challenging, but rewarding experience for those who are willing to stick with it. Additions like being able to add your own stats to items via item enhancement only make the game more approachable for today's World of Warcraft audiences. The version update brings much to the game and makes for a thumbs up.

A Crystalline Prophecy, however, is a little shaky. While the content starts at level 30, it cannot be finished until the player is level 75. The storyline looks to be decent and the end reward seems to be worth 10 dollar price tag, but the level 75 requirement pushes this one into the territory of "buy it if you can finish it." This isn't an expansion I would recommend for players just starting with the game, but it certainly is a purchase for those who are already FFXI veterans. But, newbies, if you can afford the 10 dollar price tag and have a character at or over level 30, go ahead and grab it. It's a nice addition to the game, especially for a price of 10 bucks.

Times are tough, the wallet is tight, and you still need a game to play. But what free games can you wrap your hands around that just don't suck, right? That seems to be the trouble with free to play games -- many selections all with very low quality.

But the market is not as bad as you might think. There are certainly some gems out there in the free to play market, just waiting for you to wrap your hands around them and play. Finding them however, hasn't always been easy, until now.

With the recommendations of my colleagues here at Massively, and my own personal experience, I've complied a list of 5 free to play games that are worthy of your play time. In advance, however, I wish to apologize to Chronicles of Spellborn, Wizard 101, and FusionFall. All three of these games made our favorites list, but I'm skipping them as their focus is more of a "freemium" experience, where massive areas of the games are locked out until a subscription is purchased. This column is only going to concentrate on the free to play, item mall driven games, just to clarify for all of you readers out there.

So which games made the best of the free to play list? Continue reading and you'll find out.

#3 -- Mabinogi

Yes, Mabinogi is one of our all time favorite free to play MMOs. This is probably obvious by now, but we're fans of the game. The design of Mabinogi really stands out when compared to all of the other free to play MMOs because it's so open. You can take up day jobs, gossip with townsfolk, make NPC friends, engage in a wide variety of crafting, go exploring for monuments, and even terraform the land to find buried treasures. And I haven't even mentioned combat once!

It's this wealth of options that makes Mabinogi a gem for the free to play market. Certainly there is an amount of grind to the game, but the grind is not focused in just one area. This is a game where you will find yourself doing a wide variety of activities if you should choose. It's not all about going out and beating on the nearest snow wolf so you can gain access to the next dungeon (though you can if you want to.) If you don't want to do it, Mabinogi doesn't force you to do it. That's the beauty of it.

Our downside to Mabinogi? The spam. Gold farmers like to infest this game for some reason, and it just gets to the point over overwhelming your chat box at times. We love the game, we're just not that keen about the farmers.

#2 - Runes of Magic

It's a game that steals all the best aspects of every other game! And if you think I'm kidding, I'm totally not!

No, really, Runes of Magic has gone around and pulled the best of the best and smashed it into a form of their original game. While this sounds kind of offensive at first, it actually comes out pretty nicely, especially as the game is free to play.

RoM features very polished features similar to World of Warcraft. The game plays through completing questlines and killing monsters as you level up from 1 to 50. But, the game also features player housing, a dual-class system so you can have two classes instead of one, some awesome choices for character and weapon customization, and Warhammer-esque public quests.

If you're looking for something to take the edge off of your WoW addiction for cheap, then you certainly want to check out Runes of Magic.

#1 -- Free Realms

If you didn't see this coming, then you need to drive your browser to the Free Realms site right now. Yeah, sure, it's targeted at kids. Yeah, sure, it's a little overly cartoony. But if you want a game that's going to hold your attention and provide more than an endless grind all for the low price of free, then this is the one.

It has kart racing, mini-games, silly quests, and an enjoyable atmosphere. You can grab a variety of professions from brawler to cook and find quests for all of them. Yet, most of all, it's an enjoyable game. You don't have to worry about racing to endgame or drilling for the best items or trying to find someplace to have some fun. In Free Realms, you literally trip over fun at every corner.

Inventive gameplay, a wide variety of fun activities, great graphics that run well on most machines, and it's free. You just can't argue with that.

