…And now for something completely different: a MMO game that parents WANT kids to spend their time playing! "Driving Kids World," an MMO designed for young children, is designed to teach as well as entertain.

By MMOhub Staff

"Driving Kids World" offers a colorful interactive world with a variety of activities for youngsters, and even a chance for kids to chat with friends online. The game is available at www.DrivingKids.com and will be a great benefit to pre-school and early school kids.

The game was created to satisfy the demand for a safe and creative international educational MMO game for children. It is the perfect solution for kids and parents alike: free to register, free to play, and a great variety of games and activities.

There are logic and problem solving games, memory and puzzle games, math and calculation games, creative games and games just for play. Kids can have fun playing by themselves or they can enjoy multiplayer games with their parents or their friends. Think about it: education without strain and coercion, but with fun and pleasure!

The in-game chat is moderated, and this allows a kid to communicate with friends in complete safety, in contrast to other MMO games. Parents can sit next to kids to help with lessons, or leave them playing alone; the kids are safe either way.

"Driving Kids" is a browser-based game, and it does not need to be installed. A child must register his/her name and password and send a request to his or her parent's e-mail. The parent is given all the necessary information about the game and its safety in the email. As soon as the parent consents, the kid can start exploring this interactive world. If a kid cannot read yet, a friendly robot-guide provides audio help. "Driving Kids" works on any OS with an Internet browser.

Valve and Sony Online Entertainment have just announced a new deal placing many of SOE's massively multiplayer online titles on Steam. By MMOhub Staff "We are always looking for additional ways to introduce our great catalog of games to new audiences. It's hard to think of a larger group of PC gamers interested in multiplayer games than those connecting to Steam," said John Smedley, president of SOE. "We've long been a leader in MMOs and this agreement will help bring our exciting content to millions of additional online gamers around the world." Starting today, "EverQuest," "EverQuest II," "Vanguard: Saga of Heroes," "Pirates of the Burning Sea" and the expansions for the "EverQuest" games will be available for purchase on Steam. To kick off the new occasion, "Pirates," "Vanguard," "EQ Secrets of Faydwer," and "EQII Rise of Kunark" will be offered at a special introductory price for the first 10 days the games are available. All games purchased through Steam will come with a free 30-day trial.

The idea to write an article about this came to me the other week while I was knee deep in discarded appliances up in the attic searching for an old CRT monitor that I had not seen in years.

By Dean Sherwin

Me fumbling around in the dark wishing I had brought a torch up, too late to go back though, it occurred to me that writing an article about this would be just the thing. Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you with the story of my peril finding a dusty old monitor, what I am going to bore you with instead is with the cool little trick I found out you can do if you have two PC screens.

All you have to do is hook them both up to the back of your PC, you may need an adapter if there is only one visual outlet, fiddle about in 'control panel' and hey presto you have two fully functional PC screens working off one PC.

That may seem like the silliest idea since a unicycle, but it can work wonders when it comes to playing an MMO. Think about it, with most, you have tool bars, maps and other stats taking up nearly half the screen while you have a little square to peer into this vast world. What I did was set the dimensions of the screens so that my tool bars in 4Story and WoW appear in the old CRT monitor (which I had cleaned up at this stage) and the main game play screen in my shiny LCD screen.

Let me tell you, best decision I have ever made. The game got a lot better and the whole issue of scrolling the mouse cursor between the two screens just was not an issue which I though it would be. There are tons of websites that I found offering instructions on how to do this, but to be honest..it is straightforward! Just hook everything up and go to control panel. From there it is pretty self- explanatory.

Despite the initial 'buzz' that surrounded the release and honeymoon stage last year, Age of Conan seems to be going downhill and does not have any brakes. The games publishers and developers Funcom have recently announced that they will be closing down 31 of the 48 servers. The most obvious reason for this is that they just are not being used by enough players and are unprofitable to keep up and running.

By Dean Sherwin

Most expected the game to be major competition for WoW, (Which has been at the top of the market for the last 4-5 years) but it just never caught on as expected with the gaming community. The game offers a host of intriguing and well-developed features such as property owning system, not to mention the storyline. However, because of the lack of interest in the game and thus the knock-on effect of severely under populated servers, the game has gone downhill with many users complaining of boredom within the game.

