Well I've been playing Atlantica Online a decent amount for the past 3 days, averaging about 4 hours a night easily.

So far I have my main character at level 21 and most of my mercenaries are around 16-18. At level 20 I got myself a Viking who started at level 1 but quickly got up to 11.

The game itself is not bad, it's starting to turn into a bit of a grind-fest and the camera keeps resetting after each loading screen but overall it's been fun. My main gripe is that it loves to crash at least twice a night and will either just lock up or take Vista out with it, requiring a hard reboot. I've played with various settings and it still does it. The forums say it may be an issue with the dual-core AMD CPU but that problem seems only to be addressed on XP machines.

So, I'm still going to play it but if it keeps crashing I'll probably get annoyed enough to uninstall it.

I have a tendency to want to play free MMOs every now and then. In the past I've played RF Online, the whole gamut of gpotato MMOs (Flyff, Rappelz, Corum), Cabal Online, Shaiya and a few others I can't think of now. The gameplay of these are pretty typical and quite similar so I don't usually play them for very long.

Recently, i.e. yesterday, I was trolling Whirlpool as is my want and came across a forum post about a game called Atlantica Online.

This game is pretty fun. It has the usual run about and talk to NPC's, get quests and annoying chat spam but the actual combat system is turned based which is great for those with lag issues and you get to control a number of mercenaries depending on your level. I was only online for about 20 minutes when I got an invite to become an "Apprentice" to another PC who I then asked a million questions about the game. He was a nice chap and gave me some gold and some weapons. To get the good gear you have to buy stuff from the game store with real money but if you're happy enough to run about it's a great freebie MMO.

I recommend giving it a looksee, 85%

I just downloaded The Last Remnant (Demo) from Steam and gave it about 30 minutes of play.

The graphics are pretty cool. I really like the effects and the characters look nice and cartoon-like with a good balance of realism.

The game play is kinda weird, you run about and then have battles which take you to a battle area. I had no idea what I was doing and the game seems set up for a game pad and the set up instructions are non-existent so on the whole I thought I did pretty well.

Given better mouse controls and maybe a manual so I knew what I was supposed to be doing I think it would be a funky game for those who like hack and slash RPG's.

Overall the demo would rate at 74%

Having ditched the WoW addiction I've been hunting about for something else to occupy my gaming time. Being a Steam user and having played Half-Life 2 again recently when a friend was having troubles getting through it I had been keeping my eye on something coming up on Steam.

My friend had purchased UT3:Black through Steam and was playing it so I thought I'd get it as well so we could frag each other. We've both played UT:2004 and the progression from UT:2004 to UT:3 is pretty good. We've yet to be on at the same time to try out the network side of it but the Instant Action and Campaign modes are pretty interesting and frankly, there is nothing more satisfactory than making gibs of the bots to help relieve a bit of stress ;)

Fun so far, 85%

After having my old Motorola Raz V3 for a couple of years on pre-paid, I decided to get myself a smartphone. Initially I was looking at a Blackberry Bold or Nokia E71 but the plans were a bit too pricey for me and I would have had to port my number over to 3 to get the Nokia. I ended up getting a Samsung i617t (Blackjack II) with a 150MB data plan.

It's a good phone and as it runs Windows Mobile 6.1 it's pretty easy to use and I have it set up to grab my emails. The only issue I have at the moment is battery life but it may just be because I am mucking about with it a lot and using the battery up faster than normal.

After much stuffing about I've decided to install and play around with the php-fusion CMS. So far I've hacked SoulSmasher's SmartBlueV2 theme and added some photo albums.

I plan on updating the news as much as possible and will get some more photo albums up.