Originally designed as a learning experience from a designer who wanted to learn Flash and JavaScript, The Human Brain Cloud is a brilliant stroke of simplistic game design and high-brow fun for those of us who still remember Scrabble nights with fondness. The ‘game’ starts out with a player typing in the first word that comes to their mind, allowing other ‘players’ to then begin associating other words with the original subject, creating a lovely (and large) mind map of words and bubbles. For instance, “pizza” might be associated with “cheese”, “Italy” or even “yummy” by other players, creating a sometimes humorous look into the inner workings of word association on the human psyche. Some interesting statistics have also popped up, as of this post, The Human Brain Cloud consists of 209644 unique words, 1934531 connections and 171984 humans , not bad for an experiment from a first time Flash scripter.

Brilliant: The Human Brain Cloud

Sweet baby Jesus I hope this is true. As the Star Wars license wallowed away under the steaming pile that was the prequels and the horrible mess that Star Wars Galaxies became, Knight of the Old Republic was a bright shining star of the Force. Even the sequel, “Sith Lords”, though rushed and extremely buggy, was of higher quality than Galaxies. I remember thinking, self, this needs to be an MMO. Well, it seems that dream will come true. Rumors are flying around the gaming press about a recent news report from CVG stating that BioWare has recently begun forming an online team to work on a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic MMO. Though no true details have emerged, just the fact that it appears BioWare is behind the development can only mean it will be perfection.

Read more: Knight of the Old Republic MMO in the works?

Funcom and Eidos announced today that a new release date for the much-hyped MMO Age of Conan has been delayed until October 30th, 2007, allowing developers to “further hone the qualities of the game”. Perhaps a smart move considering that any MMO released at this point in time would risk being lost in the noise that is currently being generated by the release of World of Warcraft’s expansion. The title it currently undergoing a closed beta test with an open beta being announced soon.

Read more: Age of Conan delayed | Age of Conan

After 2 long weeks, Linden Labs has finally open-sourced the client for Second Life, the popular virtual world online “game” which has been a hot topic among the mainstream press. After the announcement several weeks ago a lot of excitement has grown around this daring move by Linden Labs, which may prove to be a huge boost for the case of open sourcing online game clients which benefit from community development and modding. There are currently quite a bit of project involved with Second Life already in the works, including a Solaris x64 port, a PowerPC port, packages for Mandrive and Debian, as well as an Ubuntu package.

Second Life client finally GPL’d

Second Life developers Linden Labs have announced that they are open sourcing their client software, possibly as a way to shift focus from the rising media backlash after their months of super-hype among the mainstream. A super bold move which has been wished for by fans and amateur hackers of Second Life since the beginning of time*, Second Life users will have direct access to the client to mashup, hack and crack new features into the anything goes world. Though it’s not clear if the announcement was accelerated by the recent media backlash, which began several weeks back throughout the blogosland or whether this was a planned announcement, I think it’s great that Second Life is taking this step, let’s just hope it breathes new life into the world and means less 48 year old men in diapers and football helmets propositioning every female avatar in their vicinity**.

(*) Second Life time that is.
(**) This never happened to me, honest.

Read more: Second Life goes open source

Though gold farmers could probably care less, I would think that Linden Labs and all fans of Second Life are starting to wonder what the future may hold for their respective virtual businesses. With members of the house and senate just now starting to learn what a video game actually is, some are stumbling upon the news that virtual economies are growing to the level equal to that of some states’. Naturally, wherever there is money, even virtual, exchanging hands there are politicians, which doesn’t make the news surprising that the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress are starting to investigate the ways which virtual economies can be taxed. A report on where players can be taxed will be completed by year’s end, with virtual taxation bills popping up just in time for World of Warcraft’s 10 millionth subscriber. Typical of the IRS, always swooping in and killing any hopes of fun wherever it may be.

Read more: Virtual economies attract real-world tax attention

The Second Life News Network, currently under construction, is aiming to become a major player in the Second Life media industry, by providing fans of the massive real-life simulation game with “breaking news reports and timely, unbiased information related to events in Second Life”. As the Second Life population grows, the one source for Second Life general news reporting, Metaverse Messenger is finding that competition is beginning to make their once comfortable monopoly disappear. How popular SLNN will be among the residents of Second Life remains to be seen, but, we’re always up for someone bucking the system and breaking down monopolistic barriers, wherever they may be.

Read more: Second Life News Network (Via: Second Life Insider)

Tabula Rasa, the upcoming MMOFPS from the Garriot brothers and Starr Long, is a much anticipated return for the Ultima creators and for fans of NCsoft’s massive-multiplayers. The story revolves around an alien race attacking a human-variant race and the resulting battles will play out across a few planets (at release, more will open up in future expansions), with it rumoured that players will be able to effect the overall outcome of the war with every battle that is waged, though the game’s focus has shifted greatly during it’s development, so most of the previous rumours may prove to be untrue. One thing that will probably not change much is the game’s lofty system specifications. Not one to be happy with meeting just the minimum system specs, I’ll certainly have to perform a series of upgrades in order meet even come close to the recommended system specs, something I imagine many fans looking forward to Tabula Rasa will be doing as well.

Minimum system specifications for Tabula Rasa:

* Windows® 2000/XP/Vista
* 512 MB System RAM
* 2.5 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 or equivalent AMD™ processor
* 128 MB Direct3D and Shader 2.0 compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
* 8x DVD-ROM drive
* 4.6 GB free hard disk space
* DirectX 9.0c
* DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
* Keyboard, Mouse
* Broadband Internet connection

Recommended system specifications for Tabula Rasa:

* Windows 2000/XP/Vista
* 3.5 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD processor
* 2 GB System RAM
* ATI™ X1800 series, NVIDIA® GeForce 7800 series, or higher 3.0 Shader compliant video card

Read more: Tabula Rasa system specifications

“Acclaim” is offering open beta positions for it’s online action-bot title, BOTS. Allowing the player to create their own robotic characters with unique powers and transform abilities, BOTS allows players to take part in a wide variety of free-range robotic PvE and PvP combat throughout many gameplay sectors. Acclaim are currently looking for beta testers using the Windows XP platform, no word on a Mac OS X or Linux version is available at the moment (unfortunately).

Read more: Bots homepage | Acclaim Bots open beta announcement