The issue of keeping servers adequately populated is an issue with all developers as social interaction and busy town are necessary but cramped servers can often lead to much activity on screen, overwhelming the player, not to mention the lag caused my so many characters.

Funcom have stated that by reducing he numbers of servers, they hope to increase player enjoyment and interaction. However, it is more likely that they are simply trying to cut-costs while keeping a steady income flow coming their way during the development and testing of their future release 'The Secret World', which is though to be due for release sometime in 2010.

This news has come as many other free games such ad Bounty Bay Online, are preparing to expand servers and begin beta testing. In such economic times, perhaps the free MMO scene will take the upper hand.

Back in the hay days when a great PC game could be bough from Todd, the young office intern, grimly copied onto a floppy disk and sold outside the toilet for five bucks, you did not exactly need a computer borrowed from NASA to play the thing. You just had to pop it in, aim for the office high score and pray the boss did not happen to walk by and see you playing Tetris or Space Invader or in the later years, Doom. Some say that games were more enjoyable then without the storyline to bog you down and the millions of other players with whom you had to interact. But, whoever says that is just plain crazy.

By Dean Sherwin

Now in the new year of 2009, we will be expecting this year's upcoming release of PC hardware sometime around April of March after they sell last years stock during the post-Christmas sales. Millions will be running out to by components or even full PCs to take advantage of the updated systems so that they can squeeze just a little bit more graphical quality from WoW. These people may seem a little crazy but they are actually quite on the ball in gaming terms.

Whilst you do not necessarily need a top notch PC to enjoy video games, it is worth making sure you have a little bit more power than what recommended on the back of the box. This makes the game more playable when it comes to a point where you have hundreds of players all gathered in a town during online play or you're engaged in a heated fire fight, pop up for just a second to take that perfect shot and everything freezes on your PC while the other guy fills you with lead. My point is that perhaps buying a few sticks of RAM or a new video card when your PC is around the two-year mark will give it a second burst of life. Believe me, when you pop in a stick or two of RAM you notice the difference in the old girl straight away, whether it is playing games or not.

Planet Calypso is a gigantic MMORPG that has become incredibly popular over the years. The game itself is now getting a planet company to manage the game itself. Planet Calypso is a part of the entire Entropia Universe, a Virtual World Platform that features multiple different aspects of gaming and online living.

By MMOhub Staff

This new addition is going to allow Planet Calypso to come into its own. The extra resources will allow the game to grow and expand much father than it ever has before. The MMORPG is already a part of a large social network virtual universe. While it was an important part of the entire universe, it could only consume a certain amount of the overall resources of the company running the universe. Thanks to the new planet company, Planet Calypso will be able to flourish. There will be upgrades to game play as well as new storylines and other various upgrades that will make the game better than before.

Planet Calypso is a free to play MMORPG that brings together an entire online community into one single gaming website. The idea of Planet Calyspo revolves around an expanding human colony that has to work with what it has to establish a new civilization. This RPG is not fighting based, but is based more on piecing together the situation, making for a unique experience. While it is free to play, you can bring in your own, actual money to turn into a virtual currency.

Although some developers have tried fruitlessly to recreate the MMO sailing experience, none has succeeded in the same way as the developers over at Bounty Bay Online have. Since the games release, thousands have flocked to the servers to explore and conquer lands. Clans have been formed day in day out to team up and take over noob and expert territory alike, to rule the seas and most of all, to have some fun!

By Dean Sherwin

Recently, the company have announced that they will be releasing the second expansion pack for the game. The new expansion pack will give users the opportunity to actually conquer land and claim it as their own along with their clan, where as before, one would simply have to remain there to keep their colours flying over the battlements. Users will now be able to establish complete colonies with cities, towns and of course, harbours. They can rule them with the click of a mouse and sail to inspect their lands if trouble is on the way.

