Emergent Future

Google has released version 2 of their browser, Chrome. The new version takes advantage of an even more improved JavaScriptengine and Webkit, and includes new features such as Autofill and the ability to remove websites from your “most visited” list. If you’re already running Chrome, you should already have the update. If not, it might be worth a peek. Over all though, most of the new features are pretty unspectacular - at least from my point of view.

Autiofill is quite useful, of course, as it lets you quickly enter in information like user names, your address, e-mail, etc… and it is an…

MMORPG.com has a review of Runes of Magic up at their website that I drafted up for them after spending some time with the game. While I’ve posted a few articles up about the game in the past, this one goes in much greater detail about how the game actually stacks up. In brief, it is a pretty average, generic game over all, but with enough interesting features - and the lack of a subscription fee - to make it potentially worthwhile. Check out the full review for more details.

Taking a cue from their own infamous franchise, Duke Nukem developers 3D Realms, who supposedly recently went out of business, has stated that they aren’t quite so inclined to die off. The company let many of their employees go recently, removing most everyone who had been working on Duke Nukem Forever. However, the studio claims that they are attempting to regroup the company after losing their funding, squarely blaming Take-Two. They also claim to retain the Duken Nukem franchise, although Take-Two does retain the rights to publish Duke Nukem Forever, and seem to intend on creating games within the franchise.

According to…

Age of Conan and Anarchy Online developer, Funcom, has released some details on a few upcoming game titles of theirs, that will be free to play. One of these titles is a browser-based game while the other is a Java-based game, likely targeted toward a younger audience. With the success of games such as Wizard101, Club Penguin, and recently notable Free Realms, it shouldn’t be too surprising seeing Funcom trying to tap into this section of the market. Anarcy Online is also a free to play game supported by in-game advertising, as long as you don’t run with any of the expansions as…

Back at the Game Developers Conference in 2007, there were a few major topics/buzz words being tossed around at the time. One of them was “emergent gameplay,” which actually inspired the name of this website, and the other one was “micro-transactions.” When I say micro-transactions though, I don’t necessarily mean the flood of downloadable content that has become available for purchase for many games, but rather for the use of them in MMOs. (Yeah, shockingly I attended most every MMO-related session.)

Following that announcement, I hadn’t seen anyone actually use a micro-transaction model, except for games coming out of Asia, which…