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Colin Brennan is the weekly writer of Anti-Aliased who doesn't want money to get in the way of good games. When he's not writing here for Massively, he's rambling on his personal blog, The Experience Curve. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at colin.brennan AT weblogsinc DOT com. You can also follow him on Twitter through Massively, or through his personal feed.

The sci-fi massively multiplayer online game EVE Online has long been known for its harsh setting but also for its (almost) equally unforgiving learning curve. That is, until the Apocrypha expansion launched, bringing EVE's New Player Experience (NPE) with it. CCP Games aims to slowly ease new players into what is a rather complex game, giving them a feel for what they can already do and what they want to do in New Eden over time.

So how well does the New Player Experience for EVE Online tackle the difficulties of learning how to play one of the most complex MMOs on the market? Writing for Eurogamer, both Jim Rossignol and Oli Welsh write about the New Player Experience. Rossignol, from the viewpoint of a veteran player, and Welsh from the fresh perspective of a rookie. The end result is an overview of how EVE has changed, including a revamped tutorial and Neural Remapping (attribute respecs), as well as Epic Mission Arcs that allow players to make choices in how EVE's mission storylines progress.

Everyone's favorite drunken Final Fantasy XI game master, GM Dave, has decided to finally cross over to the dark side and take a spin in World of Warcraft. Instead of relating his experiences with feeding people who call GMs for unnecessary reasons to the FFXI dragon Jormungand, he's been asked to relate his experiences with World of Warcraft for one entire week by one of his site's donators.

Surprisingly enough, even after an entire post about how his wife cheated on him with WoW, his feelings ended up being mixed with the game. While he enjoyed certain aspects of it, other aspects, like the community and ease of gameplay, put him off from full enjoyment. But, as he said in his blog, regarding playing a paladin, "I didn't hate it. That's big for me. I hate everything."

GM Dave's full impressions of a week of playing can be found over at his blog, Bannable Offenses, and are all prefixed with the title "WoW."

The MMO section of Eurogamer covers most of the big titles on the market, but one that's less-focused upon by their writers is Runescape which, despite its long history, is still running strong today. Eurogamer's Jon Blyth was tasked with jumping into RuneScape and writing about his experience as a new player.

Blyth walks the reader through Tutorial Island, the early quests, but laments how difficult it was to make friends. He writes: "I've never had a problem with this before. I'm a charming sod, my amiable winking could win over the most fundamentalist terrorist. But RuneScape is beyond my skills. Every 'hi' was ignored. When I did get a response, it was quick and efficient. From my limited experience, it's a brutal and lonely world for the low-level adventurer." Ultimately, Blyth was left with a conflicted view of the game. In his own words, it got under his skin and left him wanting just a bit more despite its flaws, but the game's graphical limitations and controls proved to be a limiting factor in how much he enjoyed the RuneScape experience.

Do we have many RuneScape players among our readers here at Massively? If so, what is it about the game that has kept you playing over the years?

You may not have heard, but Runewalker's Runes of Magic is a free-to-play/free-to-download fantasy MMORPG that features a large world, avatar appearance customization, dual-class specialization, interesting combat mechanics, player housing, crafting, high-end PvE raiding, and even PvP. If that seems like a little bit of everything from some of the more popular fantasy MMO titles like World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, Lord of the Rings Online, and Age of Conan, that's because it is.

According to a player's review of open beta, RoM has taken some of the best elements from these aforementioned games and tried to blend them into a fun and cohesive experience. It also seems to have taken not-so-good elements like daily quests, no career respecialization, and gear dependency. Many people think free-to-play games must be shallow, but it took the reviewer three days to pick a class combination that would suit their play style. That seems pretty deep to me. Perhaps the best consideration a gamer can make is that free-to-play in this case also means free-to-try. How many times have gamers been burned by paying for a product that ultimately didn't live up to their expectations or tastes? What do you have to lose by giving Runes of Magic a shot?