The expansion pack is free to all members, both free playing members and those who pay the subscription fee. The expansion downloads automatically the next time a player starts up Bounty Bay Online after the 15th of January. The overall file size is estimated at somewhere around 500mb, which will take some time for those sailors with a laggish connection but it, is expected to be well worth the wait. The recent trailer released by the game's developers looks promising. The company has made it clear that existing players need not make any alterations to their accounts or players as once the expansion is downloaded and installed, game-play may continue as before. As with most releases of expansions on popular MMOs, there should be a rush of players, both new and existing onto the games servers when Jan 15th comes along.

In all the MMOs in the world, 99.999% of them are utterly predictable in their storyline, content and characters yet we love them. I mean think about it. You play MMOs right? Well most of them centre on fantasy worlds inspired by medieval times and storybooks. The landscapes are lush with trees and flowers with rolling hills or are dark and glooms as the beast draws closer. None of these aspects would look out of place in a children's storybook! Yet we still love them. Why?

By Dean Sherwin

Do not get me wrong. It is not as if the developers dusted off Snow White, took a glimpse and hired a couple of programmers. Obviously, they put months, even years of thought into the storyline, scenery, characters, and era and so on. The plot must be complex and engaging to keep the players interested and must have enough quests, factions and races to keep millions of people content for months of gaming. However, for the most part, they follow the genre of fairy tales.

For example, we have the 4Story or RuneScape ****MMORPGs. The scenery in both differ enormously, as do the storylines but for the most part, they are in essence the same. Wise folk teach young apprentices alchemy, wizardry and such. Magical paranormal activities are common when there are few people around and teleporting is just a click away. If you were five years old and Daddy were to read you their story's, you would be entranced by the tales of slaying dragons and of valiant knights riding powerful steeds off into the distance. This is quite a common cliché in terms of fairytales but works superbly in MMOs.

After all, what these games are offering people is the chance of immersion in a fantasy world they so often dreamt about as a kid, and not only that but to become a working part of it and to engage with others in the process.

MMOPRG games have continued to grow into incredibly monetary empires. These games have become more than a simple, small online business. Many of these games have grown in both size and scope. A lot of the companies that create these MMORPGs will turn into full companies that can actually be traded on the stock exchange. "The9", one of these companies, has decided to adopt a shareholder rights plan. Now, those who love to play The9 games can feel comfortable about purchasing stocks and shares in the company itself.

By MMOhub Staff

The9 Limited is one of the more well known online game operators in the MMORPG community. The company, located in China, has announced these rights for the shares in order to allow a few specific things. The rights help to give shareholders power, but in way that many may not see. The rights are only exercisable if someone can hold onto over 15% of the shares. These rights help to make the company a more seriously traded company, taking The9 to new heights, all while riding on it's MMORPGs.

The9 Limited has created or worked with multiple games that many may recognize. The game list that can be found helps many to understand why these shareholder's rights are important. The9 has worked licenses for Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft and Soul of the Ultimate Nation, as well as EA Sports FIFA Online and various other games in China. The company is looking to grow it's empire, looking toward the stock market to help boost it even further from the success thati t has already had.

World of Warcraft is known by many as one of the best MMORPG games available on the market today. A lot of people would even consider this the best franchise for MMORPG games today. The newest expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, is bringing new technology that could change the face of the MMORPG games that already exist.

By MMOhub Staff

There are a lot of people who look to MMORPGs for a fun gaming experience. Many of them also realize that they are going through many of the same motions over and over again. The community is massive; no one person can seriously effect the course of the other games on the MMORPG community. The new phasing technology helps to make sure that no two gamers go through the same game, and that they do not see the same game over and over again.

The phasing technology used for Wrath of the Lich king changes the experiences of the player based on where they are in the story line of the game, and the different things that they have done in the game thusfar. This creates an MMORPG experience unlike any other seen before. No two games will be alike, making the game vastly different every time you step to the game.

No longer will a player see the same thing over and over again; no longer will they be able to completely predict where they are going from where they have been. All of these experiences previous will change how the game plays out. This gives the game complete flexibility to form and mold around the player. This is a new level of customization and game play that will make MMORPGS more dynamic as they each begin to build on this technology.