For all those five people out there who give a shit about Age of Onan Conan, Gaute from FunCom posted a huge wall of text (100% chance to crit) on the upcoming MMORPG’s official website, sharing with us mortals some juicy details about the game’s progress so far. Here are a couple of his random thoughts:

Prestige Classes - It was a great idea those many years ago before we got into the depth of our character progression, but as we moved deeper and deeper into development and our internal alpha testing we found that the prestige classes were not giving the experience they were supposed to. In fact, the prestige classes were doing the opposite of what we wanted them to do when they got into the mix. It didn't give more variety or more solid character progression, it rather cornered the player. We wanted character progression to be about choice, and not about running down a small corridor to a given end. The end result was something people weren’t used to and upset them too much.

You will excuse me now while I go check the cyb0r status in Goldshire.

Freshly served with today's announcement of a PC version, here are the first eight Mass Effect PC screenshots we yanked from BioWare's website.


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- Super Smash Bros. Brawl sales top 1 million in Japan, making it the fastest selling Wii game to reach that sales figure over there. We should start stocking up on booze early, for when it launches over here (next month?). An insane Wii session is sure to ensue.

- Devil May Cry 4 demo hits 1 million downloads on Xbox Live, through some questionable math (25,000 downloads a day since January 24 isn't even remotely close to 1 million). No wonder Capcom's game owns the UK charts.

- Sam & Max Episode 203: Night of the Raving Dead launched on GameTap today. Tomorrow also on Telltale's website, along with a demo.

- Darkeden free vampiric MMORPG launched by Joymax, along with a new Daden Market (the item mall of Darkeden). From the communique, "players can log in today and slay vampires, fight humans, or crush oysters". Oysters?... Oh, I'm sorry, ousters.

- Need for Speed ProStreet has a new Porsche demo on the PC, featuring the Porsche GT2 and GT3RS cars, and Porsche's Leipzig test track. No use, there can be only one NFS: Porsche Unleashed!

- WorldShift beta up on FilePlanet for 5,000 gamers. "Subscribers only". F.U.

- Dynasty Warriors 6, now armed with the Gold status, will invade US retail on February 19.

- Battlefield, Halo veterans form Tyrant Studios in Seattle, setting out to "change the way games are made" with their combined tyranny experience. I don't suppose their motto is "Liberté, égalité, fraternité"?

- "More churches" in Resistance 2! I loled.

Along with the expected confirmation of a "re-designed" PC version of BioWare's sci-fi role-playing game, Electronic Arts announced today that they'll be releasing Mass Effect on the PC in May 2008, after having struck a publishing agreement with Microsoft. Great news, certainly, even though the rest of their press release isn't exactly inspiring. Among the cutting-edge optimizations listed below, those "fully customizable controls" are an epic wonder of PR stupidity, much like rest of the so-called features. Bravo, EA, you have outdone yourself once again! What's next, telling us we can actually play it with a mouse and keyboard?

Optimized for the PC, Mass Effect for the PC incorporates the following features:
- Optimized controls designed specifically for the PC.
- High resolution visuals - Mass Effect for the PC features highly detailed textures, characters and environments.
- Fully customizable controls - PC gamers can re-map the control scheme any way they like.
- Run & Gun Control - Players can assign biotic powers or skills to 'hot keys' allowing them to play Mass Effect with a heavier focus on action.
- New decryption mini-game.
- New inventory screen GUI and functionality - The enhanced inventory system makes it easier for players to equip and modify their weapons and armor.

The only real novelty there is that "new decryption mini-game", which they're not elaborating on at this point. Probably just a cheap, worthless gimmick, anyway. Still, great news.

Update: We now also have the first screenshots.

Yeah, right! Actually, we just needed some random placeholder thingie to break the ice, now that we're expanding our "network" with this new website. Gaming website, obviously enough. It was in fact supposed to be the first one we should've opened two years ago, but being the lolicons that we are, we started off with Animekon, then one thing led to another and... well, here we are today, at last.

So, expect the usual gaming news and rumors, unusually relayed by two longtime gaming journalists from some obscure Eastern European country. We'll also have various trailers streamed from our little-sister website TVkon, and a purely symbolic games database to keep things tied together, but without much detailed info - I'm sick and tired of maintaining a website with over nine thousand games, keeping track of release dates, official websites and all that crap. We'll let others do the grunt work for now, until we're prepared to turn this thing into a real gaming website (hopefully prior to the release of Duke Nukem Forever). Until then, enjoy it as it is, and welcome to Playkon!

As if it weren't bad enough that NCsoft's E3 2006 line-up was somewhat lacking in quality titles, their most promising MMO project - Aion: The Tower of Eternity - was first announced for the Asian market only. Fortunately however, even though the game is being created by NCsoft's Seoul studios, it will actually be aimed at a worldwide market. A most logical decision, given that none of their other titles managed to attract an excessive amount of attention: nor Dungeon Runners (give me a break), nor Tabula Rasa (a second re-design wouldn't hurt), nor Exteel (mecha just ain't my thing), nor even Soccer Fury showed any big potential, like the titles they presented a couple of years ago (Lineage II, City of Heroes, Guild Wars). And so, all we're left with is the high-fantasy, oriental-styled MMORPG, Aion.

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