For the "l33t" gamer, sometimes having a wicked PC setup is more important than the games you want to play on it. Ultraforce tries to appease The Chronicles of Spellborn fans by releasing a special edition customized PC in commemoration of the upcoming fantasy MMO title. You can take a look at the specs of the special edition PC in our full article after the jump.

Cute, 2D side-scrolling MMORPG MapleStory now bubbles up over three million registered users in the U.S. alone. Probably the fastest growing MMO games to date, MapleStory is popular for its free-to-play, microtransaction business model, allowing users to freely play and exchange real currency for unique in-game items to personalize their Maple alter-egos.

The current registered user base of America will now add to the almost 60 million registered user base all over the world, including homeland Korea, Europe and South East Asia. Banking on their unique approach to business while attracting more users to try out their games without any limitations, John H. Chi, CEO of Nexon America claimed, "Nexon is going to change not only the way people game, but socialize!"

Soon entering Nexon America's list of available MMOs is Audition, another free-to-play game with a similar business model set in a virtual club of dancers. Similar in the rhythmic gameplay of O2Jam and DDR, Audition will also sport free-for-all, head to head and team battle modes to add to play variety.

Nexon Game Cards will also have another printing at Target cards nationwide in the U.S. These game cards shall serve as player's tickets to purchasing items from the in-game shops in Audition and MapleStory. They will be coming in varieties of US$ 10 and US$ 25.

Over at Smarthouse, they've written an interesting article on sodas and how it affects gamers. It's funny how that works though, since the information they've put in is applicable to most soda-drinkers.

The strangest thing about this article is how soda is presented much like a drug. While specifically mentioning Coke and how there used to be cocaine in it a very long time ago, they may have taken the angle a bit too far, even while trying to explain the problems with having too much sugar in your system. That being said, the article is insightful for showing what happens in one hour after grabbing that soda, but also makes it somewhat alarmist.

For instance, they mention that you take in your daily recommended allowance of sugar within the first ten minutes of drinking that one soda. "You don't immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness," the article continues, "because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down."

Even more interesting here is their description at the forty-minute mark:

Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate (sic), your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.

So, are gamers taking drugs? Maybe, but then so is everyone else as far as this article is concerned. The sugar and caffeine crash they talk about here should happen to almost anyone who drinks a soda, but is probably more noticeable in people whose butts are parked around a PC or console, such as ourselves.

Still, it kind of explains why some gamers fall asleep during those eight-hour raids through Molten Core and still don't mind having gaming marathons. Maybe we should get more exercise besides DDR. What do you think?

It's kinda unfair that Blizzard's World of Warcraft is so ***d**n popular, that WidowPC will actually piece together for you a specially-crafted WoW-online gaming PC so you can enjoy in full glory the phenomenon that is WoW. Sigh, some of us here wonder if they plan on extending this kind of special treatment to other games that we like, like EVE Online, or Command and Conquer 3, or Microsoft Flight Simulator.

This WoW rig comes equipped with AMD's Athlon 64 FX OR Dual Core (your pick) on an A8N-E motherboard. Toss in nVidia's GeForce 7600, 11 bays for 5.25" hard drives, up to 4GB of DDR RAM, the Killer NIC ethernet card, and high-def sound that blind people can play to (oky, not in WoW, but WidowPC has an article about the blind playing shooters...).

And you get to pick between two lovely PC casings (the picture we've included), the TU-155 and RX-9, both of which look nothing like an Orc, but who's complaining? With that kind of power under the hood, grinding through Azeroth should be no problem. If you can pony up upwards of US$ 1,495 for the basic package, that is.

But tell you what, WidowPC. Throw in the option to upgrade to one of those sweet G80 mothers, and that's a deal that we'd take (even if you throw in the price differential for the G80). With that kind of power, we can then use the PC for more than World of Warcraft - like Crysis, FSX, C&C3, The Sims...

Will there ever come a time that Videogames 101 would be a pre-med requirement? Imagine doctor-wannabes flunking FPS 101 and just barely passing RPG PE. Hospitals would have the latest games and arcade rooms would be included in the emergency room. Looks like it just might happen in this lifetime.

Game developers, medical workers, and government policymakers will be meeting in September at the Games for Health Project. The Objective? To organize and accelerate the adoption of computer games for a variety of challenges facing the world today. In short, find other ways of making games work for humanity.

One such game is Re-Mission. It's a third person shooter that has "Roxxi - a gutsy, fully armed nanobot that seeks out and destroys cancer cells throughout the human body." According to patients who played the game, they were more inclined to take their medicines and undergo therapy. Re-Mission's Developer, HopeLab is also planning on developing games that treat autism, depression, sickle cell anemia, and childhood obesity.

There are times in a gamer's life that the only exercise they'll ever have is when they get up from the couch to get more chips. That all changed when Dance Dance Revolution came along. Now you see gamers turn into cheerleader wannabes. There's a study underway in the US to determine whether DDR can help get children fit. So far, the students and faculty are liking it. Your Math teacher may flunk you, but you'll kick his butt in DDR!

With more and more next-gen console being revolutionary, even in terms of interaction, its relevance to the medical field could become more significant. Gamers in the future will have well-built arms, we guess. Will videogames ever be part of the first aid cabinet? We're hoping that it will.

Bigfoot Networks Inc. has introduced its flagship gaming product - the Killer NIC (Network Interface Card). Powered by LLR Technology, the Killer NIC features a 400Mhz Network Processing Unit (NPU) and 64MB of dedicated DDR. These result in better ping times and more Frames Per Second (FPS) while playing games online.

Killer utilizes LLR Technology to offload the network processing tasks of games away from the CPU and onto the NPU, thus speeding up and improving the online gaming experience. Unlike other hardware products in the market today, Killer does not require game integration. It focuses on making the game run fast and smooth during the most intense action. To gamers, that can be the difference between winning and losing. The interface card is designed specifically for online video games. In addition, the LLR Technology offers developers the chance to write their own applications and utilities to run on the NPU.

The Killer NIC will go on sale starting August 16th.