Since the market has become virtually flooded with fantasy MMO's, the focus of the gaming community is beginning to move towards the sci-fi end of the spectrum. For years, EVE Online has dominated the sci-fi MMO market, remaining viable for years with a growing loyal fan-base while other aspiring sci-fi MMO's flared briefly before fading away.

However, EVE Online is not a game for everyone, heavily featuring PvP action. I've personally tried playing twice only to have the experience ruined by bored griefers with too much virtual artillery. As a result, I have been on the watch for something new to play, specifically in this genre.

Reviewing the unreleased games that are anticipated, I have selected three that appear to be worth investing some time in, once they are available.

After the jump, I will cover the primary features of interest for each game, detailing exactly why it is worth looking into. In expected order of release, they are Jumpgate Evolution, Earthrise and Infinity.

By now, everyone is, of course, quite sick of seeing the buxom ads deployed to entice new players for Evony. Being rather burnt out on everything else available on the market, I've been giving it a try. No, there isn't any comely wench in-game, of any sort, that I've found. But, it is free, after all, right..? Right?

Except they nerfed medals...

You can play for free until you get out of newbie-mode by trying to advance beyond Knight, which requires these medals, see?

For some time now, I have been picking away at the idea of connecting the Mailman mailing list server to Xaraya. If I could get Xaraya to read Mailman data, including the list of members and the archive of posts, I could provide a powerful (and free) listserv to Xaraya members by automatically adding them to a mailing list in Mailman that is associated with membership in a specific group in Xaraya (ostensibly the default Users group, but any group could ostensibly be used for various purposes). Furthermore, I could automatically establish user accounts in Xaraya for all listserv members in Mailman, run via CRON to keep a Xaraya group and a Mailman list in sync together.

However, it's been an uphill battle getting at Mailman from anything but the command line... until now!

A while back, I posted about how I was using Ping.fm to cross-publish my articles from Xaraya to my various social networking profiles.

I had been experimenting with direct use of the various API's made available by Facebook/MySpace/etc., but it was becoming a long and arduous process.

Then I discovered Ping.fm and have been using it ever since.

However, I was not able to publish the code snippets that I used to accomplish this for you, my readers... until now.

While some of us pine away for more pragmatic steampunk accessories, such as goggles, the team over at Weta has been building weapons. These are definitely not cheap, starting at just over $1k and going all the way up to $8k for the Unnatural Selector. Each comes in a designed case that further captures the steampunk essense quite nicely. Any one of these would be a great capstone to someone's steampunk collection.

I suppose it would be too much to ask for some adoring fan to gift something from the collection to me. There are a limited number of each weapon available, so it is not likely that you will get a second chance to pick one up, for yourself or for me!

Now that the stupendous success of World of Warcraft has had a chance to inspire veritable legions of similar games, there is no more "end-all-be-all" MMO out there anymore. While most new MMO's seem to stay comfortably below the "bar" raised by feature sets in games like Everquest II, it is high time that a company figured out a way to be a little bit more innovative.

While there are varying levels of graphical detail present in MMO's, the feature sets have been static for some time now. The most recent trend has steadily remained in the PvP direction, unfortunately.

What areas are left to innovate in, though? I mean, now they let us group up and kill each other, right? What more could we possibly need?

Periodically, the time comes for a good ole movie trailer marathon. When you are caught up on your show(s) and not yet ready to call it a night, you can always pick your favorite movie trailer site (Apple, for me, ironically) and fill an hour or two of back-to-back previews... assuming, of course, that you don't watch TV... I can only speak for myself, there.

I advise watching your trailers on a dedicated broadband connection. My 3G my be, in fact, dedicated, but we all know it's not supposed to be that way. ;-)

Click past the break to see which trailers struck my interest and what my expectations are for each...

What does it mean to get "Slashdotted"?

If you have been online for a decent amount of time, you probably know about the news site for geeks called Slashdot.

From this, you may surmise that getting "Slashdotted" involves getting your site linked to in an article on Slashdot, resulting in a significant increase in your site traffic.

You would be correct. Very correct.

You may also surmise that this increase in traffic results in a corresponding increase in sales/leads/etc.

What happens when the inbred nature of the internet gets into bed with new and media? They feed on each other. Right now you can see it happening as Slashdot virtually erupts a stream of meta-data traffic over an article about sniffering browser history without javascript, and references to the NINE YEAR OLD bug that continues to remain exploitable, as obvious references in the comments will tell you, quite hillariously:

What is the sound of a billion souls crying out in the dark "how did I get here?"

When I first started playing this game, earlier in the year, I was dismayed to find they had placed jetpacks in a weapon slot, preventing you from being able to fly and shoot at the same time. Well, you still can't fly and shoot at the same time, but they've given everyone hands-free jetpacks now so that they are moved out of a weapon slot and assigned to the spacebar. Flying in this game just went from manual to automatic transmission!