Tabula Rasa

Lord British himself, Richard Garriott, has won a US$28 million lawsuit against game developers NCsoft Corp.

Over the years, Gamestop has made a very bad name for itself; in spite of its success. Gamers all across the United States feel cheated and slighted by Gamestop, and in many cases have all the right to feel so. Even after so long, no other company has become as notorious as Gamestop, but will that all change? Wal-Mart is the largest chain of massive, discount department stores across all of North America, and have always had a section to sell video games. So far, very little has gone on that has given Wal-Mart's video game section a bad reputation, but some may find what a few stores have done recently to be, quite frankly, unbelievable.

Three short videos featuring Richard Garriot, his background, home and life, have been released. In the first of the three films, Garriot explains how he came by the name 'Lord British', and goes over the games he created. Garriot is famous for making the Ultima series of PC games, which later became the first ever MMORPG, Ultima Online.

NCSoft has revealed that the EU server for the troubled MMO Tabula Rasa will not be included in the planned server merge, which is in preparation for the shut-down of the game on 28 February. The European server will have its own 'sunset event', at a time more suitable to European players.

NCsoft's doomed Tabula Rasa will go out with a bang in its final weeks as the development team announced the long-awaited mech suits will make it in the next patch before the game servers are shut down.

TentopHammer: Over at Flickr, a Tabula Rasa players has posted up sixty-odd screenshots of items that the developers have named after their favorite players and fans. While this is one of those achievements that can only come in a dying or very small, personal sort of game, the Tabula Rasa devs have certainly churned up a lot of well wishes from their community with this gesture.

As Tabula Rasa approaches its end days, the anger, sadness and I-told-you-so sentiments are rising up more than ever. This week marks an interesting occasion where two former NCsoft employees each wrote detailed stories on their own perspectives regarding the sci-fi MMO's downward spiral.

Massivley: If you're still postponing the dive into NCsoft's Tabula Rasa, because of that whole shut-down thing, I wanted to just let you know that you may be missing out on a historical opportunity here. How often is it that you get to play a game through its last remaining weeks, and actually witness the end first-hand? Right now the game itself is even free to download. I'll explain more on this later, but if you're feeling extra generous, or you're big into souvenirs from dead MMOs, you can pick it up on Amazon or most brick-and-mortar shops for $5 US. If you want to spend the extra cash for a Collector's Edition, to get some dogtags, an AFS Challenge coin, a Making of Tabula Rasa DVD and more, you can do that for $15-$30 usually. Or perhaps, you'll be lucky enough to find a dumpster full of boxes behind an EB Games somewhere.

Worlds.com filed suit against NCSoft for copyright infringement on Christmas Eve. Two patents filed in 2000 by Worlds.com involving scalable chat and enabling users to interact with each other in virtual space are all infringed upon by NCSoft's games(Including City of Heroes, Aion, Tabula Rasa, Guild Wars, etc).

After just releasing Deployment 15, and talking about the upcoming Deployment 16(With Mechs), NCSoft has made Tabula Rasa free for current, new, and returning players a month early.