Massively^™

There must be something in the (virtual) air. If this year doesn't see everyone moving en masse to Flash-based, personal virtual worlds cum social spaces, then it certainly isn't for lack of trying. SmallWorlds joins Whirled and Metaplace as virtual worlds you can embed in your own blog, forum, home page or what have you. Need a place to watch "The Guild" with your friends between rousing games of Chinese Checkers? You got it. SmallWorlds can bring YouTubes, Twitters, Flickrs, games and more into your little isometric 3D corner of the web. Avatars are fully customizable, and so are their pets (!!!).

SmallWorlds is going into open beta June 2 after eighteen months of development. They'll be letting the first thousand people who sign up for the beta in a week early. If you're at all interested in seeing what you can build with their tools and how many friends you can crowd into your little virtual cabana, why not visit their site and sign up for the beta?

Buoyed by their success against Bladezz, the guild takes on the awesome might of the boss; but this is a six-man raid! How can our heroes possibly hope to triumph with only five?

Who gets pwned? Who gets pudding? Who has the Notary feat? And where the heck are Clara's kids? All (but one) of these questions will be answered in this, the season-final episode of The Guild's first storming season!

The Guild is the very funny creation of the exceedingly talented Felicia Day - though, honestly, The Guild is pure gold through and through (and that ain't just Warcraft gold, honey). The Guild is all about the adventures (and misadventures) of the people behind the characters in an MMO guild. The Guild is totally supported by donations, so lend your support where you can!

This episode is below the fold, courtesy of YouTube's special twinkly magic.

Web 2.0 is all about giving Joe User more choice, more of a voice, and more opportunities for interaction. User-created content is king, as witness the rise of such sites as YouTube. However, many MMOs are still closed systems -- you can't talk to your gTalk friends within World of Warcraft, you can't post to Twitter from Tabula Rasa, and you can't there's no Facebook integration with Everquest 2.

But who cares? Chances are you're too busy playing to care about any of those things anyway. However, as these apps mature, and people find more ways to integrate them with everything else, it probably won't be too long before new MMOs will offer connectivity with them right out of the gate. Will this be a boon or a bother? Do you wish your favorite MMO already had this integration?

The guild gathers to duel Bladezz for the guild bank. Bladezz is given the choice: repent or rape, and although no nipples are in evidence, there is leverage. Clara is not, in fact, smuggling hams -- though nobody really believed that she was.

Who does Tink defeat during the battle with Bladezz? What monster boss must the guild face? How did Codex's pap-smear turn out? Just what is Bladezz' dark and sinister secret? Is this the most awesome tea-bagging of all time? All this and more in episode 9!

The Guild is the very funny creation of the exceedingly talented Felicia Day - though, honestly, The Guild is pure gold through and through (and that ain't just Warcraft gold, honey). The Guild is all about the adventures (and misadventures) of the people behind the characters in an MMO guild.

This episode is below the fold, courtesy of YouTube's special twinkly magic. (Felicia? You owe us one for not using a snap from the first few seconds of the video!)

Got a small or medium sized community forum? Want to add YouTubes, mini-games, customizable avatars and heck -- a whole world all your own (why not?) -- in it? Then Areae wants to talk with you. Their Metaplace minigames for the masses / virtual world portal needs beta testers who wouldn't mind giving their new tech a trial run in their forums. You will probably need to paste some PHP code here and there -- but if you know what that entails, are comfortable doing it and want to give your community members reasons to spend more time on your forum, then head over to Metaplace for more details.

This could be your chance to get in on the ground floor of the Next Best Thing. Give it a shot, and if it works out for you, tell us about it!

Do you want to communicate with a representative of Flagship Studios with all of your Hellgate: London or Mythos related questions? Are you tired of not getting a response on the forums? Well, the unlikely place of YouTube may be the answer for you.

We were surprised to find that Scapes, Hellgate: London's Community Manager was answering both HGL and Mythos questions in the comments of their YouTube videos.

For example, if you go to take a look at the new Patch 1.2 trailer, you will find comments about the new Single Player patch as well as the difference between Video development and Game development.

So if you have a burning question for Flagship Studios, go sign into your YouTube account and leave a comment. You may just get a response straight from the source. Or you could wait until the next time they do an IRC developer chat.

Desperate times and desperate measures. A high place and a loop of Cat-5. More about Zaboo's mother. The threat to the guild bank. The threat of the video. The beginnings of a daring plan, and the beginnings of a daring escape. Can the talented guildies match their skills against real life and Zaboo's mother? (I swear, Zaboo and I seem to share the same mother - it's creepy)

The Guild is the very funny creation of the exceedingly talented Felicia Day - though, honestly, The Guild is pure gold through and through (and that ain't just Warcraft gold, honey). The Guild is all about the adventures (and misadventures) of the people behind the characters in an MMO guild.

The Guild stormed the Best Series award at the YouTube awards! The honors are truly well deserved, and it looks like The Guild will also take the Series category of the Yahoo Video Awards as well!

This episode is below the fold, courtesy of YouTube's special twinkly magic.

