While delays are part and parcel of life, they're always inconvenient whenever they occur. For those of you who may be awaiting Q Entertainment's Angel Love Online, you'll have to be a bit more patient. This upcoming MMORPG is still awaiting a reported summer release in Japan. For more tests of patience, turn to the full article after the jump.

If you're a denizen of one of the more popular MMOs out there like World of Warcraft or Tabula Rasa, chances are you've visited their respective wikis for information. Useful tomes aren't they? This subject was actually a point of interest at this year's SXSW Interactive, where notable members of the gaming community talked about the symbiotic relationship between gamers and wikis. Read about it in the full article.

Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game (the Hugo Award winner and Nebula Award winner), is a recovering game addict - or at least that's one interpretation you can give his interview over at Gaming Today. Ender's Game is being turned into a movie by Warner Brothers, and at the same time Orson Scott Card is open to the possibility of his book becoming a video game.

For those not familiar with Ender's Game, just understand that it's one of the best sci-fi books ever written (in our honest opinions). A fast-paced story about violence, evil, war, and leadership. It's required reading, or so Wikipedia claims, at the Marine Corps University at Quantico.

And if it's good enough for the US Marines, it should be good enough for you gamers out there, right? Anyway, back to the interview. Orson Scott Card talked about being addicted to gaming:

The weird thing was that even when I wasn't playing, I felt a tremendous anxiety. I had responsibilities - there were cities waiting for me to tell them what to build! Now, I'm not insane. My conscious mind knew that it was just a game, and when I wasn't running the program, nothing was happening at all. But I invested so much tension in the playing of the game that it didn't go away when I left the computer. The call of duty was still there.

The interview also tackled what goes into writing a story for video games. Card said:

Games CAN'T have the kind of storylines that movies and books have, or they wouldn't be playable. ... What makes a game work is the opposite of what makes a story work. In a story, you are seeking to find out what really happened - why people do what they do, what the results of their choices are. ... In a game, the opposite illusion must be created. Even though most games absolutely force you to follow preset paths, the gamewrights try to give you the illusion that you are making free choices (even though you are actually, in almost all games, still being channeled through certain puzzles with fixed solutions).

As for Ender's Game, it won't just be one game in Card's vision:

• The Battle Room. This pivotal set in the book can be several game modules in real life.
• Space war games. The three wars (back in Mazer's time all the way to Ender's time).
• Story-based games. Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow.
• MMORPG. This one is based on the Battle School in Ender's Game.
• The Fantasy Game. The "mind game" from the novel.
• The Hive Queen. It's like Civilization (a game franchise that Card was addicted to).
• Post-war war. Card describes this as being like Risk.

Well, Mr. Card, there are quite a few fans here at QJ.NET who would be first in line to get a game that follows the Hegemon.

 

The creators of EVE Online CCP has recently been under attack on multiple levels with various allegations. This was compounded by what they called a "carefully constructed and well-timed social engineering effort by one of the largest player groups in our community" with the eventual goal of discrediting both the game and CCP.

The CCP folks have posted responses on various allegations leveled against them such as CCP Sharkbait joining a player corporation to spy on their alliance, the Aurora event team rigging an event arc, and the unfair dismissal of an ISD member from the volunteer program. However, what would interest most people is the conclusion they've drawn regarding the perpetrators of the allegations and attacks. Here's a short overview of it:

An unnamed corporation posted over 4000 times on EVE's message boards concerning these allegations. In addition, 1046 posts were made on Digg.com; 235 comments were added on Slashdot; and made multiple EVE-related edits on Wikipedia.

Each of these sites was hit within a few hours of each other, at the start of the three-day Memorial Day weekend in the US and a three-day weekend in Iceland.

The guys at CCP pointed out that it was done over a three day weekend, thus lessening their ability to react to the problem. They believe this was pre-meditated. Another thing they pointed out was the fact that the entire EVE community was being readied as a weapon to use against CCP through this propaganda.

So far, CCP hasn't given word on which group has performed these attacks, and we doubt that they'll be disclosing that information. Be sure to click on our read link for full details on this.

PC World, a global computer magazine, has recently named some of the most influential people on the internet. Net heads, here's the top five of a list of those persons who move and shake the internet; we've arranged them from the fifth to the first for emphasis.

5. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia - Admit it:  whatever piece of information that you get/cite, trivial or otherwise, often  comes from Wikipedia. It's even been cited in more than 100 US court decisions since
2004.

 4. Mike Morhaime, President of Blizzard Entertainment - Some say that there are only two MMO's: WoW, and everything else. Eight million people (and still counting) plus a chance to obtain the Blade of Eternal Justice put this guy at number 4.