We cover a lot of fantasy titles here at Massively, but admittedly one game we haven't been watching as closely of late is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. The game had its fair share of issues (and some drama) surrounding its launch, but it's been quite a while since Vanguard opened up its servers to MMO gamers. How much has the game improved since that time? That's a question that Stephanie Morrow from MMORPG.com hopes to answer with her Vanguard Re-Review. She writes,"A lot can change in two years, especially when you have a team of dedicated developers working on it and a community that is willing to stand by no matter what happens."

Morrow looks at the current state of the game in terms of its technical merits, game play, and customer service. She also judges Vanguard in the light of the game's community that could either make or break the game. "The game would be nothing without its community. Players are passionate about the game, you can find them everywhere," she writes. Ultimately, Morrow's views on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes are positive, but she's quick to point out the title's flaws as well. If you're curious about how this title has shaped up, check out Stephanie Morrow's "Vanguard Re-Review" over at MMORPG.com.

Are you currently playing Vanguard: Saga of Heroes? If so, do you feel the game has improved measurably since you began?

Free to Play games are rising in popularity as their quality increases and our budgets shrink. It's to the point where most of us just can't keep track of them anymore. This is where sharing experiences and impressions comes in handy. Such is the case with a new F2P game recently reviewed by ign.com's RPG Vault, entitled Corum Online.

In this article, we get more than just impressions of the game, but we also get a good bit of solid info from Corum's Associate Producer Elliot Coward, who wrote the piece. What sets it apart from the rest? Is it the dungeon system based on siege attacks that build in strength throughout the week? Is it the PvP survival dungeons, which are possibly just as ominous as they sound? Is it the trainable pet mechanic that allows you to breed your pet to fit your character's particular strengths? It may just be a combination of all of these features, and more. Head on over to this RPG Vault article and see more about what this game has to offer. If you've played this game, let us know your own impressions in the comments below.

TurpsterVision is back with vengeance now with four episodes every month focusing on one MMO at a time. This month, along with the rest of the Massively team, we are venturing deep into Middle Earth and exploring the depths of the Mines of Moria.

Hey folks, it's good to be back; MMOs just wouldn't be the same without TurpsterVision! Today we are taking a look at Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria's new Legendary Weapons. I've often wanted to have a sword glow blue and warn me when danger is near. To be honest I'd settle for an iPhone app that would do the same thing. But fortunately for me I don't have to settle for anything less than the real deal, albeit a virtual-real deal.

Moria not only granted us two new classes, which I'll be exploring one at a time over the next two weeks, but it also granted players the ability to gain Legendary weapons of old which they can level up alongside their character. But enough reading about it, this is TurpsterVision! Watch on after the break...

Eurogamer recently went in-depth with the City of Heroes huge Issue 13 update, checking out the new day jobs, leveling pact, and dual-spec options. However, not everything was rainbows and sunshine with the large new update, in the opinion of Eurogamer.

With servers in Europe that are suffering from lack-of-player-itis, Eurogamer points out that there's nothing in this new update that can really attract players back to the game. Even if players do come back for the new day jobs and content, they're not being rewarded for playing the game. Leveling pacts and day jobs reward the player for not playing the game, which doesn't do much for low server populations.

Although a great deal of the world is still playing the beta version of The Chronicles of Spellborn, continental Europe has had access to the retail copy since the 27th of November. Since Eurogamer has had a couple of weeks to put the game through its paces, they've posted a review. Now, we're sure you know the various problems with MMO reviews in general -- the two biggest being that most (good) MMOs are updated frequently post-launch, and that there's usually too much content to get through to provide accurate insight to all levels and areas of a game -- but it's worth nothing that this one comes with a rather healthy eight-out-of-ten score at the end.

The art style and environments get an approving nod in the review, and so do the action-based combat mechanics. The "Skill Deck", which is the replacement for the traditional action bar you might be used to from a huge number of other MMOs, is both praised and knocked for its complexity. The primary criticisms that the review levels against TCoS are that it can be a bit generic at times, and that it lacks the glossy polish that you see in big-budget titles. Obviously these complaints were not significant enough to stop the reviewer from enjoying the game, and we look forward to seeing how it shapes up by the time it's released to the rest of the world in January.