Recently in Online Gaming Category

I was going to promote Shamus Young's webcomic Chainmail Bikini but it appears he's no longer going to continue it.  Pity.

I will mention though that he has a pair of interesting articles posted about his take on Video Game Piracy and Digital Rights Management that may be of interest.  He even takes a shot at Penny Arcade's new game, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.

I don't run into the problem of re-registering my games that much.  The computer I have at home is fairly old and most of the games I play came out when DRM hadn't been created as a anti-piracy program.  I think the newest game I play is Morrowind and that came out in 2002. (I do have Oblivion but I know my system can't handle the graphics. Maybe in a few years.) I'm still going through the old Dungeon and Dragon's Gold Box games from way back when and those sit on my flash drive.  I have to type in a CD key when I install something but I don't mind doing that.

One comment that bothers me is how some folks who have purchased the game have to obtain a crack just to get around the security program.  I had that issue way back when when CD games first came out. (Trying to remember what game it was.  Maybe Pizza Tycoon?) I had a CD burner in that computer at the time and the game saw it and refused to play.

edit: Oh, forgot to mention that Mr. Young also did a Lord of the Rings Photoshop'ed webcomic called DM of the Rings.  It's finished now but it's a good read.  I wonder if he'll start a new one of the Hobbit.

Image from here.

Playing a new game.  Feel free to give it a try.  Still trying to figure it out.  You play a mage on do research and go on adventures.  It's still early so you can get a pretty good sized jump on the game.

Here's a description grabbed from the RedMoon site:

Tales of Magic
The biggest sorcerer´s school on the web has opened! The player learns magical spells, attack other sorcerers with fireballs or frost attacks and battle zombies and dragons! Become the strongest sorcerer of all time! Come to Tales Of Magic!

Tales of Magic

Had a nice surprise this morning when I signed onto BananaKing, one of the online games that I play.  I discovered that I've broken into the top 1,000 players, and done so with a standard account, not one of the upgraded accounts.

Of course position #900 has about 1.2 million more bananas than what I currently have so it'll take some time before I get any higher in the rankings.

Link

Been playing a new Online game I found: Travian. I'm linking to the main site but if you look along the top right there, there's links for servers for a number of different coutries. I play on the travian.us server myself.

You start off with a tiny village with only a couple of folks in it.  You slowly (and I do mean slowly) expand by resource collecting wood, grain, iron and clay.  Grain seems to be the one that goes fast as you have to pay that out every hour for upkeep for your population and your troops.  Yo can also build a warehouse and grainary to store your resources, a marketplace to trade among other players, an Embassy to form alliances, a blacksmith to strengthen your trrops, etc.

Feel free to give it a try today.  It's one of those games that you check in a few times each day for a few minutes.  And I've added it to the links page.

I'm sure you've head about Google Fight by now where you can Linus Torvalds matches up against Bill Gates or finally prove to yourself that Coke is better than Pepsi by comparing Google results between two different words.

Bringing it to the next level we have Search Engine Smackdown. Using the heavy weights of the Search Engine field, see how much trivia you know about the history of the market.

Alien Assault Traders is now once again up and running. Still running the 2.1 code as the .3 beta is still not available for download. I'll go back later this week and work on adding in some mods and themes for it.

It's basically a space trading game. You start off with a very basic ship, look for ports to make runs between, colonize planets, etc. There is a fairly detailed instruction set within the game if you get stuck or you can ask for help in the forums.

The To Do list stands at 90 items.

A guy "snagged an Xbox 360 console from the Dave & Buster's ticket redemption center after racking up an amazing 85,000 tickets by regularly defeating skill games like Slide Master and Throttle Up over the course of several months."

read more | digg story

The Village Elves sings YMCA Edit: Found one of better quality.