3. Bram Cohen, Co founder of BitTorrent - This math and programming whiz kid put up BitTorrent, a way to download large files (like movies) by sharing the burden across hardware and bandwidth.

2. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple -  DRM-free music and internet browsing through iPhone puts him on top - again.

1. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, Executives of Google - The most trafficked site on the internet is bound to influence internet users the most.

PC World, naming the Top 50 Most Important People on the Web, has placed Blizzard Entertainment's President Mike Morhaime at the top four spot in the list, sandwiched between Wikipedia and BitTorrent. Largely attributed to their blockbuster MMORPG moneymaker World of Warcraft, Morhaime has become an icon to players and critics alike. This is a big improvement since CNN rated him at the lowest four of the "Top 50 People Who Mattered July 2006".

Because of WoW, eight million online gamers look forward to grinds of several hours online, through different modes of play aside from the ordinary RPG levelling chore. Blizzard has shipped out WoW and The Burning Crusade with services provided in America, Europe and Asia. It grosses US$ 1.5 billion every year, taking it a notch higher than before.

Since he's the fourth most influential dude on the Web, perhaps you frustrated WoW folk can get him to patch up your worries. Or did he just use that influence to serve a nerf sandwich to almost every class out there?

Given the recent spread of the God of War II sex mini-game video and the probability that you're reading this after however way you managed to celebrate Valentines, now seems to be a good time to try to see how sex is included in our favorite pastime: videogames.

This article will look at the many ways game developers, and sometimes even players, translate/insert all things pheromone/hormone-induced into pixels seen on our monitors. We'll try to see why it's there and why gags like "hot coffee" are an inevitability.

If you're a puritanical prude, now would be a nice time to skip over this article. That aside, on to the big question: Why, oh why is there so much sex in videogames?

Get the rest of the article after the Jump!

If you're eagerly awaiting for the WoW Lunar Festival but you're a bit confused as to when it's supposed to happen - like WoW forum poster Flamezor - be sure to check out the Official WoW Events Calendar. Anyhoo, according to the said calendar, the upcoming major WoW events are as follows:

• Lunar Festival February 16 - March 8
• Love is in the Air February 11 - February 16
• Darkmoon Faire (Elwynn) February 5 - February 11

The reason of course for the confusion is because the WoW Lunar Festival is based on a real world event that has no set date. We suggest you check out the Wikipedia entry on the Lunar New Year to be enlightened.

That or you can politely ask your Asian (assuming he's Chinese) friend about it; if he doesn't know, then his parents might be able to inform you.

We now wonder what Chinese gold farmers are planning to do for the event?

 

Founded in 1994 due to nationwide furor over violence in videogames (no GTA at the time kiddies, the big guns were Mortal Kombat and Night Trap), the Interactive Digital Software Association is set to enforce regulation of the gaming industry via a mandatory ratings system. Moreover, the IDSA served as a unified voice to represent their collective interests to the American public and government.

IDSA quickly gave birth to two things known to all gamers: the Entertainment Software Ratings Board and the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The company, which we've known as the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) since 2003,  has spent the last 13 years fending government regulation, fighting piracy, and serving as the industry's face.

However, the ESA does a little more than that - and they spend for more than just what has been mentioned. A Gamespot feature sheds light on just how much the ESA has to to spend in lobbying just to get the government to listen (or see it their way, lobbying is after all a legalized form of pseudo-bribery).

The total tally? In 2005 they spend US$ 2 million in federal lobbying efforts, and from the looks of things, they're set to exceed that in 2006. They're spending more than the Motion Picture Association of America. What's good about this is (despite the spending for online gambling and other debatable endeavors), a lot of the money goes to efforts that we all could safely call, gamer-centric.

If you want a better breakdown on how much they're spending, you can check out our "Read" link below. We warn you though, it's a bit closer to Wikipedia entry than a feature, but overall it's very informative. Makes you appreciate the ESA more for spending so much just so that GTA isn't deemed illegal to play.

Most 80s cartoons were made to help market toys and other franchise-related merchandise. We're wondering if that Saturday morning magic will work on this generation's electronic occupation.

Given, the huge buzz generated by the now in contention Ghostbusters' game (thank the gods Dan Akroyd confirmed it), it seems there are a lot of franchises from way back when that could get a great boost if it gets adapted for our gaming interests.

But how would these 80s cartoons translate into "generation now" video games? Which platforms would each game be for? How would each game play? This article will imagine what would happen if we turn 80s cartoon shows into "generation now" games.

We'll start with two 80s cartoons that share the same universe (yes 80's uber geeks, we know that Etheria and Eternia are different places, but the two series did cross multiple times) He-Man and She-Ra, and then we'll move from there.

Read the rest of the article after the Jump!