Well, the new year has been quite busy and time consuming for me. The latest addition to our family arrived on the 4th; Erika-Marie was born with no complications and was quite the site to see out of our blood-shot eyes. With fatigue, of course, came a compromised immune system and the flu. So the past 2 and a half weeks have been dedicated to lack of sleep, baby feedings, diapers changes and the containment of infected bodily fluids.

This month is a slow month for me. But I have had a few ides pop into my head in my drugged stupor. I hope they will see the light of day.

Here’s what’s new:

• I’m still waiting for some beta invites
• Age of Conan realease date gets pushed back 8 weeks
• Barbershops and boutiques are on their way to Middle-Earth
• Star Trek Online’s front page is devoid of access to the rest of the site, after P2 Entertainment is laid off of development duties for the title.
• The Burning Crusade celebrates its first birthday
• Pirates of the Burning Sea released on January 22, 2008
• Star Gate Worlds Online gets a new front page and is interviewed by IGN

That’s about it for now. As I come accross more interesting things, I’ll make sure to post them. Until then, I will be thoroughly enjoying my flu.

Firedorn

Now that we are into the new year, what games are we looking at? Well, here is a list of games have our interest:

Stargate Worlds
Age Of Conan
Warhammer Online
Huxley
Star Trek Online
Dark Fall Online
The Agency

Although we try and keep up-to-date on as many MMO titles as possible, these are the games that will have our interest to start off the new year. We hope to keep you informed of the more interesting tid-bits of news as we read or hear them.

When you get your new online game, you really just want to install it and play. Some, actually look at the instructions and notice you are asked to open a slew of ports. Others just try to connect and find that it fails. Each may lead to the step of searching how you open these ports or why you need to.

The newer type of online games want to provide rich features to the user base. They like to push automatic updates to you, provide news through a game management client, in-game advertisement, monitor your PC while playing and report this information back, etc… Still, all of these should be outbound connections and shouldn’t require you to open a single port inbound (unless you are hosting a game or running a server).

I believe the following are possible problems when a game asks you to open up several inbound ports:

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