Hellgate: London, the upcoming online title from Electronic Arts, Namco Bandai and Flagship Studios, has finally gone gold. The game is currently on track to meet its October 31 U.S. release date and its November 2 European release date.

Flagship Studios will also be releasing a single-player Hellgate: London demo tomorrow, October 18, on AOL's Game Daily (gamedaily.com). The demo will be available from other locations on Friday.

The demo will let gamers choose to be Blademasters or Marksmen, two of the game's six classes. After choosing their character's class, gamers will then be able to battle through a small handful of storyline and side quests as they adventure through the streets and tunnels around London's Holborn Station.

Have you ever stumbled upon the website wow.com thinking that it would lead you to the World of Warcraft website? It's a fair assumption since the combination of letters is most known to represent the popular MMORPG. Well if you did go there you might have noticed that's actually not the case, but probably not for long.

Wow.com once belonged to Compuserve and was supposed to host the WOW! initiative by the company, a system that lets parents monitor their kids' online activity. However, AOL bought Compuserve, along with all the rights wow.com but eventually no one found a use for the domain.

Now TechCrunch has been informed by a source that the website has been transferred to AOL Games which in turn will utilize the domain name for its most obvious reference, the World of Warcraft. Should the source prove correct, the website will become a social network dedicated for World of Warcraft players.

Voice changing software are fun to use sometimes, especially since the person you're talking doesn't see you. If the person you're talking to is also using a voice changer is beside the point.

Screaming Bee LLC has announced that its free voice changing software, MorphVOX Junior works with Microsoft Vista. It's a free Windows tool that morphs voices into a setting of choice. MorphVOX Junior features three fixed voices (man, woman, tiny people), four sound effects, easy to use controls, "enabled to broadcast" sound effects, and works well with Vista. There's also a built in Voice Doctor that analyzes the input speech and adjusts the output.

Gamers would find the push to talk function and key mapping very useful as it is relatively easy to use. Additional sound effects, voices, and after effects can be added by upgrading to MorphVOX Classic (US .95) or Pro (US .95). The latest version of Junior also has improved sound quality and allows for easy control over a microphone and recording source.

This software can be used both for chat programs like Xfire, TeamSpeak, Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger, Roger Wilco and Ventrilo, and online games like World of Warcraft, EVE Online, EverQuest 2, Guild Wars, and Counter Strike.

So how about changing your foxy female Blood Elf voice into a guy's?

"You spend too much time playing videogames." Yep, we've heard pretty much every variation of that line over the years. More often than not, parents usually direct that line towards their teenage kids, but a recent study has dug up some surprising answers to the question of who does the most online gaming.

Here's a hint: I'm not part of the leading demographic, and most likely, you aren't either.

According to KXAN.com, a 125-page casual games white paper published by the International Games Developers Association that reveals the who, the what and the why of online-gaming participants reveals that women between 35 and 45 years of age make up the largest block of online players. That's right, OUR MOMS make up the bulk of online gamers.

KXAN also points towards a separate report by AOL which revealed that women over the age of 40 spend just over nine hours a week gaming online. Teenagers only came in second place, with 7.4 hours per week. Adult men bring up the rear, with only 6.1 hours a week in the online-gaming world. As for top gaming cities, the research cites Atlanta and Boston as the top gaming cities in the country.

Weird, huh? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Here's a new twist for the old online voice chat system of your choice. A company called Audio4fun has just announced the release of AV VoizGame, their new voice changer software.

AV VoizGame is a voice changer software which morphs game players' voice to various voice outputs. It has preset nickvoices: five for male input voice (prudent girl, pleasant girl, balance girl, dear granny, school mistress) and five for female input voice (boy, child, young man, amorous man, cool man).

I know, the input and output voices don't match (a school mistress preset for a male input voice?!?), but that's how it was presented in the press release. According to the press release, users can "modify their real voices to match their characters or create some humorous voices to funnily flirt people." Or stalk someone (using a "dear granny" voice preset, no less!).

Currently, AV VoizGame is compatible with most chat applications such as Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Ventrillo, TeamSpeak, etc. and Online Role Playing Games like Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft and many more. The software can be used when chatting alone or playing an online game with a voice chat forum.

You can buy AV VoizGame at the Audio4fun website for US$ 23.96 (the original price is US$ 29.95, but apparently they're offering 20% off the list price). Check it out.

There's really no denying the current success and popularity of Linden Lab's Second Life. Despite the many issues it has to face daily, people and business continue to flock to its servers everyday. Then, there are also some critics (as there always are) saying that residents of SL should first get a "first life".

However, it seems that tirades like this wouldn't stop the onslaught the game is making across the industry. Just take a look a this one for example: online service provider AOL announced today that it has decided to make its presence felt inside SL's highly popular virtual world.

To be known in-game as AOL Pointe, the online media company shared that they will be building an amphitheater as well as an extreme sports park. Furthermore, one spokeswoman for the group mentioned that they are planning to use SL as a springboard for AOL's content and services such as AOL Music, Moviefone, TMZ and Lat34.com.

She added that Pointe will also be paying close attention to the game's dynamics and research how they are being received by users. Well, we've got just two things to say to AOL: First, welcome aboard to Second Life, and second, be prepared to meet its rather vigilant residents. If you do something they don't like, AOL will be sure to hear from them.