Age of Conan is a MMORPG with a pretty long story, since its development started back in 2003. Produced by Funcom, it should arrive on the PC in late May, 2008, while Xbox 360 users should wait until 2009. The first installment in the planned Age of Conan series is Hyborian Adventures, currently in beta stage, but to have the advantage of playing, it takes more than just subscribing your email address...

Now, you need to pray. Not just some prayer from a book, because you should be original. What you need to do to get into the Age of Conan is submit your prayer to the game's gods, via the official boards, and if your faith is rock solid, you will be admitted into the lands of Hyboria!The contest ends on the 9th of March, at 12:00GMT, so you have plenty of time to think, sit back and then right the prayer that could make Hyboria's gods grant you safe passage into their realm!

Previously known as Sabotage, Gamecock Media and Replay Studios' stealth action game, Velvet Assassin is based on the life of World War II allied secret agent Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell Szabo. In the game, you are going to be in charge of the agent Violette Summer, and yourmain goal is to "take care" of various Nazi objectives.

Sascha Jungnickel, Creative Director at Replay Studios, said "From the start we've wanted a game with a strong female lead that stays true to the history of Violette Szabo while pulling players into a world of dark intrigue.", and also stated that "Sabotage" was an "overused" title for the game, so Velvet Assassin matches much better the idea and feeling they want to send to the player.

For now, the screenshots look pretty good, and if Time Hesse, Gamecock's Executive Producer, is right, we may soon have another great stealth action title ready to offer some great gaming hours. "I have to say, the Replay crew have outdone themselves by making Violette into one of the best looking stealth-killers ever.", he concluded, but we'll have to wait until late 2008 to see for ourselves if he says the truth or not...

Paradox Interactive goes into space with its strategy games, and this time we're talking about modern 3D graphics, unlike their Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis game series, where strategy was the key, and graphics were completely outdated (anyway, the games in those series are some of the best pure strategy games ever done!). Now, their new Lost Empire: Immortals game just reached gold status, and you have to know about it...

The game is rated "Everyone" by ESRB and 7+ by PEGI, and comes for a SRP of USD 29.99/EUR 29.99. For your money, you will get the following features:- Colossal Galactic Map consisting of 5000+ star systems
- Lead one of 6 major races to stellar domination
- Encounter 28 unique minor races with their own agendas and motives
- Open-ended gameplay and alternative victory conditions provide phenomenal longevity
- Wage war in space or planetside displayed in the new 3D rendered dual warfare system
- Research a vast multi-nodal tree of 150+ technologies split into 11 categories
- Customisable ship design and construction
- Assignable leaders to boost all aspects of the empire including warmongering, production, research and diplomacy
- Reducing player micromanagement through a revamped sleek interface

Why won't they also sell some spare time to play it? I know how much (excellent, otherwise) hours I killed with Hearts of Iron, and that's why I don't even want to think about falling into Lost Empire's temptation...but I guess I will do that, sooner or later!

When you have too much time to spare, finding something to do could be very simple, but if you have to sit on your chair and wait for your team mates to send you some documents or something like that, a quick online game could be exactly what you need. Without any intention to advertise, my favorite site with such games is TeaGames, but MiniClip isn't bad at all either. Now, I just found out about a brand new games portal, and I have to share this info with you, as always...



<-125x125 Button - left->FunOrb, launched today, comes from Jagex Ltd., the company that sits behind the successful RuneScape MMORPG. Basically, it's a free site, but there's also possible to pay for a monthly subscription, so you will get access to exclusive game content, no ads during gameplay, full access to forums, as well as full screen mode for all games.

Currently, there are enough games on the site to keep you busy for a few days, including Chess, "Hold the line" racer, or the shooter "Dr P. Saves The Earth". Jagex promised to update the site every two weeks with new games or updated features.

The price of the subscription is £2/$3/€2.50 per month by itself, or £1.40/$2/€2, when combined with RuneScape membership.

No matter what happens, it seems we're headed towards monopoly in most areas of the economy. Obviously, I am only thinking about the IT world, and no matter how many companies are competing on a field, there's always a big one that takes a huge advantage of its market share and celebrity so bad products keep being sold just because of their predecessors' fame. For example, Intel and AMD, and I don't have to add anything else about that topic, especially since today it's about Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive...


There are a lot of people that see Electronic Arts as a money-making company that simply engulfs smaller companies with good titles in their portofolio, and then releases very bad follow-ups, and they may be right. I am not a big fan of sports games, but the FIFA series stopped from adding really new and interesting things a few years ago, as well as the Need For Speed series, which stops at NFS: Porsche for me. Now, I just heard they want to take over Take-Two Interactive, and I really don't know what to think about it, considering the past and present of these two companies and the titles they released so far.

The story is very simple - EA offered $2.0 billion for Take-Two, and they also claim this is as good as it gets. This being an unsolicited bid, just as it happened with Microsoft vs. Yahoo, it seems the story repeats itself. Now, EA offers $26 per share, after a previous offer of $25 per share was rejected by Take-Two.

All there is left to do is wait and see what happens next, as EA tries to catch up with Activision and grab back the "largest game producer" crown from them. In the recent past, Activision purchased the gaming unit of French giant Vivendi for $18 billion, while EA grabbed Bioware and Pandemic, in a deal with a value of $860 million.