Brothers and bloggers Keen and Graev have put together a nice collection of Warhammer Online videos over on their YouTube account, and this seems like the best we've seen of the game so far (I saw it at PAX a few years ago, and then we saw quite a bit of it at E 4 All, as well as the various videos released since then). The video above was taken at a German show, so it's in Deutsch, obviously, but the graphics are clean and clear, and the gameplay looks pretty manic -- just the kind of thing to get us all excited for this baby.

They've also got a character selection video, some Bright Wizard gameplay, Zealot footage, some Hammerer and Choppa RvR combat, and a little world exploration. This game is definitely looking better every day -- it's still on track for a release sometime in the middle of this year.

Hopefully you were one of the nearly 200 videos made and submitted by fans. If you didn't, too bad. You might want to skedaddle on over to the SGW YouTube Group and see if you could have done better. Although submissions are no longer accepted you can still post your own "hilarious" lines to the group. But they better be funny. You don't want to look like a Jaffa now do you? Expect to see a SGW video podcast featuring the finalists later this month.

A lot of people considering "grinding" to be a dirty word; something done by min-maxers to advance in levels as quickly as possible without stopping to smell the roses. Well sometimes you just don't have the time for the roses, or worse yet, there are times when there are no roses to smell at all! Grinding in Tabula Rasa is all about knowing where to go and what weapons to bring with you. If you prepare properly, grinding can be just as fun and rewarding as questing, with the added bonus of smoothing out the leveling curve.

In this video, we show you one of the best grinding spots in the entire game - the Waterfall Caverns in Concordia Palisades. It's a closed off area chock full of bug-eyed Fithik aliens with weak electric resistance. The layout of the Fithik mobs allows for you to easily ramp up your XP modifier to 250%, and sustain it almost indefinitely. The difficulty level is fairly easy, though first time or lower level players may want to be extra mindful of the Fithiks' self-destruct attack. Give the video a look, and let us know how the grinding goes!

Codex is under-siege in her home, much like Gondor under the assault of the Witch King's armies. Zaboo's mother is -- well let's say that it is easier to see why Zaboo is the way he is. Tink sorts out child custody with Vork over Clara's children and turns out to be every bit as good as Clara at mothering them. The naked(ed) horror, fried food and an ending that will leave you hanging.

The Guild is the very funny creation of the exceedingly talented Felicia Day - though, honestly, The Guild is pure gold through and through (and that ain't just Warcraft gold, honey). The Guild is all about the adventures (and misadventures) of the people behind the characters in an MMO guild.

This episode is below the fold, courtesy of YouTube's special twinkly magic.

We missed this story last month, but our intrepid on-the-ground crew at GDC has found it out for us: Xfire, the PC chat client/game launcher/social networking tool, has introduced a beta video capture module into their application. Taking a cue from sites and services like WeGame, they are using their own video codec (xfcodec, which unfortunately won't work with a few video applications yet), and letting you record video on the fly during any Xfire-enabled game. We're told that a future version will enable you to upload your videos directly to your Xfire profile.

As you can see above, despite YouTube's horrible compression, the video itself doesn't look too bad. And James Woodcock, who took this video, says that while the audio still has a few issues, the video quality before compression is "exceptional." Not everybody is thrilled -- the client can sometimes cause lag and drop frames -- but Xfire says they want to hear about any issues you have. Anyone tried it yet?

Back from the real world meetup, Zaboo and Codex get their body language straight, Tink tries to drive Vork into bankruptcy in a feud over Clara's children and a knockout ending! It'll all make sense, trust me.

The Guild is the very funny creation of the exceedingly talented Felicia Day - though, honestly, The Guild is pure gold through and through (and that ain't just Warcraft gold, honey). The Guild is all about the adventures (and misadventures) of the people behind the characters in an MMO guild.

This episode is below the fold, courtesy of YouTube's special twinkly magic.

This Wired article put me onto a 'mockumentary' site advertising something called 'Wrath of the 1337 King', 'a movie about ATHENE best Paladin in the world' [sic]. Watching the trailer [NSFW language] the first time yields a mix of bemusement and humor. Watching it a second time makes me wonder if it's a complete bit of flummery from the top down: Is ATHENE for real, and he's just unaware that this documentary is being made to ridicule him, or is ATHENE an actor?

Honestly, I could make the case either way. It's well-known that World of Warcraft has the ability to make fools of otherwise rational beings, and the YouTube phenomenon has caused many such fools to seek the light regardless of, or perhaps because of the potential scorn this may bring upon them. And thanks to Borat, odd, vaguely Slavic accents are in!

Is it still fun to watch clueless people be exposed to outrageous behavior? Does the fact that ATHENE is a Paladin add to the joke? Did it need to be a movie, or is the trailer enough? My favorite line from the trailer: 'Flash Heal: Kaboom kaboom kaboom kaboom!' More bits from ATHENE here and here.

Felicia Day's The Guild brings us a Christmas treat - a little something for all of you to further brighten your joyous non-denominational festive season. Okay, so it's Christmas-ey - So very much is at this time of year. It's no reason that we can't all team up and raid the big red guy for some epic loot.

Just under two minutes, the Guild Christmas Carol is a montage of classical MMO themes and Christmas songs - all sung no worse than by your own friends, relatives, and teamspeak buddies.

This fun is below the fold, courtesy of YouTube's special twinkly magic.